“Narcos is always at its best when it’s simultaneously at its most elegiac and most cynical.” I wrote those words about the Season One finale of Narcos: Mexico, an alternately languid and brutal episode in which Félix Gallardo sold out his friends, the American government in the form of Walt Breslin doubled down on their disastrous drug war, and DEA Agent Kiki Camarena turned out to have died for nothing, nothing at all. It was confident, engrossing filmmaking designed to destroy the myth of the War on Drugs by any means necessary.
I think many of the same things can be said about this penultimate episode of the show’s third season. Narcos: Mexico Season 3 Episode 9, titled “The Reckoning,” does not settle all of the show’s accounts—there’s still one more episode to go, after all. But there’s something genuinely mournful in the way it chronicles the failures of so many of its main characters: Walt, Victor, Amado, General Rebollo. Representing nearly every side and level of the War on Drugs, they’re all revealed to be grim-faced failures in the end.
I reviewed the penultimate episode of Narcos: Mexico for Decider.
Tags: decider, narcos, narcos: mexico, reviews, TV, TV reviews