![]() Practicing an English sentence that, Clemens has assured her, will make her a candidate for asylum if she's captured by the Border Patrol, Maria Elena blunders through the alien words: "I have a well-founded fear of the constitution." Reverting to Spanish to curse out loud at her luck at being trapped with a pigheaded fat man, a gordo, she reels in confusion at Clemens' wounded bellow: "I understood that!"īut the conversations are also revelatory and barrier-breaking. Clemens' pidgin conversations with Maria Elena (Salvadoran actress Emy Mena), the refugee girl he's helping-neither of them speak more than a few words of the other's language-are often comic. That armed trek across the desert-it consumes almost the entire second episode, and at one point I seriously wondered if it might take up the entire remainder of the six-hour series-is what turns Coyote from an interesting but rather ordinary cop show into high drama that at times borders on epic. And that's far from the end of the matter. border barriers to help her evade a beating or worse. In the end, Clemens finds himself unwillingly escorting the narco's teenage (and pregnant) mistress through a gap in the U.S. But an inadvertent and-by itself-not terribly threatening encounter with the hothead nephew of a Mexican narcotrafficker leads to an escalating confrontations. ![]() One of them, involving the death of his long-time partner Javy, is what takes him across the border after his retirement Javy was building his family a house there, and Clemens is determined to finish the work. Nor does he recognize the job's cost to his own family he's divorced, a stranger to his kids, and doesn't wonder at all why his wife left him for a touch-feely therapeutic counselor (played annoyingly well by a sympathy-oozing Mark Feuerstein).Ĭlemens also has some embarrassing and perhaps tragic secrets in his career background. ![]() He's no xenophobic monster, just a guy doing a job (rather well) but with no particular sympathy for the immigrants-or "TONKS," short for "territory of origin now known," as the border agents call them-he picks up for deportation. Sometimes a noir, sometimes a western, sometimes a tense action thriller and sometimes piquantly funny, Coyote has something for nearly everybody-even those faithful few fans obsessed with superhero bowel movements: Chiklis detects one immigrant-smuggling ring while sitting on the toilet.Ĭhiklis plays Ben Clemens, who on the day the story begins, is retiring after 32 years on the job in the San Diego area. The only surprise in Coyote is the quality: It's very good. Even though it stars Michael Chiklis, the mad-dog renegade cop of The Shield, this time you know the surly border patrolman is going to have a white-guy heart of gold in the end. Nothing illustrates the profound flip-flop in the politics of immigration like Coyote, the new series on the streaming CBS All Access channel. The movie, flying in the face of Hollywood's prevailing political winds of the day (the Democratic Party back then still regarded illegal immigration as a greedy corporate plot to subvert organized labor rather than a humanitarian issue), was under-promoted, didn't find an audience, and sank with all aboard. border patrolman who reluctantly changes sides after flukey circumstances lead him to observe, up close, the plight of refugees fleeing violence and poverty in Mexico and Central America. In 1982, director Tony Richardson made a film called The Border, starring Jack Nicholson as a U.S.
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