In the recap for the ‘Mayans M.C.’ season 2 debut, EZ gets in even deeper with the club while searching for answers about his mother’s murder while the Mayans face problems at home and abroad…
By Damon Martin — Editor/Lead Writer
Eight months have passed in the timeline between the end of ‘Mayans M.C.’ season 1 and the beginning of season 2 that picked up on Tuesday night.
The end of last season saw EZ Reyes decide his own future by staying with the Mayans despite promising his brother Angel that he would leave the MC after discovering a deal that was struck with the government to act as a spy on the Galindo drug cartel. Angel finding out about the deal only forced him to get involved with Assistant U.S. District Attorney Lincoln Potter — a well known figure from ‘Sons of Anarchy’ season 4 — to help his brother live out the terms of his deal.
After the Reyes brothers were called upon as assassins to rid Potter of some unwanted baggage, EZ’s prior deal with the government was stricken from the records like it never happened. Angel was ready to see his brother ride off into the sunset until EZ opted to stay a part of the club, which drove a further divide between them.
The uneasy relationship between the family had another bombshell dropped on them in the season 1 finale when EZ laid eyes on the man who killed their mother — Happy Lowman, the sergeant-at-arms of the Sons of Anarchy Motorcycle Club Redwood Original.
Happy’s involvement in the murder wasn’t explained but EZ ended up doing years in prison after giving chase trying to get to the man who killed his mother only to accidentally shoot a cop who was also in hot pursuit.
As for the club, Bishop was forced take over the reins after Marcus Alvarez was called upon to serve as Miguel Galindo’s new No. 1 advisor. Miguel struck a deal with the U.S. government to serve their needs just like his father did years earlier (while also working with the Sons of Anarchy) but in reality he was setting them up for a double cross.
Miguel had already struck a deal with Los Olvidados — the rebel faction that gave him nightmares during the first season — and together they would work together to build a more prosperous Mexico while setting up the U.S. government attempting to pull strings on them. Of course, double crossing someone as dangerous as Lincoln Potter is deadly business as everybody discovered in the season debut.
With that said, let’s recap the season 2 debut of ‘Mayans M.C.’ titled ‘Xbalanque’…
Rebel Yell
In the eight months since we last saw the Mayans, the relationship with the Galindo cartel has only gotten deeper while they work together to put one over on the U.S. government.
The cartel has been “helping” Lincoln Potter eliminate Los Olvidados while running their heroin trade over the border with help from the Mayans. EZ and Coco have been helping with runs while Angel does humanitarian work along the border to assist families in need. It’s clear by the dynamic set up that EZ and Angel are being kept as far away from each other as possible to avoid any further conflict.
After an initial run for a heroin shipment — using a school bus filled with kids carrying backpacks that double as drug storage — EZ and Coco are called into action to meet up with Bishop and Alvarez on a mission to stamp out the last remaining sect of Los Olvidados on Potter’s orders.
Bishop is fighting battles on two fronts after a recent shipment of heroin got chopped up and tainted, which led to three prisoners overdosing. That’s a serious threat to the club’s drug business, which forces Bishop to face some uncomfortable truths about one of his charters taking their product, chopping it up and selling it for a bigger profit. Meanwhile, he’s been called down to Mexico to help stamp out this rebel problem, which will hopefully put out at least one fire in his backyard.
The Mayans and Alvarez team up with a group of mercenaries hired by Potter to invade a house supposedly filled with members of Los Olvidados. The idea is that this raid will kill off the last active members of the rebel group, which will then allow Potter to orchestrate his control over the region.
In reality, Adelita has been working with Miguel Galindo behind the scenes to keep Los Olvidados active but kept in secrecy. The house that the mercenaries are about to raid belongs to a group of human traffickers, who should be eliminated anyways. The plan is to allow the mercenaries to wipe out the traffickers while the Mayans secretly deploy hard drives and Los Olvidados propaganda throughout the house to make it look like it was a rebel hideout.
The mission goes off without a hitch — the mercenaries and the Mayans team together to take out the human traffickers. Bishop is able to take out the only computer in the house to prevent any data being pulled to prove these human traffickers had no actual connection to Los Olvidados. Meanwhile, Coco and the rest of the crew plant the hard drives, phones and Los Olvidados propaganda, which is then found by the mercenaries to back up claims that this was a rebel stronghold.
The orchestrated attack appears to have wiped out the rest of Los Olvidados until disaster strikes.
