‘Narcos: Mexico’ Episode 7 Recap: Guadalahorror Show

We’re nearing the homestretch of Narcos: Mexico, and things are starting to get ugly.

But as the events surrounding Félix Gallardo, Kiki Camarena, and the rest of the gang take a turn for the messy, there’s something a bit too neat about it all.

Titled “Jefe de Jefes,” after the Lucky Luciano–style “Boss of All Bosses” sobriquet bestowed upon Félix by his high-flying lieutenant Amado, the show’s seventh episode makes ample use of the parallels between its protagonist and antagonist. That, at least, is par for the course. The series began by setting up Gallardo and Camarena as opposite numbers with the same basic makeup: both of them cops, both of them relocating to Guadalajara, both of them hoping to advance in their respective careers after being stymied back home, both of them often thwarted by the established power structure, both of them exceptionally driven to work around obstacles to achieve their goals.

Now, though, it feels both excessive and unnecessary to maintain that parallel structure. Both men are planning to leave town to go back home. Both run into opposition from their Concerned Wives when they decide not to do so. Both make major power plays to defeat the last governmental obstacles to their end goals. Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction, to be sure, but when you’re creating historical fiction based on the strange truth, there’s definitely a point at which “stranger than fiction” becomes “too cute by half.”

Ditto the tripartite outbursts of vicious violence by the three leading members of the Guadalajara cartel. Don Neto cruelly executes a man who killed his son by accident while trying to save the young man from an assailant in a parking lot. Rafa, who came damn close to killing Amado and shooting up a nightclub in the process over their continued rivalry within the cartel (and for the affections of Rafa’s rich ex-girlfriend), joins a pair of his men in savagely shooting, stabbing, and beating to death two American novelists who had the misfortune of taking notes in a way that made them look like DEA agents.

And Félix, sick and tired of the greed and condescension of powerful secret-police chief Nava, beats the guy to death in the lobby of his own hotel, telling the guy’s neutral second-in-command El Azul that if anyone in the DFS has a problem with this, they know where to find him. This itself is the capstone to a series of obviously risky decisions Gallardo makes in this episode: promoting Amado over the rough-and-tumble Juárez plaza boss Acosta, advancing his and Amado’s cocaine side of the business over the very clearly furious Rafa’s marijuana enterprise, stiffing his Tijuana associate Isabella when she asks for the share of that town’s trade that he promised her, patching things up with his furious Concerned Wife only to dump her rather than move home to Sinaloa with her and rule his empire from there. It just kinda strains credulity that all three members of the Guadalajara trinity start going apeshit simultaneously, after a reign that had been largely devoid of gratuitous bloodshed and sloppy decision-making up until this point.

Then, of course, there’s Kiki, who remains bound and determined to make sure Gallardo knows his name before he transfers back to the States. When randomly confronting the guy on the streets after a chance encounter (during which those ill-fated American writers are also visible, just by coinkydink) doesn’t cut it, he importunes his boss Jaime to charter an unauthorized flight with the otherwise compromised eradication project, finally getting the surveillance photos they need of Félix and Rafa’s gigantic weed farm. Presenting the photos to their Embassy bosses and threatening to leak them to the press if action isn’t taken, they get the result they hoped for: The American and Mexican governments plan to torch all one thousand acres of weed. Gallardo sure will know his name now, and I think we can all agree it’s totally worth it!

Look, I get that DEA agents choose that job for a reason, and that even as they suck down alcohol and nicotine by the metric ton, they’re hardcore in their quest to stamp out any form of chemical recreation that doesn’t meet with Nancy Reagan’s seal of approval. But for most people, “one thousand acres of sinsemilla” sounds like a vacation destination, not a target for napalm. It’s hardly the show’s fault that Kiki Camarena dedicated his life to wiping out a harmless vice, however harmful the men responsible for its production may have been. (And would they be so bad if the shit were legal? Well, probably, but in the kind of boring corporate way that all big business is bad, which is another way to say Ronald Reagan would have busted workers’ unions on their behalf rather than sent men to burn their fields down.) Still, in an episode that derives much of its dramatic oomph from having previously smart and even-keeled people make shitty decisions, it’s hard not to include Kiki’s quest in that category too.

That said, it’s a good-looking hour of television, I’ll give it that. Off-kilter shot compositions — like filling half the screen with the floor while Kiki waits to hear his superiors’ decision about the weed farm, or showing Don Neto in a segmented mirror while he gets ready to kill his son’s killer — and unusual camerawork — like shooting Félix in slow motion while contemplates his next move, interrupted by a pigeon crashing into the window next to him — make the desired impact. But like the seasons that preceded it, even the good ones, Narcos: Mexico too rarely has the faith in itself and its audience to let aesthetics advance the drama alongside predictable narrative structures and outbursts of violence. I keep hoping the potboiler aspect will be deposed, but for now, it remains the boss of all bosses.

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 7 ("Jefe de Jefes") on Netflix