‘Narcos: Mexico’ Episode 8 Recap: When a Fire Starts to Burn

In this episode of Narcos: Mexico, dozens of people are killed so the United States government and its Mexican-government allies can burn a five-thousand-ton marijuana field valued at two and a half billion dollars. Then the owners of that field and their Mexican-government allies, who are also America’s allies when it comes to suppressing the left, kidnap one of the U.S. government agents responsible for the raid and prepare to torture him to death for information the U.S. government’s plans for further action. By this point the U.S. government has decided, by the way, not to take any further action, so as not to embarrass its Mexican-government allies.

Folks, I’m starting to wonder if the War on Drugs was a bad idea.

Directed with disorienting brio by Alonso Ruizpalacios and written by series co-creator Doug Miro, “Just Say No” is one of the Narcos universe’s finest hours. Its sardonic narrator, the still-unseen Scoot McNairy, says people from miles away felt funny the afternoon the field was torched. Sure enough, the show’s eighth episode has a feel for pacing and framing that ratchet up the story’s nightmarish fugue-state atmosphere long after the smoke from the shootout and the burning in Rafa Caro Quintero and Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo’s visible-from-space weed farm clears. It feels like that smoke never does clear, is the best way to describe it.

At least one character actually does enter a nightmarish fugue state. Faced with the loss of his life’s work and the knowledge that this means the end of his vision for the cartel, Rafa loses his shit and decides to quit cocaine cold turkey as a sort of fuck-you to the substance that supplanted his beloved sinsemilla. He basically goes crazy — cutting out and pasting photos of his ex-girlfriend and Agent Camarena all over his walls, hallucinating shower sex and the sounds of horses in his hallway, shooting at Kiki’s picture, threatening his underlings, and so on. Ruizpalacios does the usual hazy surreal dream stuff when shooting the actual hallucinations, but even before we reach that point, he starts using long zooms unlike anything the show has ever done before. The effect is supremely troubling, like something’s happening to Rafa that no one can stop.

He also handles the actual withdrawal process beautifully, with Rafa’s henchman Cuco at times cradling his boss like a sick child, calming his tantrums, pouring a sedative drink directly into his mouth like a baby bird, and even physically forcing him to stay still, while Rafa threatens and even attempts to kill him over and over. There’s a tenderness and intimacy to this act that you’d never see coming from a show like this.

Félix, meanwhile, has the task of keeping everyone calm, not just Rafa. That means Rafa himself, and Don Neto, and truculent plaza bosses like Pedro Acosta in Juárez — an old-school type who’s going to have to ramp up distribution considerably now that Colombian coke is primed to become the cartel’s sole export. (An unexpectedly effective side plot in which Félix sends his trusted lieutenant Amado to get Acosta in line, which results in him helping the underboss locate a lost shipment of coke in a crashed watermelon truck in the middle of the night, feels like some kind of fractured narco-fairy tale, a sensation enhanced by Acosta reading from and quoting the story of Snow White throughout the journey.)

Félix’s opposite number, Kiki, is in an understandably celebratory mood by contrast. His hard work has paid off with the biggest bust in history, and finally the folks back in Washington are taking notice, sending a team of Congressional investigators down to look into the cartel’s dealings.

But smartly, the episode films them both in much the same way. Kiki and Félix alike are shot all the way at the side of the frame for no reason, or smushed toward the bottom, or shown from strange vantage points. There’s an entire conversation between Kiki and his boss Jaime in which they’re shortsighted toward the inward edge of their respective frames so much it looks like they might fall off the screen, while Félix is sometimes shown in closeups so tight you can barely even see his face. The message is not stated outright, but it’s made clear nonetheless long before rogue elements in the cartel kidnap Kiki at the Mexican government’s insistence: Both these men are headed for trouble, even if only one of them knows it.

The episode is so effective at delineating the competing drives of its characters and exploring the corner into which they’ve painted themselves that the previous episode’s amped-up tensions feel even more unnecessary. It seems as if the writers, sensing the climactic raid on the field on the horizon, felt the need to give each character the feeling that they, too, were building toward something explosive — Rafa and his buddies murdering American tourists in a haze of coke-fueled paranoia, Félix killing the head of the secret police in a fit of rage, Neto executing the guy who accidentally killed his son, Kiki and Félix simultaneously hitting rough marital waters because they’re so focused on their careers and goals in Guadalajara, etc.

Even if these developments were based on actual events, the show has leeway in terms of how — and when for that matter — those events are presented. For example, Narcos Season Three held back evidence of a presidential candidate’s corruption, which in real life was a news story through much of that season’s timespan, until it could be used as a plot twist in the finale. That was a bad move for the story, but the point is that it’s possible to finesse the handling of real-world developments in service of a more satisfying narrative; they just happened to get it wrong that time.

Here, they could easily have used the raid as the catalyst for all the personality crises and explosions of anger they were already ginning up before the choppers flew into the desert that day. Indeed, with Rafa’s coke withdrawal and the government’s rash decision to kidnap Kiki, that’s exactly what they do anyway. It feels like a whole episode could have been trimmed away with no loss to the emotional arc of the season.

But that’s enough complaining. Whatever went wrong last time, this episode set right. Yet there’s no real way to look forward to the next one, if you know what’s coming. Setting the stage for that sense of dread is perhaps the episode’s real achievement.

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 8 ("Just Say No") on Netflix