Last Dance
Episode 8 of Narcos: Mexico Season 3 begins with Mexico reaching a critical breaking point. In December, everything falls apart as the President steps down, cleaving behind a ticking time bomb. Overnight, the Peso drops almost half its value and a million Mexicans lose their jobs. The rich feel this pinch too, albeit less drastically, but there are others who don’t share this pain. In fact, Amado sees this as a big opportunity to double his own worth. Ultimately, this also forces Hank’s hand, given he needs to work with Amado for the time being. Amado though runs into problems of his own though. Meeting with his new suppliers, he learns from them that they’re not pleased with the Cali Cartel members (including Pacho) working with the government. Because of this, they intend to kill them in cold blood, telling Amado this in advance as a courtesy. When the meeting ends, Amado rings Pacho and the two have a really heartfelt moment together. Of course, Pacho doesn’t know he’s going to be killed, leading to a somewhat bittersweet feel to all of this. Meanwhile, Andrea meets up with Kate, who happens to be the mole she’s been working with. She hands over boxes full of statements related to a slush fund worth over $700 million. Working together, they track it down to several small banks in El Paso. Of course, this also means that it can be linked back to Hank too. Alex wakes up a mess; beaten and broken. He still refuses to talk though. San Diego are breathing down Walt’s neck, and given the DOJ want indictments, he’s running out of time. They need Alex on their side, given he’s the key to all of this, but that puts Walt in a difficult position too, given the Mexicans are keeping him off the records for now. The only way to solve this is by finding Alfredo, but the General is confident that Alex will break eventually, and they should keep the pressure up on him. Walt takes a different tactic though and heads in to see Alex himself, asking about Alfredo. He tries to level with him, talking about his own family and even promising to keep Alfredo safe from harm. Unfortunately Alfredo is far from safe, especially when Walt and his buddies rock up in the hotel room and find him and his girlfriend sitting with bullets through their forehead. Walt lies though, telling Alex that Alfredo wasn’t there. Instead, he heads back and fronts Alex, deciding to play some tapes from the Arellano family, given he’s been around them and knows their voices. And thanks to Walt’s persuasive methods, he agrees. It’s now been two months after the peso collapses, and while rumblings continue to change the political landscape, Victor remains dead-set on continuing his crusade to find the killer. He notices a big car, just like the woman on the bus mentioned, and keeps an eye on the bus depot over the nights. His comrades at the police station notice his descent and unfortunately, that results in Victor losing his job and being laid off. Now, given the devaluation of the peso these few months, it’s perhaps unsurprising but his partner gets to keep his job. So Victor, now stuck on this morally ambiguous line between right and wrong, finds himself keeping up pretenses and working undercover. Only, it’s not really undercover given he’s been laid off. Anyway, his real task here is following whoever it is responsible for taking girls from the bus stop – and he may just have stumbled upon the culprit. Noticing their car leaving at night, he tails them. That is, until his tyre pops and he comes up trumps once more. Goddamnit. As the episode comes to a close, we cut back to Havana where Amado makes a big decision and decides to walk away from the drug trade. After Escobar and the others have met an untimely demise, he wants to start over. Marta agrees to come with him… but is all of this too good to be true?
The Episode Review
As the camera zooms out on Amado, in a graveyard surrounded by tombs, there’s something of a foreshadowed expectation here that this guy is going to die before the season’s done. It’s a clever bit of foreshadowing for sure, and something that works incredibly well to back up what an excellent job the team have done with this show. The story itself is, of course, continuously enthralling and these later chapters have really started to hammer home the widespread repercussions across the drug empire that Amado has helped create. However, it looks like he’s after an out; trying desperate to jump from this doomed ship. Will he get his happily ever after though? We’ll have to wait and see what this show has in store for us but so far Narcos: Mexico has been a brilliant watch.
