‘Griselda’ Series Finale Recap: Fade to Grey

This was never gonna be the best episode of Griselda. The fall of a drug kingpin usually goes pretty much the same way: they have it all, they lose it all, they go on the run, they’re reduced to their smallest circle of confidants and gradually lose even them. Finally, either the law or their enemies catch them, and they wind up either in a cell or at the bottom of the ocean. Griselda’s story offers no real surprises on that score.

Nor does it offer fireworks. This is not the fictional downfall of Griselda’s fellow Miami cocaine cowboy Tony Montana in Scarface, yelling “Say hello to my little friend” and blowing an army of assassins to hell. Nor is it the straight-from-an-action-movie real-life demise of Pablo Escobar: hunted by the combined forces of two entire nations, tracked using sophisticated equipment and raw human elbow grease, chased across rooftops, hunted down, executed in cold blood, and propped up for pictures like the carcass of a trophy animal. 

Griselda goes out not with a bang but a whimper. After carelessly disposing of the corpse of her quote-unquote friend Marta, who has some kind of hemorrhage after a crack binge and collapses through a glass table, she and Rivi are now the walking dead as far as Marta’s husband Rafa and the Ochoa organization go. They also have no money and no coke, since June’s CENTAC unit hit all their stash houses. They escape only with the three oldest kids — Dario leaves Griselda in disgust and takes their ridiculously named child Michael Corleone with them — and the admittedly huge stash of coke Marta had on hand. Griselda hopes it’s enough to sell off in bits and pieces over time and amass enough money to flee and live in comfort.

Fat chance of any of that. Rafa hears of it the moment the coke hits the streets even though Griselda and Rivi have landed all the way out in California. He heads West to conduct the hit personally, only to discover she’s called the cops on herself to dodge the cartel’s killers. Rivi, meanwhile, makes it look like he’s turned against her, only to fatally undermine the feds’ case against her by having phone sex with a staffer for the prosecution. (This whole sequence is fantastic by the way. Major kudos to actor Natalie Cañizares for doing several seconds of intense physical sex comedy in a small — but obviously memorable — role upon which the entire story winds up hinging.)

So Griselda gets a sweetheart deal. June despairs and finally gets that desk job she wanted long ago so she can spend more time with her family. Along the way the pair have an uncomfortable conversation that recreates the famous Don Draper/Michael Ginsberg “I don’t think about you at all” interaction in elevator you’ve seen memed a thousand times. It’s just as untrue here as it is there, of course. 

I’m glad they put these two characters together a couple of times. It’s not that Griselda is some white whale June is obsessed with catching; doing so was important to her, but not important enough to destroy her life in service of that goal, as so many of her cop counterparts do in stories like this. It’s more that when they’re together, you can feel the combined weight of the thoughtless misogyny to which they’ve both been subjected over and over and over throughout the course of the series. When June suggests Griselda is furious that after beating all those men, a “bitch” beat her, the word fully sounds like a slur. 

But her sweetheart deal doesn’t extend to everyone. In their final interaction, June, who seems completely flattened by the news, informs Griselda that her sons Dixon, Uber, and Ozzy (Martin Farjado) have all been murdered. Michael Corleone, at least, is safe with Dario’s mother. (Dario is long dead, killed on Griselda’s orders when she has Michael kidnapped away from him for a time.) Wizened and coarsened and grey, Griselda looks out on an imaginary beach, remembering one of her family’s last fun times together, tracing it with her lit cigarette the way she has so often done. 

The show ends on this very Barton Fink visual. It doesn’t even show us Griselda’s eventual assassination after she returns to Medellín upon her release. Why bother? What’s left for her? What’s left of her?

If this review is more plot-heavy than its predecessors, that’s because this finale is much less sensation-based than anything that’s come before. There are quirks, like the Marta situation and the honestly charming way Rivi robs a bank for just one roll of quarters so he can use a payphone to warn Griselda that Rafa is on his way, but nothing on the level of the last episode’s berserk bacchanal. To my eyes the blue-and-orange color scheme is much more subdued, the grading much less pronounced. There are no big massacres or explosions, Marta’s brain notwithstanding. Dario’s execution is relatively tasteful; you only see the muzzle flash in Dixon’s execution; Ozzy’s and Uber’s, and Griselda’s of course, are not shown at all. 

The pleasure of the finale is in watching Vergara say goodbye to this character, whom I expect will be a career-changer for her, or at least ought to be. The fire largely extinguished, the crack pipe put down, she’s first stonily defiant, and then simply emptied out. She’s still Griselda, but you can feel that something vital isn’t there anymore. There’s no big breakdown either — it’s like someone let the air out of her, and she’s flopping along the highway at 15 miles an hour to her inevitable destination. And with that, we’ve reached ours as well, our eyes opened to Vergara’s potential and our drug-drama jones fully satiated. Not a bad outcome at all, for us anyway.

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.