WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for Mayans M.C. Season 3, Episode 10, "Chapter the Last, Nothing More to Write," which aired Tuesday on FX.
With an episode full of emotional highs and lows, Mayans M.C. ended in an explosive way as the Santo Padre club found themselves under attack from a combined force of other Mayans groups led by Yuma President Canche. While just what the fate of the club and its members will be in the recently announced Mayans M.C. Season 4 isn't clear at this time, the finale, titled "Chapter the Last, Nothing More to Write," leaves open a lot of possibilities for the future.
CBR talked with Mayans M.C. co-creator Elgin James by phone about the Season 3 finale, his favorite moment from the most recent outing and what to expect from Season 4.
CBR: Do you have a favorite moment from the season?
Elgin James: I have so many, because I think of the actual moments... so many that actually just worked on screen. But that scene at the end of Episode 5, where we're just in the back of the back of the truck with Gaby -- with Sulem [Calderon] -- when EZ gets shot. That was an idea that I had. And I told everyone, and everyone's like, "I don't know how that could ever work."
But then what's beautiful about the cast and crew is that one of them just got to work on it. And one of our grips, named Nick, he and his dad just spent the weekend sort of thinking about it, talking about it, working on it. And by the time we shot it three to four months later, they created this device so we could shoot it with that beautiful movement at the end that comes around to the side profile. So, when we were shooting that, all of a sudden, we were in a follow truck behind, so we were feeling every move that JD [Pardo] was making. And it was just one long take for both Sulem and JD, and it was just so emotional. And then when we just hit that, everybody just screamed. Probably not a very smart idea on my part, like, "Hey, what about this?" And then it took, like, 200 people's work and sweat to make it happen.
So that's one of my favorite moments, but there's just too many. I mean, everything Richard Cabral did, everything Michael Irby did, everything JD and Sulem did. I could go on and on. But so I would say yeah, every single minute of every episode.
Speaking of Richard, Coco's storyline was really dark this season, but there's that hope at the end -- I swear to God that's not meant to be a pun -- but there's absolutely no way to say it otherwise. But, like, Gilly really does step up as a friend. Tell me about that balancing act with something that's so delicate and fraught as drug addiction.
James: When I pitched this whole season to the network and the studio, what happens in the beginning, you know, you sort of conceive it. And then you go in to all these really smart people, and you say, "This is going to happen." And I told them from the first episode, the first scene, all the way to the last scene. And one of the things they said, because there's so much darkness, one of the execs, who is incredibly smart, and she's just like, well, "It feel that there's no hope this season." And I'm like, "Oh, no, there is. Hope is the homeless junkie that lives on Meth Mountain," to use your own pun.
But yeah, I mean, Richie and I knew that we were going to get to go here. Like, when I first met Richard, we were at a prison reform panel together. We grew up on different sides of the country. We just had so much [...] in common, just on a soul level. And I was like, "You have to be on my show, man. I just got brought onto this TV show. You have to be on it." So from the very beginning, we knew we were going to go someplace like this. And there's moments -- splashes of it. I mean, in Season 1, he got to do some brilliant work, but it really was never "it" like we always say, like in quotation marks. So this season, we knew we were going to go there, [...] because so much in our own personal lives -- the things that we've done, the shame that we carry with us wherever we go, there's repercussions to every action you do. There's repercussions and there's consequences. And we knew we both wanted to explore that.
So, man, when we were on Meth Mountain, it was 32 degrees out. He's in basically nothing. He's just in his underwear and shivering. I mean, you saw where he went. [...] It really symbolizes... the 39 lashes of the Stations of the Cross for Jesus is really Coco storyline, and he just went there as an actor. Richard Cabral has suffered so deeply and so beautifully. It was really awe inspiring to watch. It was also really, really scary to watch, like raw. It was scary to watch my friend go so deep and go so far, but to the same token of what you're talking about, there's that moment in Episode 6, where I think he was almost the most scared of, when he's twirling and dancing around. And there's so much hope and joy there. There's so much innocence.
The first time you get to see Coco as a little boy, even though we saw him in Episode 3 in the beginning as an actual little boy, like this moment, this smile on his face, this freedom, is where we really get to see his inner soul. And I think that makes us mourn as we lose him more and more. The following episodes make us mourn it even deeper, but then Gilly shows up and saves the day.
