As I mentioned in another reply on this thread, there is the amusing bit where they have this theme song about the plight of Mexican immigrants ...while the show establishes just how much of a problem they are. The writers probably think they are scoring points against Trump's wall with the depiction of the club's tunnel, but Trump isn't talking about the wall as an end it itself, it's a means to the end of the problem of Mexican immigration, specifically the criminal kind. And that's what we have on the show - a gang of more or less assimilated Mexican-Americans, many of whom have very little accent (it's closer to a variation of an American accent than from having a primary foreign language), but who are emeshed with a Mexican drug cartel, being forced to do its bidding even to the point of serving up their own allies to be tortured and murdered, while flouting American laws and the border to do so.

The backstory of Sarah Bolger's character isn't clear, but what we know so far, is that somehow a high school relationship with an assimilated Mexican-American was the relationship equivalent of a gateway drug, leading to her becoming the mistress or trophy wife of a cartel kingpin. The moral of the story? Don't let your kids date Mexicans, not even the ones who seem really good and are going to Stanford - they have more in common with drug cartels than the American dream.

But aside from the political stuff, the tangles of the situation are a double-edged sword. If done right, this could be awesome, but if it's mishandled even slightly, it will end up being both tedious and ridiculous. YMMV but I have very little tolerance for these extended, deep-cover shows, especially with an unprofessionally hostile or uncooperative handler.

What we've seen of Eze's handler so far, is that he is belligerent and bullying, while insufficiently in control of the situation. If you are keeping a tight lid on your source, because you have something over him, you don't let him get away with mouthing off at you in order to let the audience know he isn't cool with the situation. The handler should be shitting or getting off the pot with his method of dealing with Eze, but it feels like the writers want to have it both ways - there is the tension of Eze having to constantly respond or jump through hoops at random moments which happen to be when he is in the most danger or under scrutiny, with the handler all hostile and belligerent so there is no appeal to reasonable risks. This sort of story was not done well at all with Juice in season 4 of SoA, but at least the cop & DA were more plausible, with the cop having conscience pangs, and the DA merely indifferent to the fate of a gang member, rather than appearing to resent his operative's criminal history.

So the handler seems like a pure antagonist, but Eze isn't going to have any support or benefit in dealing with him. There is no tangible security or gain, though he alludes to protecting his family, the specifics are not yet clear. If he's got to be dealing with a hardass cop handler, the scope and scale of his operation should be limited, with limited danger, or the hardass should be clearly interested in keeping a tight rein for Eze's protection. Instead, it looks like a means for the writers to force Eze into dangerous situations, with no appeal, because the handler is a jerk.

Then there is the issue with the club on the hook with the cartel, the relationship drama of Eze's ex being with the head of the cartel, and possibly raising Eze's child with said kingpin, and now Eze's brother and two other club members working with an anti-cartel vigilante group behind the backs of their charter president and against the wishes of Alvarez himself.

Sutter has experience handling multiple plotlines and having them come together well, so he has earned a bit of faith, but this is a really risky situation he's put the show in to start off. As I said, I have limited paitence for being jerked around by the writers with blackmail stories that run too long and the premise gets thin. Inevitably, they succumb to the temptation to manufacture plot drama, where the cover gets blown and the house charade comes crashing down, only for it to have no consequences, or something improbable causes a reset to the status quo.

Sutter & co played it very close to the limits on Sons. Donna's murder was a great tragedy, but they held off on the natural consequences for quite a long time, because they would have disrupted the status quo. That death should have been a deal breaker for many relationships with the club, and if their intent was to show the toxic hold the club has, that Opie, Piney & Jax were able to move past the death relatively easily, and that Opie would seek solace in the club that first killed his wife, and then tricked him into committing other acts of violence in misguided revenge, well, they didn't make that point explicit enough, IMO. They did other good stuff (like Opie leveraging Clay's & Tig's guilt to extricate Chibbs from a similar bind) and eventually did service the issues. But they had Stahl try to blackmail Opie in Season one, try it again in Season two with Chibbs, despite being portrayed as having real remorse for how her actions contributed to Donna's death and then they had Roosevelt & Potter do it to Juice in Season 4. They executed each instance as well as it could be done and even found semi-reasonable ways out of the latter two, with people actually talking stuff out, but you couldn't help noticing the recurrence of the mechanism. Even if getting criminals to flip on their associates is a common law enforcement tactic, the particular methods on the show raise some questions about the plausibility.

