‘Narcos: Mexico’ Season Finale Recap: War Pigs

“It was that moment when it all fell apart.” The most compelling point made by the season finale of Narcos: Mexico (“Leyenda”) is that just when it looks like the United States is finally getting serious about heeding the warnings, cutting through the corruption, and taking the fight directly to the bad guys…well, they become the bad guys, or just as bad as them, if they weren’t already. The narration that closes this languorous, occasionally horrifying episode doesn’t appear anywhere else in the episode, and its voice finally represented on-screen in the person of a burned-out, gun-smuggling American agent played by Scoot McNairy. Both maneuvers lend extra weight to the narrator’s words, which are accompanied by real-life news footage of heavily armed soldiers and dead bodies. Those words essentially take the emotional logic of how the story of Narcos: Mexico has developed — indeed, the entire moral logic of the War on Drugs itself — and drag it out back to be bashed in the head and dumped in a field.

This, it turns out, is the fate of DEA Agent Kiki Camarena as well. We learn this within the episode’s opening minutes, but not before a brutal raid on the farm where he’s supposedly being held captive, during which his boss Jaime Kuykendall looks on in horror as his Mexican allies litter the ground with the corpses of women and children. It would appear that Kiki’s corpse, as well as that of his eradication-program pilot ally, were dumped there by the Mexican government in order to give its trigger-happy agents an excuse to murder the entire family of a former political opponent.

And this is just a taste of the betrayals and bullshit to come. When Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo finally decides to flee Guadalajara for the relative safety of his old stomping grounds in Sinaloa, it’s because he no longer trusts his government allies not to pin the entire thing on him. By now they’ve already begun arresting or executing expendable members of their own little club, including that creepy DFS agent we’ve seen since the start, who gets a Moe Greene Special in broad daylight.

Félix seeks help from his childhood mentor Governor Celis, who offers it at a price of one million dollars and then rats him out anyway. The ensuing raid on Félix’s new compound is led by ostensibly honest cop Commandante Calderoni, the beef-headed mustachioed leg-breaker who’s worked with Kiki and Jaime in the past and now has control of the mission because Jaime has been rotated back to the states. Calderoni has the drop on Félix, but backs down when he’s offered some but not all of the tape recordings of Kiki’s interrogation by government agents — that is, not the ones implicating his bosses in the Ministry of Defense — and two million dollars for his troubles. Félix sweetens the pot by giving up the location of his partner Don Neto, who can do nothing but sit and freebase and listen to music behind dark sunglasses as the swimsuit-wearing revelers at his beach hideaway are slaughtered one by one around him.

The remaining tapes give Félix the leverage he needs to make a deal directly with the Mexican army, who usher him into a summit being held by his underbosses to cement his replacement at the top of the food chain; he summarily dismisses his associate Isabella once again and forces all the remaining bosses — Acosta from Juárez, the Félix Arellano brothers from Tijuana, Chapo from Rafa’s former fiefdom, and Don Neto’s pilot nephew Amado — to bend the knee. Amado, the person most directly affected by Félix’s various double-crosses in the person of his now-incarcerated uncle, is also the person who most enthusiastically welcomes Gallardo back into the fold. And just for fun, he sends Governor Celis the severed head of his beloved son, who’d actually defended Félix to the old man when he’d come hat in hand just a few days prior.

So everything worked out great.

Written by co-creator Carlo Bernard and directed by series mainstay Andrés Baiz, this tenth and final episode of the show’s first season recognizes that Narcos is always at its best when it’s simultaneously at its most elegiac and most cynical. The last time it reached that point was the finale for Season Two, a dreamlike affair in which Pablo Escobar meditated on his lost family and friends in the final hours before he was hunted down and slaughtered like a rabid dog by American and Mexican agents who posed for photos with his dead body. “Leyenda” pulls off a similar trick, alternating the sorrow of Kiki’s widow with the cunning of his nemesis, turning Don Neto’s arrest into a slo-mo music video as directed by Sam Peckinpah, short-circuiting our expectation that the cartel’s management would turn over by staging a literal army invasion of its board of directors, transforming Félix’s darkest hour into his hour of triumph, and finally revealing that when the United States finally did get around to calling in the cavalry, they’re a crew of stone-cold killers operating out of an RV and a surfer hotel.

There’s even a genuinely dreamlike conversation between Kiki and Félix themselves, shown in a flashback to the late stages of his interrogation, in which Kiki says that neither of them is getting out of his kidnapping alive. The end of this episode argues otherwise, at least for now. And what a bold, vicious kick to the balls of this martyr, to reveal that his deathbed prophecy was hot air — that the man who reluctantly presided over his torture and execution would emerge from it all stronger than ever. This is not to say that Gallardo would never take a fall — that’s not how the lives of drug kingpins work out, generally speaking. It’s merely to say that Kiki Camarena died for a mistake, a mistake his countrymen proved bound and determined to compound. Instead of burning that massive marijuana field, they could just as easily have laid human bodies and American dollars end to end across the whole thing and torched them instead.

In short, while it only occasionally dared to defy its roots as a true-crime crowdpleaser, Narcos: Mexico closed strong by snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. For that, the show is to be commended. Smoke ’em if you got ’em.

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 the Narcos: Mexico Season 1 Finale ("Leyenda") on Netflix