‘Narcos: Mexico’ Episode 6 Recap: Borderline

Looking for advancement opportunities in the exciting, fast-paced world of Mexican narcotrafficking? Become a druglord’s indentured-servant driver! You too can follow in the footsteps of El Chapo — minding his own business while driving Félix Gallardo to his execution one minute, working for Félix Gallardo after his executioner gets executed the next, and the mass-murdering kingpin of his very own cartel just a couple decades later! Or you can be like the cop who pulled over Don Neto for driving while intoxicated, got tapped to be Don Neto’s personal chauffeur when he realized the error of his ways, and eventually oversaw the wholesale purchase of the Tijuana police department for the cartel! Yes, getting forced to drive a dude around under threat of death and eventually becoming one of that dude’s most trusted lieutenants is a growth industry — get behind the wheel of your own destiny today!

“La Última Frontier,” Narcos: Mexico‘s sixth episode, is about more than these enterprising young men of course, despite the central role they each play in the battle to wrest control of Tijuana from Alberto Sicilia Falcón, the flamboyantly omnisexual plaza boss in charge of the town’s cocaine trade. (Here, for example, is young Chapo, sending the Cuban crimelord a message with a Molotov cocktail.)

It’s about a whole lot, actually, especially where Félix is concerned. The episode covers a single roughly 24-hour span, during which:

• A group of Gallardo’s top guys, including Neto, Chapo, Rafa, and the Arellano Félix brothers Benjamin and Ramón (who run the marijuana racket in Tijuana for Gallardo) hire the Tijuana P.D. to help them steal back the weed Falcón stole from them
• Falcón sends the army (not “an” army, as Neto misheard Chapo describing the Cuban’s forces, but the literal army) to counterattack and torch Rafa’s weed
• Gallardo dispatches is Tijuana associate Isabella to make a truce with Falcón that would cut them both in on the cocaine he plans to move through the plaza
• Gallardo makes contact with a high-ranking government official to seek approval and security for moving Pablo Escobar’s product in the country, but seemingly gets rebuffed and may have to wait for days, which is time he doesn’t have
• One of Gallardo’s courier planes gets intercepted in Texas, leading to the seizure of several million dollars
• Gallardo’s Texan moneyman, acting under orders from the DEA, inflates the plane seizure into a matter of serious legal risk in an attempt to lure Gallardo across the border to deal with it, so that he can be arrested — or killed, no one seems to care which — on American soil
• Gallardo agrees to make the trip, but get stopped at the border by a customs agent with orders to relay him a phonecall from the aforementioned government official, who says he has a deal regarding the Escobar cocaine and also warns him the Americans are waiting for him on the other side
• Gallardo reneges on his deal with Isabella and Falcón almost immediately upon receiving the good news about his new government backers and has Falcón executed
• Gallardo’s Concerned Wife discovers he’s been buying expensive watches for beautiful women all over town, one of whom is pregnant
• Gallardo discovers that his wife knows he’s been two-timing her when he returns home to see a painting by the same artist as the one that hangs in his office, which he bought from the pregnant woman’s art gallery
• Gallardo and his pilot friend Amado receive Escobar’s shipment and discover it’s basically an entire fucking mountain of cocaine

So yeah, it’s a full day!

Diego Luna is quietly quite good in this episode, which is maybe to be expected. His previous series highlight was the episode in which he was caught entirely flatfooted by the Nicaraguan contras to whom he was running guns, and here he’s nearly as vulnerable, exposed, and desperate as he was then. (Though no one’s threatening to attach a car battery to his junk, at least.) You can feel the walls closing in around him just as surely as he himself does — more so, perhaps, given that we know about the Texas sting operation (led by Kiki Camarena and a Texan agent played by Jackie Earle Haley) long before he does.

Displaying considerable moxie, the show chooses G.W. Handel’s stately, morose “Sarabande” to accompany much of the action, particularly the climax in which Gallardo narrowly escapes arrest and then returns home to discover his infidelity has been discovered in turn. Real Kubrick headz know that this is the theme music to the great director’s period-piece masterpiece Barry Lyndon — itself the story of a country boy who becomes rich and powerful through a combination of luck and deceit. I kinda wonder if the filmmakers were gonna go with a more appropriately adulterous Kubrick music cue, Shostakovich’s “Waltz No. 2” from Eyes Wide Shut, before thinking better of it and going for a less obvious choice. (Also, its Netflix sister show Altered Carbon got there first.) At least they didn’t use Strauss.

And as if in response to Gallardo’s entry into the cocaine business, the gory violence in this episode is scaled up considerably. One poor sap gets pulped by an airplane propeller as the plane tries to make its getaway. Another is put out of his misery by Chapo after getting gutshot during Rafa’s raid on Falcón’s warehouse. And Falcón himself…well, he won’t be having an open-casket funeral, that’s for sure.

By arriving at this turning point for Gallardo’s business so late in the series, Narcos: Mexico seems to be telegraphing that its story will continue into a subsequent season. Or maybe not? The show raced through the fall of the Calí cartel in just one season last year. Then again, it didn’t need to cover that organization’s rise, having done so on and off throughout the two seasons dedicated to Pablo Escobar’s Medellín outfit. At the very least, other, later Mexican cartels, including Chapo’s, are out there waiting. Expect a lot more bad days, a lot more bodies, and a lot more famous music cues along the way.

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 6 ("La Ultima Frontera") on Netflix