Mo artfully tackles the migrant crisis in its fantastic final season

Amer’s distinct brand of comedy is hard to name, but it shines through here. He oscillates between sincere and silly, grounded in a sense of self-assuredness. He knows who he is. He knows where he comes from. And he knows who his people are, be they Mexican (Mo’s estranged girlfriend, Maria), Nigerian (Mo’s childhood best friend, Nick), or Saudi/Sudanese (Mo’s other pal, Hameed).

He also knows who his people aren’t: decidedly not Guy (Simon Rex), Maria’s new boyfriend. Mo and Maria (Teresa Ruiz) broke up—or at least had a blowout, relationship-altering fight—last season for a whole host of reasons, including a gunshot wound (long story) that he hid from her. Plus, he’s Muslim, she’s Catholic, and he was always worried that the older generation of his family wouldn’t accept her. (To be fair, they didn’t. But he still could’ve stood up for her.)

Enter Guy, who Mo gets along quite well with at first, before learning that he’s dating Maria—and, perhaps more importantly, that he’s Israeli. This becomes an arc of comic tension over the rest of the season, as Guy’s success (he’s the chef at a splashy new Israeli restaurant) acts as foil to Mo’s stasis (he sells falafel tacos out of a bike food cart). 

That stagnation, as the show reminds us, is caused largely by the swamp of red tape in which Mo is mired. He can’t work without papers, but those papers are dangled far out of reach—especially after having illegally crossed the border into the U.S. Rather than granting asylum’s holy grail, a judge orders Mo’s deportation. This proves tricky, given that Mo is a stateless person. There’s no place to deport him to.

So—even though Mo is technically deported—he’s released on his own recognizance. They have to let him stay, and he can even have a work permit. He just has to wear an ankle monitor at all times. Plus, he can’t vote, and if he ever gets in trouble with the law, ICE can put him in a detention center indefinitely. It’s an absurd paradox, one that the show illuminates succinctly, without falling into didacticism.

Here again, Mo offers us a new vantage point into immigration. And these insights are couched within what is still predominantly a comedy. Yes, we’re learning, but we’re also laughing—and taking in dream sequences that are scattered throughout the season, flights of fancy that lift us briefly from the sometimes gritty subject matter. In those recurring dreams, Mo’s grandparents appear with a key, often at times of uncertainty when he could use a bit of guidance. And—spoiler alert—it turns out that key is to their old home in Haifa.

This is depicted in the last episode of what Netflix has said is the last season of Mo (although Amer hopes the show will live on). It’s a gorgeous, 40-minute ode to the West Bank, to Palestine, to olive trees and family and God, culture, heritage, and memory. Where we come from informs who we are each day and lives on in the back of our minds. But it’s important to remember that some of those places still exist and to treasure the ones that do and mourn the ones we’ve lost. The real challenge is to remind ourselves that, as Mo’s mom (Farah Bsieso) tells him: “Hamoodi, the world will always try to tear us down. And when they do, we smile. Because we know who we are.” 

Mo season two premieres January 30 on Netflix