1 week Ago By Rafaela Bassili
In the aftermath of Joe Leaphorn’s turn down the path of no return, Dark Winds has redirected its focus towards one particular question: Should we be defined by the choices we have made in the past or by the way we carry ourselves in the present? Joe tries to get through to Emma by pleading that though he has tried to separate her from his choice, he can’t honestly tell her he wouldn’t make it again. Joe’s reckoning with himself is the show’s dramatic center, but no character, however minor, is immune from self-reflection, whether it’s forced or spontaneous. If before, Joe’s imperviousness — his righteousness, even — was immovable, now he has lost his bearings.
We have never seen him look so disturbed; throughout “Tseko Hasani,” the dark circles around his eyes become bluer and deeper, illustrating Joe’s retreat into himself. It’s the accumulated weight of his guilt bearing on him, sure, but his despair is also a result of his more urgent fear of Yé’iitsoh. Shortly after Halsey’s violent death, as Special Agent Washington waits for more federal agents to arrive, Joe brings in Margaret — the medicine woman and grandmother of Anna Atcitty, whose death in the first season was the show’s opening mystery — to cleanse the station.
Noticing the lieutenant’s spiral, Gordo advises Joe to go somewhere for a while and lay low while he handles the mess. But Joe won’t let go. Later, after the cleansing ceremony, Joe speaks to Margaret about Yé’iitsoh.
He mentions the myth of the Hero Twins, whose purpose was to save people from the monsters who walked the earth. Fearing his irretrievable step past the line that, in his words, “separates monsters from men,” Joe asks Margaret point blank whether she believes Yé’iitsoh could be behind the murders now multiplying across the reservation. She doesn’t answer his question, instead leaving him with something to ponder.
She tells him that you only see monsters when there is something out of balance in your life — when you have lost your way. Their conversation is an instance of the show’s tilt towards metaphorical, less easily legible conclusions. As of yet, we can’t be entirely sure whether Yé’iitsoh is the force behind the violence surrounding Joe or a foil for his regret; as Emma told him last week when Joe left Vines to his death, he got blood on his hands.
At times, the show’s imagery hits this point over the head: when this week’s episode opens, Joe is literally washing Halsey’s blood off of his boots, badge, and uniform. That moment comes right after a brief horror-movie sequence, complete with feedback noise and eyeballs rolled so far into his head we can only see the whites of Joe’s eyes, his mouth agape. Special Agent Washington assigns the extra federal agents to look into Halsey’s murder, so she can continue to focus on Vines’s disappearance.
We see the return of Rosemary Vines, whose physical resemblance to Uma Thurman continues to throw me off every single time she appears on screen. Not that Rosemary was ever tender towards her late husband, but on the occasion of his death she is particularly acerbic. Through her statement, we learn some new information about the Vines’ past: BJ had been married to Rosemary’s sister, who died in a fire that destroyed their home and left Rosemary with permanent lung damage (hence the oxygen).
Everything about it is suspicious: the fact that Rosemary married BJ in the aftermath, that the fire happened in the first place, and that BJ himself was the next to go. The whole thing is like its own parallel Succession plot. Weirdest of all is that this whole time, Rosemary has known that a neighbor called Emily Quinn saw a police car leaving the Vines’ residence the night of BJ’s disappearance, with the man himself looking scared in the backseat.
When Washington asks why she didn’t feel compelled to share this information sooner, Rosemary replies that she was “saving it” for “a moment exactly like this.” Bizarre behavior. Washington’s warning for the NTP to lay off the Halsey case notwithstanding, Joe and Chee follow Halsey’s suggestion to go to the diner where he claimed he’d been on the night of Cata’s death.
With so many mysteries still unraveling, it can be easy to forget the catalyst for the whole thing: we don’t know where George Bowlegs is or what happened to Ernesto Cata. By the end of “Tseko Hasani,” we get half an answer to one of these questions; for now, we learn from the diner waitress that Halsey had indeed been in the restaurant that night, in the company of “Mexican Norman Bates,” which can only mean Budge. Chee finds out through Bern, whom he reaches in the small border town of Juarez.
