Season 1 Episode 5
S2 E4
S3 E4
In our group's episodes, the idea of what/who the hero and villain are shifts quite chaotically. In the first episode, we can label Escobar as the ultimate villain, as he in the beginning stages of his drug transports and other illegal business. Murphy is trying to put a stop his nonsense, labeling him as the hero. However, as we continue through the other episodes, we can see the way these roles can be easily reversed. One person might be labeled as the hero in one episode then be labeled as the villain the next. That is the fascinating thing about Propp, the fact that it is interchangeable and characters roles are never set in stone. For example, Escobar is labeled as the villain for our first episode (S1E5), but then we label him as the hero in our second (S2E4) because he progresses the storyline along in a different way. By using Propp, we also see that a hero doesn't have to be inherently good or inherently bad and vice versa for the villain.
The Proppian sequences were difficult to differentiate because, as previously stated, the heroes, villains, donors, and other actors changed between each episode. S1E5 was probably the easiest to boil away the discourse on and assign a Proppian sequence to, merely because it was early enough in the story that the narrative arc was clearly defined. The later episodes posed a far greater challenge, because the various heroes and villains needed to be differentiated individually before the narrative sequences could be determined. Audry and I went back and forth on both season 2 episode 4 and season 3 episode 4, trying to decide which story elements could fit into which part of the sequence. As the show went on, the discourse became greater and greater, rendering it difficult to study the story straightforwardly. On the other hand, the binary oppositions remained the same throughout the show: we see Right vs Wrong, Legal vs Illegal, and Narcos vs Government remain consistent during the length of the show. Overall, this project made it easier to understand how characters, binary oppositions, and narrative sequences interact to construct the stories we consume.