‘Narcos: Mexico’ Season 2 Episode 6 Recap: Desperate Times (2024)

With all due respect to the Who, the kids aren’t alright.

The pair of little charmers you see killing their maid in the gif below while they’re play-acting as revolutionaries in Narcos: Mexico Season 2 Episode 6’s opening sequence grow up to be power players in Mexico’s ruling party, the PRI. With one poised to become president and the other serving as his right-hand man, they’ve swept aside Félix Gallardo’s allies within the party. What’s more, they plan on privatizing Mexico’s economy, selling off everything from communal farms to the telephone company to the highest bidder. This, Agent Walt Breslin tells us in his voiceover narration, will see the number of billionaires in Mexico grow from one to 24 in five years’ time. As metaphors for right-wing economics go, “these people killed a woman in cold blood as children” scores a pretty direct hit, no?

Anyway, you might be able to see the problem all of this poses to Félix before he does. Simply put, this faction of the PRI no longer needs to accept his cocaine-cash bribes, because they’ve got money to spare. In addition, their personal pet narcotrafficker is Guerra, the Gulf Coast boss who just double-crossed Félix with the Cali cartel—and who indeed orchestrated the attempted hit on Gallardo that ended the previous episode. So not only can Félix not buy them off, he can’t hit back at Guerra without risking their wrath either.

And the fun for Félix doesn’t stop there! The tit-for-tat violence between the Sinaloa and Tijuana factions of his cartel continues, with some seriously spectacularly gross results…

And despite Félix’s order that the two sides make piece, Tijuana’s Arellano Félix brothers refuse, reasoning, quite correctly, that Félix needs them during this period of insecurity more than they need him, so his hands are tied. This forces Félix into the personally embarrassing, politically disastrous position of having to act like the decision to execute his longtime associate Cochiloco was his idea, rather than Benjamín and Ramón Arellano Félix’s.

Güero Palma, the Sinaloan underboss, does not take kindly to this.

It gets worse, in ways Félix doesn’t even know about yet. Striking out on their own, Enedina Arellano Félix and her associate Isabella Bautista make a deal with a cocaine supplier to move weight without either the brothers or Félix’s approval, adding another potentially combustible ingredient to the fire.

Finally, and potentially most destructively of all, the triple-agent cop Calderoni tips Walt and his men off to the runways Félix and his man Amado are building outside of Juárez. Walt and company track Amado to an airline’s bankruptcy auction, where he buys six planes in one day, all of which Walt bugs. Almost instantly, a bugged plane leads them straight to Amado’s secret airstrip, where they see six fuel trucks lining up. This tells Walt that Félix is, for some reason, planning to move an entire shipment of cocaine all at once—a huge risk that only desperation could drive him to. If they hit this shipment, Félix’s Colombian partners will kill him before the day is up. Voilà—vengeance for Kiki Camarena.

When I saw in the opening credits that this episode (“El Dedazo”) was written by series co-creator Carlo Bernard and directed by its head helmer Andrés Baiz, I figured we were in for something momentous and mournful, the way the best Narcos and Narcos: Mexico episodes tend to play out. That…really wasn’t the case, as it turned out. Instead, it’s the usual formula: incremental movement across a tangle of plot threads, generously seasoned with graphic violence and political cynicism. Not even a side plot in which Félix more or less stalks his Long-Suffering Ex-Wife adds much to the mix.

But one thing Narcos teaches you is to look for the little things. It’s in the way one of the murderous PRI brothers waxes rhapsodic about women in tennis skirts. It’s the idea of a man whose name means “The Crazy Pig” getting sent to conduct high-stakes negotiations. It’s in that weird glance Ramón Arellano Félix shoots him before his men open fire. It’s in the fact that Cochiloco takes off his sunglasses for maybe the first time since we’ve met him, only to get shot seconds later. It’s in the way Félix finds himself swept up in a rally for the PRI’s rival party, a development that seems to start the wheels turning in his head for a maneuver that could pull his ass out of the fire one more time. Narcos is rarely, if ever, going to blow you away—but that just makes any moment where it scores a direct hit on you that much more impactful.

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.

Stream Narcos: Mexico Season 2 Episode 6 on Netflix