‘Narcos: Mexico’ Episode 9 Recap: House of Pain

“Great horror is the pursuit of meaning through defilement, a conscious and inquisitive violation of the mind, the body, the beloved, the home; the concentric circles of security that comprise our lives.” —Gretchen Felker-Martin, “Foreword,” Mirror Mirror II

“You wouldn’t believe the day I just had.” —Kiki Camarena, “881 Lope de Vega,” Narcos: Mexico

In plot terms, episode nine of Narcos: Mexico is the simplest yet. Corrupt Mexican government officials allied with Félix Gallardo’s drug cartel torture DEA Agent Kiki Camarena for information about what the Agency’s got on various unnamed politicians, in vain, because he doesn’t know shit. His fellow agents race to overcome institutional obstacles on both sides of the border and find the people who’d know where Kiki is. They nearly nab Rafa Caro Quintera, the ranking cartel member in the kidnapping and torture plot, before a crooked cop enables him to get away. They do nab him after Félix, who’s now in hiding himself and getting forced to clean up the mess his government partners made against his express wishes, sells him out. The Mexican cops torture Kiki’s location out of Rafa, but when they arrive, he and his torturers alike are all gone.

But while the story is easy to follow, “881 Lope de Vega” (the address of Kiki’s torture chamber) is concerned with moral messages that are very hard to swallow.

What gets me most is the raw, brainless brutality and venality of the whole affair, as two governments and an organized-crime outfit with the profit margins of a Fortune 500 company spend millions of dollars and waste untold lives over a drug war that’s unwinnable by definition, and which isn’t even in full swing yet. Do the people zapping Kiki with a cattle prod and piercing the bones of his hand with an electric drill actually think he knows anything that will help them evade prosecution? Did the agents and soldiers who lit Rafa’s $2.5 billion weed farm on fire think it would materially damage the cartel, let alone affect the overall flow of contraband into the United States? How many people have to die so rich and powerful criminals, on both sides of the law, can stay rich and powerful?

And of course there’s the staggering hypocrisy at all. The “good guys” torture Rafa in order to put a stop to the torture of Kiki. The Mexican politicians who ordered the torture are now letting Félix, who opposed it until they made it clear they’d turn on him if he didn’t go along, take the fall. Most of the people in the Mexican government and security forces who are implicated in cartel corruption also enjoy the cooperation and protection of the American government on Cold War realpolitik grounds, since the Drug War at this point is just the junior-varsity version of our other globe-spanning human-rights-violating borderless mega-conflict. And on and on it goes.

The most interesting curveball thrown by this episode, which I’ve dreaded since the moment I realized what this season was going to be about, involves Rafa, who’s suddenly Mexico’s Most Wanted. Forced to go on the lam by the fallout from the kidnapping (it was clear to everyone involved except him that the government would use him as a fall guy for it), he takes the opportunity to whisk his old girlfriend Sofia away from her Bible-thumping mom and fly off to Costa Rica, for approximately 24 hours of getting high and fucking on the beach. It’s hard to sympathize with this idiot, but that’s what makes the intensity of his sexual connection with Sofia compelling. Even an amoral moron who’s spent half the season whining that Félix doesn’t love his sinsemilla as much as he loves Pablo Escobar’s yayo is willing to stop the entire world for a good lay.

But I found myself wishing that Kiki’s torture was handled with a similar fearlessness. Perhaps mercifully, the show spends most of its time on the manhunt, not the torture. I say “perhaps” because there’s a degree to which it feels like a cheat—a way to soft-pedal the horror that befell Camarena in real life, and in so doing shortchange this fictionalized version and the actor, Michael Peña, who plays him.

I wouldn’t have enjoyed watching Kiki get electrocuted, beaten, maimed with a power drill, and revived by a doctor whose job is to keep him alive and conscious in order to prolong his suffering. But I’d have valued the chance to be inside Kiki’s head as he experiences the result of his years-long crusade against the cartel. What were his thoughts? Did he feel it was worth it? Did he regret it? Did he think about his family? Did he simply wish to end the pain? How did he endure what he was forced to endure? Other than a brief scene in which he coaches a fellow prisoner, the pilot who took the surveillance photos that led to the destruction of the weed field, to be honest about not knowing anything since lying and saying what they want to hear would only make things worse for him, we really don’t know what he thought or felt. Perhaps we’ll find out in the finale, since he’s still alive the last time we see him.

The other big problem is the ending. Employing a storytelling logic that completely escapes me—maybe they weren’t sure we’d understand that it’s sad when a father of two gets tortured to death for no reason?—the filmmakers decide to overlay the attempted rescue of Kiki by the DEA and Mexican forces with the sight and sound of Mika Camarena reading Charlotte’s Web to Kiki Junior, because it’s the book Kiki Senior had been reading to him before his disappearance. And not just any part of Charlotte’s Web either, but the part where she dies, alone and unmourned. Writers of the television world, please, don’t do shit like this. Have faith in your own ability to convey the emotional scope and depth of the world you’ve created, the people who inhabit it, and the events that befall them. If you don’t, who will?

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 9 ("881 Lope de Vega") on Netflix