Netflix released the season last Friday, and the premiere episode was pretty decent. Nothing earth-shattering, but a fast-paced, super watchable hour of bravado and violence. Here are some bullet points from Ep 1.
Okay, this isn’t exactly true, but he is apparently quite the family man. And everyone he murders this episode totally deserves it. Well, except the pregnant woman who had a heart attack when two of the 17 bags of coke she swallowed to transport into Miami burst open inside her stomach, but that was like, involuntary manslaughter at worst. And the fact that he offers half-a-million for the head of Steve Murphy? He probably just really wants to raise that caterpillar, nurturing it until it becomes a butterfly.
The episode does not pass the Bechdel test
The show actually manages to be rather education without becoming boring. For example, a sequence midway through acts as a brief tutorial on how cocaine gets made. (Pick the coca leaves, stomp the shit out of them, soak ’em in water until they turn to paste, bake this paste in the oven as if it were the world’s most special birthday cake or Tuesday’s desert if you’re Keith Richards.)
We also see the inside of a science lab, where folks are studying the effects of cocaine on lab rats, essentially turning them into little rodent cokeheads. (“Hey man, have you seen my cheese around? Actually, never mind, I don’t even have an appetite, like AT ALL. Dude, did I ever tell you about the time I escaped my cage and made it all the way to the sink? Haha, shit was inSANE. Oh my god, I can’t feel my tail!!!”)
And then there’s an interesting bit about what actually caused Reagan to initiate his own personal war on drugs. Turns out, it wasn’t the thousands of dead bodies turning up in Miami or all the young lives lost to addiction, it was the fact that billions of dollars were leaving of America for Columbia. Makes much more sense now, doesn’t it?
And finally? We learn how to say “eat shit” in Spanish.
Eat shit, if you're wondering.