Welcome to our weekly breakdown of the minutia of Kurt Sutter and Elgin James’ Sons of Anarchy spin-off, Mayans MC. While Kimberly Ricci provides her always excellent coverage of the series (here’s her write-up of this episode), here we’re going to endeavor to look deeper into the episode and excavate some of the details viewers may have missed, callbacks to Sons of Anarchy, and posit questions explore theories about the direction the series.
Kimberly covered the episode’s wildest scenes earlier this week but before we get into the nitty gritty of this episode — and there were some details that may not have been immediately apparent — here’s a quick refresher on the storyline:
EZ helps Coco’s daughter dispose of a body. Thanks to Chucky’s big mouth, Bishop has even more reason to believe that Coco is the rat inside the Mayans. Adelita returns Miguel’s baby to him in exchange for $7 million pesos, but Miguel is apprehended for drugs trying to cross back over the border. Adelita, meanwhile, has Miguel’s mole killed. Plus, Sons veteran Lincoln Potter delightfully makes an appearance at the end of the episode.
Let’s get to it.
1. The episode title, “Gato/Mis,” is obviously Spanish and Mayan for “cat,” and as is custom, the title animal appears in the first and the last shot.
2. Let’s jump immediately to that last shot, which sees Lincoln Potter holding that cat outside of the Mayans Clubhouse.
A quick refresher on Lincoln Potter: He was an assistant U.S. Attorney in the fourth seasons of Sons of Anarchy. He spent the entire season closing in on SAMCRO and the … Galindo cartel. In the final minutes of that season, just as he had the Galindo cartel dead to rights, he had to ice the entire investigation because he discovered that two guys, Romeo Parada (Danny Trejo) and Luis Torres, were CIA agents secretly working undercover as members of the Galindo cartel. In fact, it’s possible that Lincoln Potter’s involvement brings Romeo Parada back into the fold on Mayans MC.
The more pressing question, however, is what is Lincoln Potter doing there now? On Sons, he absolutely had it in for the Galindo cartel, so it’s quite possible that he’s the U.S. Attorney that is ultimately in charge of this entire investigation. In other words, he may be Jimenez’s boss’ boss. He may be the guy at the top who is putting the screws to Jimenez to put the screws to EZ to put the screws to Emily to flip on Miguel. That actually makes some sense. After EZ told Jimenez that he’d rather go to prison than put Emily in danger, perhaps they called in the big gun — Lincoln Potter — to make put more pressure on EZ to flip Emily. Remember that Jimenez told Felipe that the reason he was pressing EZ was because “my sack is getting pressed by the U.S. Attorneys. I don’t know how high up it goes.” Lincoln Potter would suggest it goes up very high.
Or, maybe he has a RICO case against the Mayans club, and he’s going to use that as leverage to turn the entire club against Galindo. Maybe Chucky has been working as an informant for Lincoln Potter this entire time!
3. Let’s not beat around the bush on Adelita’s plan, either. She clearly set Miguel Galindo up by putting heroin in the baby blanket, though I do love the irony of Miguel being separated from his baby on the Mexican border. In either respect, clearly Adelita had the Mexican immigration officials in her pocket, because — as she told Angel at the beginning of the episode — “there are not hundreds of people depending on me. There are thousands.” Like, for instance, the Catholic church.
And in case you didn’t catch it, the guy she handed the package off to early in the episode is the same guy who arrested Miguel at the end of the episode.
4. This is a biggie: Remember when Adelita told Angel that her real name is Luisa Espina? Later in the episode, Jimenez asked Felipe about his time in Mexico. “Who was your partner?” he asks. “Espina,” Felipe says. “Don’t know if he got out.” That basically means that EZ’s father used to be partners with Adelita’s father or uncle. I suspect that’s going to be a big detail later on.
5. This is interesting, too, and goes to a theory we discussed last week. We posited that perhaps Miguel’s brother — kidnapped as a baby and presumed dead — isn’t actually dead, and that Felipe and his wife took the baby and raised it as Angel (it would at least partially explain why he changed his name and ran). In this week’s episode, in a conversation with Jimenez, Felipe says about getting out, “The Woman I loved was pregnant with our first son.” Jimenez says, “Angel”? But Felipe didn’t affirm or deny, meaning that the son her wife was pregnant with might not have been Angel, which lends more credibility to the theory that Angel might actually be Miguel Galindo’s big brother.
6. “What happened there?” Letty asks Coco regarding Chucky. “I don’t know. We won him in a card game. Not kidding.” So, apparently SAMCRO lost Chucky in a card game. That explains so much, doesn’t it? (I blame Tig.)
7. For what it’s worth, aside from Leticia, Coco also admits that he has two other kids with two other mothers. Coco gets around. It remains to be seen if his other two daughters play a role in the series.
8. Finally, we found out a little bit more about the man who killed EZ’s mom. We still don’t know if it was a robbery or a hit, but we do know that he was a Wildcats fan.