She went there with Muños — who, at this point, is more than just a friend — to check out a refinery owned by AGS Industries, where she suspects the drugs being smuggled by Spenser are loaded onto his trucks. Muños is hesitant to go where they don’t have jurisdiction but relents when Bern teases him with the idea of disguising themselves as a “normal couple” on vacation. If it weren’t for what happens later in this episode, it would look like Muños and Bern were walking the road to coupledom — in bed at their hotel in Juarez, Bern tells him about the 12-day coma that led to her being taken in by the Leaphorns.
She’d been in a car accident when Joe found her and brought her home to live with Emma and their son, JJ, much like we saw them do with Sally in the first couple of seasons. Bern tells Muños that Joe has a code and lives by it. After so many years under his guidance, she adopted that philosophy and it’s this same determination that later leads to her telling Muños she’s not the kind of cop who will stand by and watch corruption eat its way through her department.
Back at the reservation, Joe and Emma discuss the moment when Joe’s code fell apart — and what to do with the remains. It’s the third episode in a row that Joe comes home to a distraught Emma sitting at the table, thinking about what to say to him, weary but helpless at the need to have yet another round of the same conversation. This time, though, she’s reached her breaking point: she is in the middle of telling Joe that he has to move out of their house when Special Agent Washington arrives with a search warrant, just in time to make everything worse.
They don’t find anything, and though Washington corners Emma into giving her more information — she basically threatens a co-conspirator charge — Emma doesn’t yield. The saddest part is when we see her retreat from Joe’s touch as he leaves the house to spend the night in his truck; she remains loyal to him even though she knows their relationship is broken. Instead of sleeping, Joe revisits the files for George’s disappearance, making a new connection between the toolbox Shorty was looking for and George’s mom’s residence in Reno, Nevada.
He almost gets some sleep, but the potential proximity of Yé’iitsoh keeps him up. Meanwhile, Chee fights off his own demons at the bar after hearing Muños’s voice asking Bern for toothpaste over the phone. Shorty finds him lying among beer bottles, unable to formulate a complete sentence, and takes him home.
There, he gives Chee water and the kind of pep talk that can sober a person up: he tells him that his son is still missing and that it’s Chee’s responsibility to find him. Even Shorty, whose character is minor compared to the show’s larger ensemble, can’t escape the question of how we should judge ourselves and each other: on the actions of the past or on the kindnesses of the present? Shorty may have been an enemy to Chee in the past, but now he is remaking himself in the image of a friend. The next morning, Joe finds Chee back in his own trailer, treating his hangover with pickle juice.
They catch each other up: Chee asks federal agents he knew in Washington about Budge, whom they believe might have been a CIA operative doing “wet work” (meaning killing people) in Guatemala. Joe, in the meantime, has developed a theory about George that will ultimately bear out: he was pawning tools off his father’s toolbox in order to raise funds, potentially to buy a train ticket out to Reno, where he could be with his mother. Based on the information the pawn shop owner gives him, Joe is able to track George down to a strip of desert near the coal mine where he’s been living by himself, with only a horse as a companion.
The by-now familiar and ominous howling of the wind trails Joe’s truck as he drives up. George’s horse spooks and flees; looking up at a ridge, Joe sees Yé’iitsoh. He doesn’t shoot, but the episode closes on man and monster standing there, facing each other.
It’s not the only stand-off in “Tseko Hasani,” though. In Juarez, Bern and Muños are surveilling the refinery — from a high vantage point, but still, I thought, carelessly exposed — when Budge and his henchmen spot them. Bern and Muños lose them by hiding under a jutting rock below Budge, who kills his main security guy for not being able to apprehend them.
Budge pushes him off the ledge of the rock, landing him face to face with Bern and Muños, but he’s killed before he can give the couple away. Back at the hotel, Muños tells Bern that if Ed Henry is really enmeshed in the scheme, they have to go to the DEA about it. Or, they could just do nothing and leave it well alone, a totally unsuspicious thing to say.
It’s evident from what they just saw that Budge is not playing, but Bern is determined to get to the bottom of it. Just then, she notices something about Muños’s passport and badge sitting on the hotel’s nightstand that nearly makes her throw up. The zoom-in is driving me nuts.
What am I missing? What did she see? Was it the band that tied the passport and the badge together that gave her a clue that Muños may indeed be the mole? It’s a blue band labeled after a fruit-something. I will feel so vindicated if Muños turns out to be in cahoots with Spenser. I called it! By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice and to receive email correspondence from us.
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