In the Mud

The Weight of the Water

I'm still not sure what label to slap on the opening minutes of *In the Mud*. It begins like a routine prison transfer and then turns, viciously, into a scramble for oxygen. The van hauling a new group of inmates to La Quebrada prison is attacked and dumped into a river, trapping the women inside a sinking metal cage. We watch muddy water climb the windows, limbs slam and tangle, bodies panic as the truth sets in: to the state, they are disposable. When five survivors finally claw their way onto the riverbank, covered in the dirt the title promises, they don’t look like toughened criminals. They look like people dropped into a hideous new life. It’s a brutal, breathless start. I just wish the series always matched that force.



Sebastián Ortega spent years building a sweaty, iron-smelling empire with *El Marginal*. With this spin-off, he turns toward the women inside the Argentine penal system. You might brace for a simple gender-flipped rerun of the old formula. (Television rarely says no to a safe idea.) But this show runs on a different current. The violence in La Quebrada isn’t always loud or swaggering like it was in San Onofre. A lot of the time it’s quieter than that. It lives in exploitation, in transactional favors, in the look a guard gives a woman when he knows nobody is waiting for her beyond the walls.

At the center of this mess is Ana Garibaldi, returning as Gladys "La Borges" Guerra. If you only knew her from the edges of *El Marginal*, what she does here really is a surprise. She’s not merely the mobster’s wife anymore. Garibaldi puts the character’s exhaustion right into her posture. Look at the way she grips a smuggled cigarette: fingers tense, eyes always flicking around the yard. Her face seems weighed down by years spent near other people’s violence, only to end up engulfed by her own. There’s nothing glamorous about the way she survives. It’s work. Slow, joyless, relentless work.



I have a complicated relationship with prison dramas. From *Wentworth* to the early, messier seasons of *Orange Is the New Black*, the genre almost always gets snagged on the same problem: how do you balance real social critique with the soap-operatic needs of serial television? *In the Mud* stumbles over that exact line, especially once it moves into its newly released second season. By the time Eugenia "La China" Suárez shows up in the 2026 episodes, bringing a slightly distracting celebrity shine into all that bleakness, the series starts leaning hard on gang-war mechanics. Whether that lands as a weakness or part of the fun depends on how much melodrama you can take. At times, the script traps these women in feuds that feel less emotionally true than structurally necessary, as if the real goal is simply to keep 16 episodes fed.

Still, when the character dynamics click, the show really hurts. Carolina Alvarado of LatinaMedia put it well when she noted the series "offers little comfort to its characters or its audience, and can often be a brutal watch." She isn't kidding. A first-season subplot involving a trafficking ring operating out of the prison director's office doesn’t merely cross a moral boundary; it obliterates it. The camera stays on the cold, administrative faces of the people making money off the inmates, then cuts back to the cramped, desperate spaces the women are forced to live in. The lighting is sickly and fluorescent. The walls seem wet. The claustrophobia starts to feel physical.



Maybe Ortega doesn’t quite pull it all together. The pacing droops, and some of the supporting players settle into familiar shapes: the naive newcomer, the corrupt guard, the tyrannical shot-caller. Even so, I can’t write it off. Under the genre machinery, there’s a real pulse. You feel it in those brief, nearly silent moments when two women exchange a look and understand the system intends to grind them both down. They are trying to stay upright in the mud, and sometimes that struggle is enough to hold onto.