Y tu Luna también: Narcos: Mexico: Season 1, Episode 4 – “Rafa, Rafa, Rafa!” (2018)

*Episode premise spoilers.*

This is an exciting episode. There’s some wild stuff going on, along with some pretty high-stakes drama. As we approach the middle of season 1, the story takes turns that I certainly didn’t see coming my first time through the show.

Rafa has been circling around Sofía, the wealthy daughter of the Minister of Education. Stupid with love, the two conspire to be together by faking Sofía’s kidnapping. Of course, abducting the daughter of a politician is a grade A bad move, and it brings all sort of police to the doorstep of the cartel. As the DEA plots how they might use Rafa’s lovesick crime to their advantage, Félix considers how to make this shitstorm disappear.

The episode earns its title, because when you see how inevitably disastrous the fallout will be from Rafa and Sofía’s plan, you want to shake your head and say, “Oh, Rafa, Rafa, Rafa!” The kidnapping is a mess and the next phase of their scheme—roleplaying Bonnie and Clyde while they hide out—is childishly short-sighted. Also, there’s a ridiculous scene of Rafa and Don Neto listening to “Karma Chameleon” and blowing their own minds with the realizing that an eight-track doesn’t skip like a record would.

It’s no wonder the DEA sees Rafa as a goldmine. With the DFS blocking their investigation from getting anywhere near Félix, the narrator sums it up when he says, “Best way to catch the smart ones: get an idiot working for ‘em.” The Minister of Education is on the warpath, which means everybody is looking for Rafa, and Kiki and co. hope they can apprehend and then flip him. This storyline brings in Calderoni, a character who doesn’t pop up often in the series but is always interesting when he does. In a sea of corrupt cops and obstructive bureaucrats, Calderoni appears to be a bastion of down-to-earth integrity, and with him leading the search for Rafa, Kiki can see a tangible path open to the DEA for the first time.

This is an excellent episode for Diego Luna. Félix is a character who likes to keep everything in order, and Rafa has just thrown a grenade into his tidy operation. Throughout the episode, he’s unspeakably aggravated with Rafa while at the same time worrying about his impulsive friend and trying to figure out how they can find their way out of this calamity.

I love the scene where Félix confronts Rafa about his actions. Luna’s performance is less irate drug lord and more disappointed dad, with a strong air of, “You dummy, why can’t you just think?” As he contends with his competing instincts to protect the cartel/himself and protect Rafa, you can tell how angry Félix is, but for the most part, he speaks rationally. The most he lets loose is when Rafa is ignoring him and he slaps the cigarette out of Rafa’s mouth! Great moment, no notes.

Later in the episode, Félix is going through it in a serious way, on a personal level as well as a very tangible one. Although he pays Nava enough for the DFS head to be at his beck and call, Nava continually needs to throw his weight around, and now with Félix searching for a solution to his Rafa problem, Nava has the decided upper hand. I love how subtly Félix gets his back up when he comes home to find Nava waiting for him, casually menacing as his daughter plays nearby. I don’t want to get into spoilers, but it’s fascinating to watch how this carefully controlled man reacts to being in a situation where he’s entirely without control. Even when he’s pushed to the absolute brink, you can still see him putting things together and making connections in his head, which is damned impressive!

Train Dreams (2025)

I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this Best Picture nominee. I didn’t know much of anything about it, and while I wasn’t particularly excited for it, I tried to go in with an open mind. On the whole, though, I enjoyed it.

Train Dreams follows the life of Robert Granier, an Idaho logger in the early 1900s. We touch a little on his childhood, sent west on the train as an orphan, and glimpse into his later years, but for the most part, we focus on his prime working years. Robert lives for his wife Gladys and their young daughter Katie, but his hard, dangerous work takes him far away from their idyllic cabin in the woods. Every year, he ride the train to a different logging site, where he spends months chopping, felling, and dreaming of home.

That summary makes the film sound kind of simplistic, but while it is fairly slow-moving, it’s not without momentum or plot development. Some major things do happen in the story, and Robert gets put through the wringer. But throughout, matters are depicted with a quiet, contemplative air. The movie is bleak and beautiful, filled with dreams, regret, and fragile connections. There’s Robert’s loving relationship with his wife and daughter, but every time he’s home, he’s haunted by how much Katie has grown up since he last saw her. There are the men who drift in and out of his life, fellow loggers who pass the time with him, who might be there one year and gone the next. There’s his friend Ignatius Jack, who steps in to be a reassuring unobtrusive presence after Robert is dealt a heavy blow.

