He, and the three other bosses, have made a deal with the government to turn themselves in in six months and face little-to-no punishment. The set up here, that really helps suck you in as a viewer, is that the seasons starts with Gilberto, perhaps overstepping his role as the Cali architect, announcing that he's leaving on top. And it's one thing to just flesh out your villains, spotlighting with their "Gentlemen of Cali" dynamic along with their individual dreams and plights, but it's another thing altogether to deliver a catchy hook. With Peña as the nucleus, now delivering the "The More You Know"-style narration, the show also earns points with a well-crafted quartet of kingpins - leader Gilberto (Damián Alcázar), his quietly more-evil brother Miguel (Francisco Denis), New York violence-wreaker Chepe (Pêpê Rapazote), and distribution madman, who's also mad for men, Pacho (Alberto Ammann). Not that he's ever anything more than shades of the "downtrodden determined lawman disillusioned with corruption on both sides of the drug war" archetype (since this is a show where every win is really several losses in disguise), but Peña, just as a bilingual Latino-American from the Texas border, is instantly more interesting that Holbrook's outsider gringo character who was saddled with the broken marriage arc. Firstly, Pascal's Peña is now the central gunslinger. So then how did the show actually improve in its third season given that "lesser" villains were now at the heart of the conflict? Well, it did so in a few important ways. Boyd Holbrook's Murphy was dull and often bogged down in cop cliches while Pedro Pascal's (Game of Thrones) Peña was usually pushed off to the side despite being the character we often wanted to know more about. It had been Escoabar's outrageous exploits that fueled the show as things tended to lag considerably whenever the story shifted over to the DEA side of things.
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