‘Narcos: Mexico’ Episode 5 Recap: The Life of Pablo

Now I know what you’re thinking: “Why did he go with ‘The Life of Pablo’ when ‘Going Back to Cali’ was right there on the table?” Because I don’t like to repeat myself, that’s why. Which, considering the events of this episode, is more than you can say for Narcos: Mexico. Nominally the story of how Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo broke into the Colombian cocaine trade while Kiki Camarena and his fellow DEA agents busted the secrets of Gallardo’s business structure wide open, it’s really just an excuse to see these guys again.

And personally? I don’t mind at all. Actor Wagner Moura’s Pablo Escobar was one of my favorite television characters of the decade — a singular performance that’s all the more appealing and imposing because of how much he underplayed it. It’s funny hearing all of Gallardo’s friends with a foot in the coke world warn him about Pablo being “temperamental,” an assessment with which Escobar himself agrees, because looking at and listening to him you’d swear the guy was coming down off painkillers after a root canal. (Maybe it’s all that weed he’s smoking.)

Cocaine, schmocaine: Pablo’s chief export was the ambition and anger he grew inside himself. But the genius of version of the character we saw on Narcos was that his reserved temperament when encountered in person forced everyone to lean in closer and hang on his every word. It’s more effective, and frightening, than exploding all the time would have been. To reflect this, Amat Escalante keeps Pablo shrouded in darkness and half-light during an outdoor nighttime soirée. It may simply be a workaround for Moura’s post-Pablo weight loss, but it presents a stark contrast with the brightly lit office of the Calí boys, and it gives the character the vibe of a supervillain without requiring him to do anything outwardly supervillainous at all. Gallardo picks up on all this very quickly, though given the circumstances of their meeting — one of Pablo’s lead hitmen, Blackie, kidnapped Félix and his associate Isabella from the runway where their private plane was slated to take off and drove them all the way to Pablo’s Medellín compound, where the kingpin casually introduced the prospect of feeding them to his pet hippopotamuses — he kinda has to be a quick study.

At this point in history, both the Medellín cartel (run by Escobar) and its more businesslike rival outfit in Calí (run by the classy brothers Gilberto and Miguel Rodriguez and their partners, scruffy Chepe Londoño-Santacruz and dashing Pacho Herrera) are in operation, and not yet at total war with one another. Félix rightly selects “the Gentlemen of Calí” as the more stable option for whose coke to smuggle across the Mexican-American border now that Caribbean trade routes have been closed down, but Pablo gets wind of this immediately, hence Gallardo’s impromptu second druglord summit. And to Escobar’s credit, he doesn’t force the Mexican to choose sides in the cartel battle — he just has to move the product from Pablo’s cartel right alongside the Rodriguez’s from here on out if he wants to stay out of trouble. It’ll be a tricky balancing act, politically and logistically, but it will make Gallardo rich beyond his wildest dreams.

But it’s not just the money that moves him. Nor is it the excuse he keeps giving all his partners, both new and old: “If I don’t do it, someone else will,” implying that his marijuana cartel would lose power and influence almost overnight should another Mexican gangster take over the cocaine-trafficking business first. (Rafa, who’s already dealing with fallout from one of Mexico’s homegrown coke barons, remains unconvinced.)

As Félix tells Pablo — and if you want another reminder of Pablo’s magnetism, please note he tells Pablo this, the guy who kidnapped him, not the friendly gents who invited him into their office — and as we learn for the first time, he was married before his current wife, to a woman who died of leukemia and whose portrait he keeps in his desk at work. This taught him some harsh, seemingly actively traumatizing lessons about how easy it is to lose control of your world, increasing his drive to seize control of it himself.

This seems like yet another thing he and Kiki Camarena have in common, in addition to their gigs as cops, their career-advancing move to Guadalajara, and the fact that they both named their firstborn sons after themselves. When Gallardo’s associates in the vicious DFS federal police organization increase their harassment of the DEA agents and their families — the particularly menacing opening sequence shows one of the most prominent federales forcing Mika Camarena out of her car, then talking to her kids alone while she watches, just to drive home how vulnerable they all really are — Kiki and his boss Jaime get serious about doing something on their own in the absence of help from the embassy in Mexico City.

First, Kiki has his neighbor, a phone company employee who’s helped him before, tap not just Gallardo’s office phone but every line in his entire hotel headquarters. This gives the DEA of crystal-clear picture of everything from the members of the cartel to the government and police officials in their pocket to the layout of organization’s fifth-floor nerve center. After using a soldier as a double in order to shake the DFS agents tailing him, Kiki goes to the hotel and, after some dramatically unnecessary cat-and-mouse shit with the DFS guy who frightened his family and who just so happens to be there now, breaks into Gallardo’s office and takes notes on his bank statements.

But despite all this rock-solid evidence, much of which points back to a central account based in Texas of all places, the boys back in Washington won’t risk exposing the corruption of their right-wing allies in Mexico’s government. And even more unfortunately for the DEA crew, the DFS gets wind of what they’ve been up to as well. They shoot up one agent’s home, nearly killing his family and forcing their relocation back to the States; glumly, the three agents remaining learn they won’t be getting a replacement. And they straight-up execute Kiki’s neighbor, with that same DFS guy pulling the trigger.

As they sit and stare at the poor man’s body, the remaining trio devise a new plan: Lure Gallardo across the border, then arrest him for bank fraud where they have the power to do so without getting ratted out. Like his nemesis, Kiki is determined to take control. But so were Pablo Escobar, the Rodriguezes, Chepe, and Pacho. How are they doing today, I wonder?

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 5 ("The Colombian Connection") on Netflix