That's interesting that you mentioned the Stations of the Cross. And that's something I've been I've been thinking about a lot for the season. There's very much a religious component -- and not a strictly Catholic one. I mean, you have the hummingbird at the start of the finale, and they've got a lot of symbolic and spiritual connotations. Tell me a bit about imbuing that kind of spirituality into this season.
James: My dad was a minister. [...] And I actually chose Catholicism when I was a kid, even though he wasn't Catholic, but I just chose that. I remember we were on set once, and I was so surprised when someone didn't know the Hail Mary. And I was like, "Oh, my God this is crazy. I say it a million times a day." [...] I was saying to someone earlier today, it's through the idea of [...] putting in the culture aspects and more accurate culture aspects. And that had to be more than just, "Are they eating burritos or tacos?"
It had to be more than that and just something that's on the surface and became this sort of, like, religion and you know, partly Catholicism, but just basically religion in general. [...] There's one of the reasons why the names of the chapters are after Huckleberry Finn. For one, it's the great American novel, [and] as much as people put this, "Oh, well, this is a Latinx show. Oh, this is this." We've always been like, "No. This is an American show." America looks different than usually what you see on TV. Like we're all American here. America comes in all these shapes and everything else and ethnicities and cultures. And this is an American show.
But also, you know, Huckleberry Finn is in some ways, about Jesus' 40 days in the desert, and that's really EZ's journey this season. It's his 40 days in the desert, and he makes all the wrong choices. He makes the opposite choices that Jesus did. [...] That's why we started the relationship with he and Gabby having not consummated. They've barely even held hands yet. And when Jesus was starving in the desert, and he's given relief, or he's offered relief in bread and water, he says, "No." He refuses. EZ very much accepted that by a campfire in Episode 6, and it went on and on, even getting on the knees to surrender and have all these kingdoms. And he does it, but he does it too late, saying, "I'll go with you. I'll go with you." And you know [it's] probably the end of the EZ that we've come to know for the last three seasons for a while.
You have the sacrifice of Abraham -- sacrificing his son -- in Felipe, except the thing is Felipe really did. He really went through it. He wasn't stopped like Abraham was. You have Bishop's story with Job. Just everything that he's lost, and Job didn't lose his faith, and Bishop very early on did. All that stuff is in there.
St. Francis -- that statue of St. Francis actually was given to me when I was a little boy by a nun. It used to be bigger than me. [When] I was a little kid, I used to play, like, Cowboys and Indians with it. And then when I get older, I would carve, like, "Sid Lives" in it and an anarchy sign. It's been with me my whole entire life. And it was really important to also get that story in.
That brings me to the end of the season, where there's that really incredible shot of EZ standing there and watching this kind of like wave of Mayans banging at the gates and about to break in. Can you unpack that a little bit for me?
James: Talk about chickens coming home to roost and talk about consequences and things having actions and his plans having actions and just sort of be... And part of it really comes from when I was in a band... You know, me and my friends used to fight against Nazi skinheads. And we spent a couple decades doing that. And my band, Wrecking Crew, were on tour with Agnostic Front. And my friend Matt Henderson, who lives out here in LA with me now, we played in Allentown, Pennsylvania. And all of a sudden we were upstairs in the backstage, if you will. And we'd heard about Nazis in Allentown. Started to hear rumors about it and stuff, but like, "Alright, we'll see if anything goes down."
All of a sudden, we come out to look as the floors were shaking. And there's 300 Nazis. Women like waving flags, saying, "Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil" and Sieg Heiling all at the same time. And it was sort of the idea with EZ, and you're standing there and it is, at the same time the most ugly, despicable... I was one of the few people of color. There's me and another kid in the whole place. But then looking over it, there's also this beautiful thing about it. Like this ugly beauty of all these people screaming in unison that have such hate. And then by the time they saw me and this other jus, it was just like Invasion of the Body Snatchers. They couldn't believe their minds. And, you know, it turned into a huge riot, and lots of bloodshed, and all that kind of fun stuff. But it's always really stayed with me.
And so when I was talking about that scene with JD, I was telling him that story. So it was just this animal instinct. It's almost like your intestines, your gut drops, a little bit of just like, "Holy fuck. What is on the other side of that?" And it is all of their secrets and demons ready to come crashing through that gate.
