Dark Winds Recap: New Faces

In stories mainly devoted to unraveling a mystery, coincidences are few and far between. Hints are set up for the audience like crumbs, so we can follow our own investigative trail, holding it up to the arc as we go along. This is why they’re so compelling; it’s engaging to try to get ahead of the story or of the character whose job is to complete the narrative puzzle. Is there anything that we know that Joe Leaphorn doesn’t? So far, that has never been the case — we’ve been deep in Joe’s perspective. But with Bern in Hachita and the arrival of Special Agent Washington on the Navajo Nation, the three main investigations at the heart of this season are starting to look less like three separate spheres and more like a Venn diagram.

They start intersecting in this week’s episode when Chee and Joe find themselves on a small chili farm that gives off Spahn Ranch more than it does sustainable small-scale agriculture. There, Chee finds a bulletin board with pictures of U.S. Border Agents, including Bern. There is also the recurring use of the word “pig ” — the young Mixtec girl Bern spoke with used it as she pointed to the Spenser Ranch logo. At the chili farm, only six miles from the cabin where George Bowlegs was supposedly hiding out, a farm worker yells, “Pigs!” as he runs from Chee and Joe.

Something about Spenser’s vileness seems all-encompassing. When Bern gets into her truck the morning after inspecting a Spenser oil tank despite “protocol,” the gun she’d left behind at the border is on the passenger seat. She finds out that the menacing De Baca goes by Budge, and though Muños tells her he is probably just an under-the-table henchman for Spenser, Bern knows there’s more to it. She finds a way to go back to the ranch by telling Ed Henry that she wants to apologize to Spenser for delaying his truck. When she gets there, Spenser tells her disturbing things, chief among them that his grandfather brewed coffee with used socks. Second-worst is that it would be a waste of time to apologize to Budge, who doesn’t have feelings. Before leaving, Bern snoops around the “gas trapping house” at the edge of the property. She doesn’t see anything, and her attempt to speak with a worker is unsuccessful. She even asks him what “pig” means, but he doesn’t engage with her.

Bern’s life is not only made up of trying to uncover human trafficking rings, so later that day she gets ready for a date with Muños, who promised to indulge her theories if she’d let him buy her dinner. But when she opens the door to who she thinks will be Muños, there’s Budge to take her out instead. She grabs her gun before she gets in the car with him. It seems slightly out of character for Bern not to insist on following in her own vehicle rather than get in a car with him, but at this point she’s still pretending that she has no ulterior motives in speaking with Spenser and his associates. Budge takes her into Mexico and to a restaurant that, despite the murderous vibe of the company, looks … really good. Bern presses Budge about the gun, but he evades — he doesn’t seem concerned about her determination, though he concedes she may be a problem to him yet. Budge walks out, leaving her stranded. At the border, Muños picks her up, which I thought was too cutesy a moment for the tone of the show. I was hoping Bern standing Muños up to chase a lead she’s been explicitly and repeatedly told not to chase might create tension between them; this way, it seems too easy.

Before all that can happen, though, “Ch’iidi” opens on a sequence of two kids in Shiprock. They are fashioning a bike ramp out of an old piece of plywood when they find a body, already in the skeleton stage of decay, lying in the ravines. Suspecting that the body is Vines’s, Washington talks Joe into going with her to check out the site. Joe’s hands are tied: there’s only so much resistance he can put up without making himself look more suspicious, which he clearly already is to Washington, even if she pretends otherwise. She tells him that though her first step will be to sit down with the families of the six men who got killed in the oil well explosion, she doesn’t feel the need to speak with Joe and Emma — they are the law there, after all. As Washington is talking about how she finds it odd that whoever drove Vines to the circumstances of his death didn’t guarantee it somehow — with a knife, for example, or a gun — Joe has a vision of himself coughing up a bloody arrowhead.

It’s only one of a few visions that Joe experiences throughout this episode — they seem to function as reminders or stand-ins for Ye’iitsoh, as they only appear in moments of acute stress and guilt. Over the radio at Joe’s parents’ house, Emma hears news of Vines’s body (though at this point, it still hasn’t been officially identified), which Henry Leaphorn receives gladly: he thinks Vines deserved to get some “Indian justice.” At home, Emma confronts Joe, and as she speaks, he sees ants swarming out of the sink drain. Joe tells Emma the truth, and it makes her feel sad to know that her husband acted on their son’s behalf without her input. She tells him that by driving Vines to his death, Joe has invited his spirit into the house and stained their son’s memory with blood. Joe doesn’t relent — he maintains that he did what he thought had to be done — but by the end of the scene, we’re not really sure whether he can believe himself.