Everything goes to shit when a spotter for the mercenary crew finds Adelita’s little mouse spying on them from a nearby perch. Mini is captured and the mercenary crew plans to torture her for answers, which obviously can’t happen because she knows the real connection between the Galindo cartel and the rebels. Add to that, the members of the club refuse to let them brutally torture a little girl for answers.
The only way to stop them is to kill them — so the Mayans execute the remaining members of the mercenary crew to save the girl, which only adds to the list of problems plaguing this partnership between the cartel, the rebels and the U.S. government agent who believes he has his thumb on everyone.
Potter More
Back in the United States, Lincoln Potter is back in action as he continues to work towards total elimination of the rebels while furthering his relationship with the Galindo cartel.
Before he finds out about the hit south of the border, Potter first pays a visit to Felipe Reyes’ butcher shop but immediately calls him by his real name Ignacio. A quick reminder — Felipe was once a member of an elite Mexican police force that was employed by the drug cartels to carry out their most vicious attacks. Felipe eventually fled with his family and started a new life in the U.S. but last season saw his past come back to haunt him after Adelita and Los Olvidados tracked him down for the numerous crimes he committed.
In the midst of all this, EZ found out about his father’s former life but he didn’t get any answers other than discovering Felipe wasn’t even his real name.
Potter’s visit was obviously just a tactic to tighten his grip around the Reyes brothers, who were already caught in his web a season ago. Potter released EZ from his previous agreement as a confidential informant but now he obviously plans on calling on either or both brothers to do his dirty work whenever he needs it done.
Now Potter has let Felipe know that he’s well aware of his true identity, which means he could be called into action as well or this could just be additional blackmail to ensure he keeps EZ and Angel obeying his every command.
When Potter arrives back at home base, he’s greeted by the news that the mercenaries were able to stamp out the rebels only to have three members of the team slaughtered afterwards. The leader of the group believes this was a counter attack from Los Olvidados, which means the rebels aren’t dead and buried just yet.
Potter has been doing his best to keep an eye on Adelita — who is now several months pregnant — but she’s managed to evade capture. Of course it helps that she’s actually partnered up with Miguel Galindo and her rebel faction is just as strong as ever except now they are occupying the shadows.
Sadly if the mission had finished with the death of those human traffickers posed as rebels, Potter would have closed the book on Adelita and her group. Now that the mercenaries have been killed, Potter decides to put Adelita back into play, believing that she struck back at them with a new offensive.
Potter also doubles his efforts to find her while giving permission to the mercenaries to seek and destroy anybody involved with the rebel group. That means Galindo’s job protecting Adelita just got that much harder and the eight month war with the rebels isn’t over yet.
Miguel is dealing with his own problems at home as well.
While his wife Emily has been granted power to engage in some business dealings of her own, she’s still being kept in the dark about Miguel’s business in Mexico. It doesn’t help matters much that his mother Dita has been struggling with some kind of illness that only puts a further strain on the couple’s marriage.
Miguel being called away to help move Adelita again with Potter planning to ramp up his efforst find her forces him back down to Mexico while Emily is left to deal with his ailing mother. We later find out that Dita suffered serious burns during the house fire last season, but it’s unclear if her struggles are from physical pain from the fire or perhaps the mental toll she’s endured after she was essentially cut out of her son’s inner circle a season ago for a family secret she kept from Miguel his entire life.
After Miguel meets with Adelia, he returns home to find an upset wife waiting for him.
Emily is clearly struggling to trust him after Miguel promised that he would no longer keep secrets from her but it’s obvious that he’s not telling her everything. It also doesn’t help matters much that she’s curious about the father of Adelita’s baby and Miguel claims to not know anything.
Is it possible that Miguel is the father to Adelita’s baby?
He could have impregnated her as a way to protect Adelita from harm knowing that she was carrying the Mexican cartel leader’s child. What started as a business arrangement could have also become more as Miguel spends more and more time south of the border with his new partner.
Judging by last season, Angel Reyes would seem to be the most obvious person as the father to Adelita’s baby but all the secrecy seems to point to something else. Angel had no interactions whatsoever with Adelita in the premiere so it could be possible that he’s been shut out in favor of the new relationship with Miguel.
Either way, Emily’s list of questions about her husband only continue to grow and that distrust will almost certainly eat away at them like a virus.
Happy Days Are Here Again
After returning from Mexico, the Mayans have some club business to handle.
