‘Narcos: Mexico’ Episode 4 Recap: Karma Chameleons

How does this show stay entertaining despite all the tough-guy blather and bullshit? Man, if I could figure that out I might have to switch gigs. Narcos: Mexico hits its fourth episode (“Rafa, Rafa, Rafa!”) in full stride, doing exactly what you expect it to do…but then, also, not.

The episode centers on the plight of cartel founder Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, who because of a fuckup by his right-hand man Rafa has to eat shit for DFS Director Nava, the glibly cold-blooded head of the all-powerful federal police organization that splits its time between murdering leftists and protecting Gallardo’s revenue stream. Strictly speaking, a character like Nava — exceedingly well-cast though actor Ernesto Alterio may be, with his smooth manner and raptorial visage — is just a plot device in human form. Barring some miracle we’ll never get a glimpse into his interior life, find out his fears and passions and traumas, or be able to see him as an actual person. Within the show, he exists to be an obstacle to Gallardo, presumably an obstacle to be overcome. Genre fiction is full of these guys, I’ll grant you, but over the course of ten hours of television there’s no real reason to leave him that way. You could dig into him, activate him, change him from something inert to something kinetic. I doubt that will happen.

And yet! I don’t find myself bored when he’s on screen, no matter how rote this “guy teaches another guy who will probably kill him some day a hard lesson about how the world really works” plotline is. I’m not excited, but I’m not glancing at the running time at the bottom of the screen either. Maybe it’s because I trust that sooner or later, something kind of interesting will happen. (I trusted Season One and Two that way, until Season Three broke that trust.)

Like, okay, Nava sets up Gallardo and his pilot pal Amado to run guns to the Nicaraguan contras, the extreme right-wing paramilitary the Reagan-Bush regime funded with money raised by selling arms to Iran and, allegedly anyway, the sale of cocaine. Because America’s imperialist project was so massive and often so self-contradictory, though, the coke has just been piling up at the border with nowhere to go thanks to anti-drug measures in the Caribbean. Gallardo winds up getting a painful taste of this incoherent policy in miniature, when he gets tortured by the very people he delivered the guns to.

But the interesting thing here isn’t the incident itself, or the way he stares at that pile of yayo like he’s just seen the 2001 monolith. (When he returns home he starts inquiring about becoming Colombia’s man in Mexico.). It’s seeing him made so vulnerable despite being so powerful.

Look at it this way. Gallardo is made to act as a dogsbody for Nava. He agrees to pick up cargo without first finding out what it is, or where it’s going. When he arrives, no one answers his questions. When they torture him, they ask questions he doesn’t know the answers to. The only person looking out for him and Amado at all on this journey is a mysterious, incongruously cheerful American we know from previous seasons as a CIA agent named Bill Stechner, who’s our liaison to the drug dealers and death-squad commanders down south, and the guy only speaks in English that Gallardo can barely understand, if at all. What a supremely disturbing and disorienting experience this is for him, and what a curveball to throw at someone you’ve already dubbed The Godfather.

The storyline involving Gallardo’s partner Rafa has its own surprising moments, really right from the start. This guy may be a brilliant botanist, but he’s so stupid with lust for his new girlfriend (and vice versa) that he stages a kidnapping at gunpoint at Christmastime in front of her entire terrified family, including her government-minister dad. This leads to a massive manhunt literally overnight, forcing him to go into hiding and give up on the Bonnie & Clyde–themed lost weekend he and Sofia had planned for each other. (Gallardo has to go on Nava’s gunrunning mission as a make-good for refusing to hand Rafa over to be arrested and/or killed by the government.) “Criminal gets horned up for an impressive woman who caught his eye” is standard fare, but getting so horned up that you create a major terrorist incident is next level.

And for crying out loud, how great is the sequence where Rafa and his partner-turned-babysitter Don Neto have to figure out a way to kill time in their big empty safehouse? The two get massively coked up, and then have a little two-man dance party to freaking Culture Club. As Boy George croons “Karma Chameleon,” Neto (who winds up nearly getting arrested during his drunken drive home, then makes the cop who stops him his indentured-servant driver) hoots and hollers about his new CD player, simply unable to contain his joy that the music won’t skip no matter how much you jump around. In a music-nerd move so amazing I can hardly contain myself about it, Rafa’s reaction is momentarily muted when he produces a stack of vinyl records in their cardboard sleeves and starts ranting about how the album cover will become a lost art when the canvas shrinks to CD size. It’s like he stepped out of every conversation about music I had with my dad in 1990. Writer Scott Teems deserves some kind of award for this scene alone.

So anyway, yeah, there’s torture, there’s some nudity, there’s high-ranking bad guys having dick-measuring contests, there’s mid-level good guys also having dick-measuring contests, there’s not one but two Concerned Wives (you wanna talk about about inert plot devices in human form? hoo boy), there’s a new Last Honest Cop roughing up confidential informants, there’s a meticulously planned police raid that goes bust at the last second, all that middling crime-show shit. Yet so far this season, there’s always something more.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.

Watch Narcos: Mexico Episode 4 ("Rafa! Rafa! Rafa!") on Netflix