Zahn McClarnon’s depiction of Joe’s resentment and guilt, still simmering but on the verge of spilling over, reaches its apex by episode’s end. When “Ch’iidi” opens, Chee and Joe are on the way back from the Bowlegs’ cabin. On the border between Navajo County and BLM (Bureau of Land Management) areas, they find that “small chili farm” quotes included because that is definitely not what is going on there. The farmers, led by a man named Halsey who has the demeanor of a cult leader, have a grimy look about them. They insist they don’t know Ernesto or George and that they were all home and asleep on Monday night when Ernesto was killed.

Later, Joe finds out that the ranch is owned by a company called AGS Industries. He gets a middle-of-the-night call from one of the farmers, Suzanne, whose red truck was the first thing Chee and Joe found at the farm. Under the guise of arranging an order delivery, she sets up a rendezvous with Joe, where she tells him that Ernesto and George used to hang around the farm until Halsey got fed up with them. She emphasizes that Halsey gets angry often, though she doesn’t say why or to what consequence. She also tells Joe that Halsey lied about Monday night — he took off in her truck and was gone all night. The next morning, Joe and Chee return to the farm with half the Sheriff’s department. It looks empty at first, but Halsey appears and disappears in time. He slips through a sort of rabbit hole after Joe chases him for a while and eventually escapes in the truck after nearly running Chee over.

Elsewhere on the farm, Joe finds Suzanne unconscious and barely breathing with a needle dangling from her forearm. He hears shots being fired –– Chee was trying to stop Halsey from driving off –– and considers following, but something stops him. Joe turns back and crouches besides Suzanne. He holds her to his chest and apologizes to her. “I’m not going anywhere,” he promises. It’s a striking moment and a good illustration of the character-driven approach that makes Dark Winds feel fresher than other network cop procedurals.

The show took a turn for the better when it began incorporating New Age “hippies” as a threat to the reservation. For a story that takes place in the 1970s, it only makes sense — by that point, the promises of the Summer of Love were starting to wear thin, and people with nefarious intentions, such as B.J. Vines, could exploit hippie ideals to accrue power and influence; and worse, to encroach on Navajo territory by pretending to be curious about or aligned with Indigenous beliefs. The exploration of this kind of white violence has the double effect of anchoring the show in a place and time — the United States in the 1970s — and complicating the narrative by writing into the tension between Indigenous sovereignty and federal jurisdiction, which is devoted to protecting white people. The chili farm, which seems more like a cult, gives continuity to this theme — it’s another side of the Vines coin.

As these themes are introduced, Joe changes with them. Oftentimes in crime fiction, the personality of a detective or P.I. is one of the few fixed truths of the conjured world: Phillip Marlowe, for example, won’t hesitate to break a few laws to nail a lead, and he’ll always order a gin gimlet. But as new faces begin to infiltrate the Navajo Nation, Joe changes with the tides. Throughout season one and most of season two, he was unable to pull the trigger. When he left Vines to his death, something fundamental in his character shifted — and in season three, the ripples of that shift are beginning to be felt. This development makes Joe come alive.

Case Notes

• While Joe’s character is sharply written, some of the other characters feel less developed. Consider the inclusion of Chee’s history with Shorty: In this week’s episode, Chee reassures Shorty that he isn’t his father. But these explicit moments fail to have the same resonance as when, last season, Chee waited with Tomas Charley’s son for his mother to pick him up. It felt like we learned something about the precariousness of Chee’s childhood then in a way that was organic to the story. I’m still missing some of that this season, even as Chee’s interiority is more explicitly foregrounded.

• I love the dynamic between Joe and Sheriff Gordo Sena — especially because we saw it develop from hostility to affection — but it often seems to me that Gordo is parachuted randomly into episodes. Doesn’t it seem weird that Gordo wouldn’t have been called to raid the farm, especially when it’s located outside reservation borders?