First things first, Bishop sits down with EZ to tell him to squash whatever beef he has with his brother Angel because their volatile relationship is starting to bleed all over the club. To add to the drama, EZ’s patch vote is coming soon and it has to be a unanimous vote, which means Angel has to be on board for his brother officially joining the M.C.
It doesn’t help matters much that Angel has felt like an outsider lately in his own club while Bishop and the rest of the guys have really become dependent on EZ as the new ‘golden boy’ of the charter.
Meanwhile, Bishop also has to sort out the drug running problem caused by one of the other chapters in Arizona where the three prisoners overdosed from Mayan heroin.
It turns out the heroin excursion to start the episode was part of a trap laid by Bishop to find out which one of his charters was taking the drugs, cutting it down and then repackaging it before going out to the streets and prisons. Thanks to EZ’s eidetic memory he spots the package that has different numbering and that one belonged to the charter in Tucson.
Thankfully the club president wasn’t in on the scam but instead it was one of his officers. So they dish out the proper punishing by feeding this guy a heavy dose of his tainted drugs. He dies suffering of an overdose as Bishop manages to solve at least one problem in a day mired in difficulties.
And finally Happy Lowman from SAMCRO arrives in Santo Padre with a shipment of guns for the Mayans — returning to the old ways when the weapons were transported in oil drums like back in season 1 of ‘Sons of Anarchy’. Happy’s delivery is met with some suspicion from Chucky, which leads to the mention of two iconic names from the history of the original series.
It seems Chucky was assigned to work in Santo Padre as a result of some sort of bet but discussion of that situation has to go through ‘Chibs’ — the reigning president of SAMCRO in the wake of Jackson Teller’s death. Happy mentions Chibs but in reality Chucky wasn’t asking about that particular bet that apparently someone either won or lost.
Instead, Chucky asks Happy why the Sons are still dealing guns after Jax specifically wanted to get them out of that business. Happy responds by telling him that the exit from the gun trade was more difficult than first imagined so they are still in bed with the Irsh dealing weapons with the Mayans.
It’s sad to say one of Jax’s dying wishes hasn’t been carried out.
Before leaving, Happy accidentally runs into Felipe, who arrives at the clubhouse looking for his sons in the wake of the visit from Lincoln Potter. Felipe leaves without ever locking eyes with Happy but it’s clear he recognizes the Reyes’ patriarch from his past.
When Felipe returns home he reconnects with EZ to warn him about Potter’s visit and looming threat hanging over the family. He also begins to talk to his son about the past while trying to build a bridge between his sons.
As for EZ, he meets up with a cop later in the episode — it appears to be someone he was friends with in high school — to receive a thorough background check on Happy Lowman. It seems over the past eight months after EZ recognized Happy as the man responsible for his mother’s death, he’s been doing meticulous research into his background and perhaps why he was involved in that murder-for-hire tragedy.
Back at his own place, Happy digs into his past as well while searching for paperwork that confirms he knows Felipe Reyes and remembers killing his wife. Back in the first season of ‘Sons of Anarchy’, we learned that Happy tattoos a ‘happy face’ on his body for every murder he’s committed.
We get a glimpse of that graveyard tattooed on his stomach when Happy goes digging for a pair of profiles he had stored away on Felipe and Marisol Reyes. On the papers, Happy sees a tracking schedule that somebody put together with locations and routines on both of the Reyes’.
That means somebody likely paid Happy to take out Felipe and perhaps his wife got caught in the crossfire when she was at the butcher shop at a time when only he was supposed to be there alone. But who was this person seeking to kill Felipe Reyes and why was Happy involved at all?
As for EZ, he closes the episode arriving at his brother’s home for a heart-to-heart (of sorts). While Angel still doesn’t want anything to do with his younger sibling, EZ explains they’ve got bigger problems facing them right now including the pending vote coming up to confirm his membership into the Mayans.
EZ finally tells his brother that he’s tracked down the man responsible for killing their mother.
The Reyes’ brothers have been at odds for the past eight months but nothing will put sibling squabbling aside like the chance to avenge their mother’s death but at what potential peril to them personally and to the club? The Sons of Anarchy and the Mayans have been at peace for years now and the two organizations appear to be working hand in hand across numerous charters nationwide.
An unauthorized murder of a SAMCRO officer like Happy — no matter what he’s done in the past — would almost certainly set off an explosive and bloody war that could undo the relationship forged between Jax Teller and Marcus Alvarez several years ago. EZ wants his vengeance but at what cost?
Tune into ‘Mayans M.C.’ next Tuesday night at 10 p.m. ET on FX to find out!
