“Ok, let me break it down for you. Four-thousand soldiers, tens of thousands of rounds of fire, and a bunch of fucking helicopters,” says DEA agent Steve Murphy (Boyd Holbrook) in voiceover at the beginning of the just-released trailer of Narcos’ second season, before shit (and cocaine, and so many body parts, presumably) hits the fan. “There was no way Pablo Escobar was getting out of this one.” Such is the joke: the first season of Narcos ended its story in 1992, when Escobar (played by the excellent, Golden Globe nominated Wagner Moura) escaped from La Catedral — his own prison which he’d bargained with the Colombian government to be held in. (As opposed to being extradited to the U.S.)
Interestingly, the first season covered about a decade-and-a-half of the drug lord’s life, following his rise in the late ’70s up until his prison break. The second season, however, only has a little over a year left to cover, given that Escobar escaped in July 1992 was killed by the Colombian National Police in December 1993. /Film cited executive producer Eric Newman saying in a roundtable:
Trust me, if we could find a way to keep him alive and keep Wagner on the show… He will die. The design of the show is we told 15 years of history in season one. At the point of Escobar’s escape which is the summer of 1992, Escobar has 18 months to live. That’s not something we can change. To stretch that out beyond another season would be disingenuous of us. That story was always designed to have an ending.
Despite the notion that there’s about 1/15th the amount of time to cover in Season 2, from the trailer (set to Styx’ “Renegade”), the show doesn’t look like it’s slowing down in the slightest; on the contrary, it may just be more tensely focused. The escape, Murphy (perhaps hyperbolically) narrates in the trailer, “was the greatest law enforcement blunder of all time.” Now, he, his fellow DEA agent Javier Peña (Pablo Pascal), and the Colombian government are “looking for payback.”
And if you’re worried that the inevitable death of Escobar will mean the end of Narcos, Newman had also assured people in that same roundtable that “there are any number of things that can happen after” and that “obviously there are a lot of other stories in this world that continue on beyond him.” He mentioned being impressed by what Homeland had done following the departure of Damian Lewis’ character.
The second season will be released on September 2. Watch the trailer: