It might be the best episode of the season and once again Moura’s performance was perfect. The scene also featured an excellent appearance of Escobar’s famous hippos, which he kept as pets. In a minor, but sure to grow role, Alejandro Edda played a young gunman in the cartel named Joaquin Guzman, who is better known as “El Chapo.”īecause the timeline of the rise of the Mexican cartels overlaps a lot of that of the Colombians, Narcos: Mexico had an opportunity to bring back a number of characters, including one very memorable scene with Wagner Moura as Pablo Escobar when Diego Luna’s character visited Escobar in Colombia to make a pact to smuggle cocaine through Mexico. Luna's casting came on the heals of starring in the Star Wars universe. Leading the new cast would be Michael Pena, playing real-life DEA agent Kiki Camarena, and Diego Luna as Felix Gallardo, the leader of the Guadalajara Cartel. Sure, the show could have brought Boyd Holbrook and Javier Pena back and fudged the story of the DEA agents in Mexico, but instead they stuck with the realism and honest storytelling by changing the players, as they changed in real life.
#Pablo escobar the drug lord vs narcos series#
All the main characters from the previous series were gone. Out was basically the entire cast and in was a completely new one. It only made sense, as the criminals were changing and the location was changing therefore, it made sense for everything to change. With Narcos: Mexico, Netflix and the showrunners decided to do a light reboot. Still, the production and acting were world class and the ending, setting up what the creators thought would be Season 4, was excellent, with Pedro Pascal’s character back home in the States, sitting on the Rio Grande with his father, watching Mexican drug smugglers load up a boat. Sure, they were just as violent as Escobar, maybe even more so, but the story wasn't as good. There were more players, they operated in many different cities around the world and there wasn’t a unifying bad guy for an audience to cheer against. There were no anti-heroes, only villains, and Escobar was both, which is what originally made the show unique.Īdditionally, the story of the Cali Cartel is harder to tell. The show suffered mightily because of this. The men that ran the Cali Cartel, while just as ruthless as Escobar, lacked his charisma and his panache, in my opinion. The show just wasn't the same without him as Escobar. The hardest loss in Season 3 really was Wagner Moura. While Season 3 was equally well done, production-wise, it does suffer from a couple of flaws luckily it was still immensely popular. They were major rivals of Escobar’s and with his death, they moved hard to fill to power (and drug) vacuum left in the wake of Escobar’s death.
With Escobar dead, Season 3 of Narcos shifted to the other major cocaine cartel in Colombia, the Cali Cartel, based, obviously Cali. It’s all very much based on the real story and was flawlessly executed, unlike Pablo Escobar, whose execution on a roof in Medellín was anything but flawless or dignified. Of course, in the end – spoiler alert – Escobar was taken down by a combination of Steve Murphy and Javier Pena’s characters and Colombian police and military forces. It was a dangerous time in Colombia and indeed much of the rest of South and Central America and the Americans, misguided or not, felt righteous in their belief that bringing all-out war to Colombia and to Escobar was completely warranted.