By Kofi Outlaw

Duque rum will never be the same. Literally.

This week the Cuban clan held their annual rum blenders convention, where tasters and critics gathered to sample rum made by the most acclaimed master blenders from around the world. Actually, fast forward: this week’s episode started a day into the future, with Alex asking a repudiated Cuban gangster for help, while a mysterious man lay in a hospital bed, beat to a pulp.

As told in flashback we learned that, before the convention began, Pancho and Amalia met with Pancho’s doctor to discuss cancer treatment. Upon hearing he would lose taste and smell from chemotherapy, Pancho refused treatment. (Some rum just tastes that good I guess.) At the convention Pancho sampled one rum after another, hating them all, until he came to the table of a young, beautiful Australian girl. Upon tasting her rum, Pancho demanded to know whom the blender was—surprise, surprise, it was the young hottie herself who knew how to work magic at the stills. In her, Pancho was sure he’d found his successor.


At club Duque Henry was having increasing concerns about his eastern Euro-thug business partners, who were selling ecstasy in the club and stealing liquor, leading to a loss of profits for Henry. When Henry tried to stop the thugs from tossing an over-dosing club hopper out into an alley, the thugs beat the crap out of him and sicked a pit-bull on him. The mysterious man in the hospital, then, was Henry. Learning what had befallen his brother, Alex tried to negotiate with the Euro-thugs. When that failed, things came full-circle to the beginning of the episode, with Alex asking the leader of Santo’s gang to remove the Euro-thugs from the club permanently. For the gangsters, this meant a series of grotesque assassinations involving stairs, snakes and a pile of ecstasy pills force-fed to a Euro-thug.

At the Duque mansion Pancho told the family that he wanted the Australian girl to become the next master blender for Duque rum. Meanwhile, Alex’s son Jamie and his fiancée Rebecca, feeling overwhelmed by Isabel and Amalia dominating their wedding plans, absconded to Georgia to elope. That night Pancho met with the Australian girl and after swapping trade secrets, convinced her to work for Duque rum.
At the end of the episode, Frank went back to Ellis Samuels’ loving arms, while Alex repaid the Cuban gangsters by making them partners in Club Duque. As this new (and surely disastrous) partnership was being forged, Isabel suffered a miscarriage. Feeling guilty about not being there for his wife, Alex tried to reconcile with her, only to have her stare blankly at him and tell him she didn’t know him anymore.


This week offered some new twists and turns, primarily the inclusion of an innocent, blond and beautiful Australian to the Duque inner circle, and Alex’s forging a partnership with gangsters. If previews for next week’s episode are anything to go by, the moral tightrope Alex has been walking will become all the more precarious, as his family begins to learn of his ‘after hours exploits.’ Should be sweet.