Throughout the seasons, Narcos had similar sequences of events. Most episodes began with the villain intervening and causing some kind of trouble. Two of the three episodes began with villainy or lack. Season 2 episode 3 began with a battle between Narcos and the cops, while season 3 episode 3 began with the DEA finding the money. Each of these events set off the rest of events that make up the episode. After the issue was presented, the hero would discover the lack and would then be tested. They would then respond to the test; they would either earn a victory or loose. Most episodes end with an acquisition event that would act as the catalyst for the next episode. It seemed to follow the same structure that most “career-based” shows do: the hero is presented with an issue, the hero struggles to solve the issue, conflict, then resolution. Each episode had its own variation, but for the most part, they had the same Proppian structure. I thought that there would be more diverse structure throughout the episodes. Netflix releases relatively good content with varying degrees of complexity. I just imagined that the structure of Narcos would be as comparatively complex as the subject material. I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed.
Although the episodes have a similar proppian structural sequence of events the differences lie within the actors and binary oppositions. For instance, within some of the episodes Steve would be the hero then in later seasons Pena would take that role or the villain would not be Pablo but the Rodrigez brothers instead. Furthermore, when looking at the oppositions we would see some of the same binary oppositions of Colombian vs. American, Fake vs. Real, and State vs. Criminal but, when looking at other episodes we would see completely different oppositions such as Professional vs Dirty, Choice vs. Obligation, Expectation vs. Reality, and Public vs. Domestic. This surprised us because we believed that the actors and binary oppositions would remain somewhat the same throughout the whole series but instead we saw it change quite a bit over the seasons. Overall, though working on this assignment we learned that not every series follows a clean cut sequence of events a can change quite a bit.