Review of 'Narcos: Mexico' 3

I really enjoyed the third and final season of Narcos: Mexico, and regret that there won't be another season, devoted to Chapo. Yeah, I know there have been other series and movies about Chapo, but his story deserves to be done up in the inimitable Narcos way, especially his ingenious escape via tunnels, which (as I've mentioned before ) I've always admired. When I was kid living in the Bronx, I used to think that the best way of escaping police if they were after me was to dig a big tunnel under the Hudson and up to the Catskills. Fortunately, I didn't commit any crimes and they never came after me.

Back to Narcos: Mexico 3, it was great to see Pacho (good acting by Alberto Ammann) again. He's the only character to appear in every season of Narcos and Narcos: Mexico, and that's quite an accomplishment. The character and the real person had a hand in the drug traffic in both Colombia and Mexico.

Alas, Pacho ends up dead. As does Amado (good acting by José María Yazpik), the Lord of the Skies. Though for Amado, there's a hint at the end of the season that maybe he actually escaped from the hospital plastic surgery, or with that plastic surgery that changed his face. In real history, Amado definitely died. But the circumstances -- exactly what went wrong in that hospital -- are not clear. In Narcos: Mexico 3, we see his lover -- the love of his life -- walking back to her house after taking a stroll on a beautiful beach in Chile. We see two glasses of wine on the bureau. Who was that second glass for? And we see a model plane, obviously suggestive of the Lord of the Skies. So ... who knows what that scene was suggesting, and, who actually knows what happened in real history? Maybe they did plastic surgery on some recent corpse to make his face look like Amado, while the real Amado, not looking like himself after successful plastic surgery, left the hospital and got to Chile unscathed.

The rest of this final season was good, too, hammering home the message that the U. S. barely knew what it was doing in its war on drugs. I had to laugh in one of the concluding episodes when Barry McCaffrey, U. S. drug czar, says in a real newsclip that we had the situation well in hand. I know Barry, he's currently a commentator on MSNBC, and if I ever have a chance I'll ask him how he felt about that clip in Narcos: Mexico.

But drugs, though the U. S. badly bungled our declared war on them, is no laughing matter. And the whole Narcos series stands as a powerful, brilliant portrayal of how and why that war went so wrong.