Yeah, and at the same time, I mean, there's also kind of that that demon that's kind of already inside the gate, which is Taza, who tells Bishop about what he did to essentially orchestrate a massacre. What was it like bringing this incredibly badass biker into the universe and making him bisexual?
James: It's something that we always wanted to sort of address. And I think it really comes down to is that sometimes people don't understand about Black and brown communities is there's so much more fear, and there's so much more homophobia there. It comes from being so emasculated for years -- for centuries. That's what it comes from in this country. And I think that's why it still exists in the culture. That's what we really wanted to have the chance to talk about, and we're also in the same predicament of like, "Why did Taza kill Riz?" And so, you know, there were a lot of conversations we had, and it actually came up in Season 2. And we just didn't want to. We wanted to have a full season to unpack that.
There's a thing that happens in television, because television just moves so fast, and you have an idea, and it's like, "Oh, let's address this. Let's address, you know, the crisis at the border, or let's address this. Or let's address suicide or something." And it becomes you're doing it in an episode. And if we're going to talk about something as important as this, we really wanted to have a whole season, if not a whole series, to sort of like unpack, and we've only started to unpack it, really. And we knew with Raoul [Trujillo], who is such a phenomenal actor. He's been doing this for decades and doing such incredible work. And for a couple seasons, he was just giving us exposition. I mean, he just this face [that you] put the camera on, and he just gives you so much anyway. He's just so rich. And his performance is already very layered. But really, he was just giving us exposition. And we really wanted to figure out who the hell Taza is, and what was his past. And, you know, and we couldn't get anyone else to tell that story better.
Something that I've been wondering from a few things that you brought up here is how much of what happened in Season 3 was planned in Seasons 1 and 2. How much of it was long-term planning and how much of it was flying by the seat of your pants and figuring it out?
James: What's really interesting is Kurt [Sutter] is such a different storyteller than I. He literally is a fly, and he loves it. He loves chaos. He loves to fly by the seat of his pants. So he'd do something and have no idea what it meant or what was going to happen. There's still stuff that you talk about in [Sons of Anarchy], and there's just this chaos to his storytelling. That's great. That's why so many people love it. To me, and this is not to be flippant about sort of mental illness, I have OCD in many ways, truly. But I also have crazy story OCD. So it's like that funnel cake in Episode 1, I knew was going to come back in Episode 5. Maybe it'll come back in Season 7. I need to have all of these things. So it's really educational for me to work with Kurt. That just doesn't exist. But to me, it was just like, OK. And I was just figuring out what we were going to do for Season 3. A lot of it was just like, there's so many loose ends. Let's start to tie things up. And that's really what it came from.
What can you tease for me about Season 4, because you got a renewal. Congratulations!
James: Thanks, man! You never know. Honestly, we do not take that for granted, and, you know, I think at first people were like... We have such an insanely passionate and loyal fan base. I think there are a lot of people that were tuning in just because of Sons, and they split. Understandably. They're like, "Oh, this is a different show. And this isn't brown Sons of Anarchy." [...] [B]ut our loyal fan base was there the whole time and was riding with us, and now other people have started to come in. Som we've actually done better than we expected, which is great. There's a while we did not think we were gonna get Season 4. And part of me was like, "Oh, good. Thank God. I never have to figure out what happens and how they get out of this mess at the gate." And then as soon as I found out, we got it, I was like, "This is awesome. Oh, no, now we've got to solve this."
But now we've got plans. We're really excited where EZ is gonna go. You know, I think EZ's been on the fence for three seasons, right? He's sort of [had] a foot in one world, a foot in the other. And then what's gonna happen now, when he fully commits to one, and I can tell you it's gonna be pretty bloody.
Created by Kurt Sutter and Elgin James, Mayans M.C. stars J.D. Pardo as EZ Reyes, Clayton Cardenas as Angel Reyes, Sarah Bolger as Emily Galindo, Michael Irby as Obispo "Bishop" Losa, Carla Baratta as Luisa "Adelita" Espina, Richard Cabral as Johnny "Coco" Cruz, Raoul Trujillo as Che "Taza" Romero, Danny Pino as Miguel Galindo, Edward James Olmos as Felipe Reyes and Emilio Rivera as Marcus Álvarez. Season 3 is available now on Hulu. Season 4 will release in 2022.
0 Comments