I’m spreading this out, one or two episodes at a time rather than binge-watching the whole eight, because I want to savour them, also because that would be like watching a four-hour movie, which I usually only do if Peter Jackson is involved. And I’m trying to finish my thesis, so no four-hour movies for this old student!

If you haven’t read my blog on the first episode, you might want to do that first, as it makes more sense if you know that Delores has just been released from prison after 16 years. Just click here.

Delores is living in the basement of an empanada shop run by Luis, but he is a dreamer, and is quickly going broke. The whole neighbourhood has been gentrified, and people don’t buy empanadas like they used to. Luis keeps inventing new flavours, but none have caught on.

Episode 2 is the setup for the cannibalism to come in episode 3. We know it’s coming, but Delores doesn’t.

Luis is feuding with his landlord, Gideon Pearlman, played by the wonderful comedian Marc Maron (the cranky entrepreneur from the TV show GLOW). Delores plays peacemaker, takes him downstairs and gives him all her money, which turns out to be negligible amount, due to the massive gentrification that has happened in Washington Heights in the last sixteen years while she was in the pokey. He sees her massage table and she offers him her “magic hands”, which of course he misinterprets as an offer of a hand-job. But Delores has learnt self-defence in jail.

“Got to break the C2 or C1 to kill somebody”

Which she does. Not knowing what to do with the body, she runs to the shop and buys spades, saws, gaffer tape and, to be inconspicuous, a whole load of birthday balloons. It really is a dark comedy!

When she comes back, she finds Nellie, who works in the empanada shop, giving away samples of the new taste sensation, MUY LOCO. What’s in it?

Yeah, it’s not pork, it’s long pig, and when she confronts Luis, he tells her he “took care of it”.

Luis is suddenly a huge business success. Everyone loves Muy Loco, including the local cops. And he wants to give Delores the credit, whereas all she wants to do is barf.

“But you, my Delores, you just changed the game for me. You have led me to a pantheon that very few of us who are called to this art are ever privileged enough to touch.
So now, that greedy son of a bitch will get chewed up, shat out and flushed down the toilet.”

The other reason I didn’t want to go past episode three is that Luis and Delores engage in a fundamental philosophical discussion that is key to Cannibal Studies, which we might summarise as “meat is meat”. When Delores refuses to taste Muy Loco because “it’s human fucking flesh in an empanada!”, Luis responds:

“Delores. Meat is meat. Flesh is flesh. The only reason that we eat a pig, or a cow or a lamb, like whatever, is because we are more powerful than them. So we get to feed off them. That’s how we survive, because we are carnivores. That’s just like Darwin and shit, man”

We’re actually not carnivores – that name is reserved for the true predators – tigers, sharks, that sort of animal. We are scavengers, like anchovies, or pigs.

We’re treated to lots of close-ups of meat being chopped, meat being cooked, meat being gobbled up. Viewers may at this point be consoling themselves by saying “it’s not human”, but it’s red meat, it’s from some mammal, and what difference does it make which species?

Luis has taken care of the body, removed the evidence, and become a successful business owner, all with one radical idea. The only problem is,