One time in Medellin, I got my hair cut by a woman who swore that Pablo Escobar, the notorious Colombian drug lord, was still alive. She had spotted him a few years back, reading a newspaper in his childhood stomping grounds of Envigado. How could she be sure it was him? Escobar, his sicarios, and their female escorts used to frequent her old salon in Laureles, the neighborhood where Escobar was killed (or not) in 1993—by the Colombian National Police, or U.S. Delta Force snipers, or rival drug lords, or himself, depending on which version you lend credence to. She was there as they lowered the body of a shoeless, bearded vagabond off the ceramic-tiled roof, his cratered face caked in blood. Don Pablo wouldn’t have gone out like that, she assured me. Even before she had seen the real Escobar in Envigado, corpulent as always, sitting back and reading a newspaper, she knew it couldn’t have been him on that stretcher.

After giving it a lot of thought, I’ve decided that the second-worst thing about the hit Netflix original series Narcos is that Steve Murphy, its DEA agent narrator, would have used that anecdote to make some hackneyed pronouncement on the essential nature of the Colombian condition. Like Thomas Friedman on a deadline, his commentary is a bottomless fountain of self-assured banality, the sole discernible purpose of which is to reinforce the mystery of life in the Global South. (Granted, in a Friedman column, the barber would have been a cab driver.) Only in Colombia, Murphy would say: “A place where the bizarre shakes hands with the inexplicable on a daily basis.”

That’s an actual line that someone wrote and numerous other people declined to cut before Season 2 was released last Friday. Murphy, played with jaded tough-guy sincerity by Boyd Holbrook, shares a similar insight in Season 1, about how Colombia is a “country where dreams and reality are conflated.” A generous viewer might dismiss this reductive condescension as meta-commentary on the irredeemable whiteness of his character. But Narcos goes out of its way to endorse Murphy’s sneering gringo sensibilities as its own.

The show debuted last summer with a plagiarized epigraph on magical realism that never gets justified in the storytelling. And in the final episode of Season 2, Murphy once again scours the depths of Gabriel García Márquez’s Wikipedia page in search of a literary pretense for the show’s compulsive stereotyping. Colombia, Murphy says, is “where magical realism began” (it isn’t), and “anyone who’s spent real time here knows why.” Earlier, Murphy puts it another way: “Weird shit” just kind of happens in Colombia.

After 20 hours of pseudo-documentary exploration, that seems to be all Narcos has to say about the life and death of Pablo Escobar. The worst thing about Narcos, though, is that it believes it is saying much more.