Pablo Escobar's Most Savage Moments on 'Narcos'

Image via Complex Original

Episode: "Descenso" (Season 1, Episode 1)

Savage Rating: 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥/10

Obviously, we have to include this scene because it's the mugshot that everyone knows. (It also inspired my Halloween costume last year.) After the DAS caught wind of the magnitude of Pablo's drug-smuggling operation, Pablo decides to take matters into his own hands. He stops by the DAS office for a "little" chat that escalates into an extremely heated argument. He gets arrested and boom—there's your iconic mugshot. Escobar didn't realize it at the time, but this mugshot did more damage than good, ultimately leading to a lot of grief down the line.

Episode: "Descenso" (Season 1, Episode 1)

Savage Rating: 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥/10

What a badass moment right off the bat. The scene starts out with the cops not giving a fuck who Pablo Escobar is, despite the street cred he had already amassed, but by the end of it they're pretty much bitching out to him. It really sums up how scared of Pablo Escobar everyone came to be and just how much power this man had in Colombia even BEFORE he even became a cartel leader. 

Episode: "The Sword of Simon Bolivar" (Season 1, Episode 2)

Savage Rating: 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥/10

Welcome to the birth of the famed Medellin cartel. Pablo Escobar used the kidnapping of Marta Ochoa to bring all the Narcos together for the first time and then proclaimed himself their leader. So basically, Pablo looked all these dangerous people in the eyes and said, "I'm your f*cking BOSS, and now you have to listen to everything I say." True savagery. 

Episode: "You Will Cry Tears of Blood" (Season 1, Episode 7)

Savage Rating: 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥/10

This is honestly one of the wildest things Pablo had the balls to do during his reign. The government let this dude build his own jail. So what'd he do? He basically built a castle vaguely surrounded by bars and stayed there for a little over a year. The government later attempted to try and switch him to a normal jail, as if that was going to work.

Episode: "La Catedral" (Season 1, Episode 9)

Savage Rating: 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥/10

Continuing from the last slide, yeah, it did not work. Look at the picture above—you don't get to wear hats like that in normal prisons. This setup was one of the biggest lies of the entire season. Instead of bars and prison food, the boss had hot tubs, prostitutes, casinos, and liqour. That's the way the most dangerous criminal in the world/brief congressman Pablo Escobar rolled. Little did he know that the truck delivering his goods had been planted by the DEA, and the agency was capturing footage of literally everything that went in and out of that jail. As soon as the government caught wind of what was really going down, all hell broke loose.​

Episode: "Despegue" (Season 1, Episode 10)

Savage Rating: 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥/10

One of the most nail-biting scenes of the season is when Pablo sets the Vice Minister of Justice up, welcoming him into La Catedral and then basically holding him hostage, even as the government was closing in on the jail. Escobar's power, at least in his mind, was so absolute that he didn't think twice about going toe-to-toe with a literal army. The conflict left us with too much suspense to handle, and honestly, we're not sure we'll will be able to keep it together once we find out #whokilledPablo.

Episode: "Explosivos" (Season 1, Episode 6)

Savage Rating: 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥/10

This is the darkest moment of Narcos, when Pablo recruits a kid for the task of blowing up an airplane. Meanwhile, the kid had no idea that the suitcase he was carrying had a bomb in it. He did all of this to murder presidential candidate César Gaviria Trujillo, whose regime was blocking his every move. Honestly, I had no idea that Escobar actually did this, and it's still shocking that it's a real-life event. It's a perfect example of how sick the man actually was. Pablo really didn't care who got hurt, as long as he got what he wanted.​