The film got four Oscar nominations in total. In addition to Best Picture, it’s up for Best Adapted Screenplay (it’s based on a novella of the same name,) Best Cinematography, and Best Original Song. The cinematography nod definitely makes sense to me! In some ways, it’s a bit of a freebie, since movies that show off beautiful landscapes tend to get accolades for their camera work, hehe. And to be sure, the landscapes in this movie are gorgeous—every time they show a lake or a river, it’s the purest, clearest water you’ve ever seen in your life—but it is genuinely wonderfully shot. The camera does its part to convey that beauty and bleakness, in capturing both how tiny Robert is within this wide wild land and the up-close immediacy of his heartache.

Joel Edgerton is effective as Robert. He’s a solid, plain-spoken man who isn’t hugely demonstrative but often shows his emotions in subtler ways. He, and some of the other characters in the film, show that limited education doesn’t limit depth of thought. I’m always happy to see Felicity Jones, and she’s very good as Gladys. She manages to feel very modern while still fitting well into the period setting. (I have to say, though, it seems like every time Jones appears in an Oscar movie, her role is “Wife of the Guy,” which is a bit of a bummer.) The film also features strong performances from William H. Macy and Kerry Condon.

Warnings

Strong thematic elements, violence, language, drinking/smoking, and sexual content.

Other Doctor Lives: Twenty Twelve: Series 1, Episode 2 – “Visitors from Rio” (2011)

Episode 2 leads us pretty quickly into its central comic mishap, which the characters attempt to deal with in an exceedingly British way. While the pilot started off more measured, this one drops us right into the action.

The commission has a (seemingly) simple mission today: pick up a Brazilian delegation for the 2016 Olympics at their hotel and ride a chartered bus together to the Olympic park, where they’ll tour the facility and meet with MP/former Olympian Sebastian Coe. Not so simple, unfortunately, when the driver has no idea where he’s going.

Making things worse is Graham, our character of the week. Played by Karl Theobald, Graham is the commission’s head of infrastructure. He’s the one dealing with traffic and such ahead of the Games, and while he immediately realizes the bus driver is headed in the wrong direction, he way overcomplicates things in his efforts to right it. For example, when he puts together a new route in the hope of making up for lost time, he uses his special government intel to identify the roads with the least traffic, not thinking about how that’s going to send a massive bus down a small residential street lined with parked cars.

This is a fun episode. It’s a very mundane sort of crisis—the sinking realization that you’re going to be late (very late!) to where you’re trying to get to—and Ian and his team flounder. They try to explain the seriousness of the situation to the driver as politely as possible, and they do everything they can to distract the Brazilians from the unfolding disaster. Meanwhile, Sebastian Coe is already waiting for them at the Olympic park, and Ian fields numerous calls from Coe’s assistant, giving her the most optimistic updates he can. This exchange pretty much sums up the atmosphere in the bus, when Ian is grasping for solutions and Siobhan cracks a very deadpan joke:

SIOBHAN: “I think we can still be humorous here, right?” 

IAN: “Well, I suppose we could be, yes, but let’s just not, shall we?”

For another bit of added fun, I knew I recognized the bus driver. Well, he’s played by none other than Karl Collins, a.k.a. Shaun Temple from Doctor Who! So he’s been in episodes with two different David Tennant Doctors, one prior to Twenty Twelve and one after. Since Tennant only narrates this show, they wouldn’t have worked directly together on it, but I’m still counting it as a Whoniverse reunion.

There are a bunch of gags involving the interpreter who’s accompanying the Brazilian delegation. As an interpreter myself, these jokes feel pretty lazy to me—I know a spoken language interpreter isn’t the same thing as an ASL interpreter, and I don’t know what sort of regulations interpreters have in Brazil, but there’s a lot here involving the interpreter adding her own commentary, refusing to interpret things, and trying to one-up Siobhan while she’s going over some announcements. I wasn’t really a fan of that side of the episode.

I’m enjoying David Tennant’s narration. His delivery is always very measured and serious, but there’s a fair amount of sly humor here, often in the specific structure of his sentences. Here are my favorites from this episode:

• “Meanwhile, it’s 10:45. By this time, they should have arrived at the hotel. But so far, they haven’t.”
• “It’s been a day of managing expectations, and Ian’s final task is to manage the expectations of his important guests as to what exactly it is that’s happened to them.”