And while it might not be fair to judge "Mayans" on what has come before and what "Sons of Anarchy" did with a different writing staff, that's the breaks when you are leaning on the fans' knowledge of the established setting. The broad-strokes details and workings of 1% MCs are not explained at all on the show, and the audience is mostly forced to infer the status of Eze and what a prospect means. "Galindo cartel" is fairly self-explanatory, but the show is clearly expecting most fans to know about their relationship with MCs, especially the Mayans. They are definitely taking some shortcuts in the knowledge that the fanbase is familiar with this world and the events of SoA. Which means that a club member being blackmailed by law enforcement is a tired old plot to this fan base. If you are trying to sell your show on the basis of "You loved Sons of Anarchy!" you have to own that show's baggage. I don't recall any fans looking forward to a new show with MORE blackmail plots! They were signing up for violence, gore and capers.

So we'll see.

Another problem with the entanglements is that show didn't do enough in the opening to get us invested in the rest of the charter. We pretty much only know Eze, the president and the big brother. And big bro's compatriots, the Big One and the Little One. Which means we're relying a lot on Eze to carry the load of audience concern, and IDK if he's up to that. He seems pretty contrived. Jax Teller was the old leading man, and the SoA pilot opened with him swaggering on top of the world, before hitting him with a bunch of problems. An audience member could see how it would be cool to be Jax, before we got know him. Eze seems like he was constructed on paper to be sympathetic, what with his sainted immigrant father (that's not a Mexican thing, it's a stock character: you could swap Edward James Olmos out for an Italian or what have you in a different time or place, and you basically know what you're getting when they cast Olmos) and the brother with whom he has a mutually caring relationship. The college stuff and his wrongful imprisonment all points to an idealized hero in a typical PC fashion. We need a reason to care about this guy that makes him different from all the other stock "good guy because we say so" types. Eze at this point is a case where they need to "show, don't tell" that he's a good guy, and an interesting protagonist. So far, they are only telling us he is. If the show is going to base its hooks on Eze beging conflicted or endangerd by multiple loyalties, we need to give a shit why it's bad that he's about to be exposed or killed. Part of the reason is that long-time SoA viewers understand the rules of the MC life in this world, and we know "the club" better than Eze. If it's Eze vs. the Club, we need a damn good reason to side with him. Even if we don't care about the Mayans' Southern California chapter, we know how serious it is for a member to cross the club, and we're going to be thinking "a guy with a big brother wearing the patch ought to know better." I think that was going on with Juice in Season 4. It wasn't so much "poor Juice" as "how could you be so dumb, Juice?" We might not care about Eze's patch brothers the way we cared about Jax and Chibbs and Happy and Bobby, but the other show generates a degree of buy-in to the MC worldview.

Also, I thought the shoot-out at the cemetary could have been done better. I thought while watching it that it was just three guys slaughtering the Indians, even if in hindsight it seems like there had to be more than that. It looks like the Indians had the advantage of numbers when the Mayans started shooting, and the only thing that changed was them opening up a van full of long guns. About all that scene served to do was establish the skinny little guy as a sniper. Now was the arrival of the San Bernardino charter an indication of an ongoing alliance between the two clubs? Is Robert Patrick going to be showing up all the time? Why did they need approval of Alvarez to call them in, if that's the case? Or was it just a chance to have the Reaper show up? If the latter, was that a good idea? A huge swarm of Sons appear just to cut off the escape route of a couple of Indians from a firefight, so shouldn't we expect San Berndarino (SanCRo? SAMSan? SAMBern? ) to show up whenever the club is in deeper holes or up against more serious threats? If not, there's going to be people constantly asking "Well, when they were going into the fight with X, why didn't they call Les & the boys to help them out?" So it feels like they might have messed with the established setting just to see the old logos.

There are some seeds of a good show in here, but there are pitfalls too, and the SoA legacy could be as much a hinderance as a help.