Dark Winds Recap: Gods and Monsters
It’s not unusual, in contemporary television, for an episode to break with the season’s arc to explore a self-contained storyline; remember that one episode of Girls where Hannah has an afternoon’s affair with Patrick Wilson? But in procedurals like Dark Winds, it’s rarer to encounter novelistic digression. As Agent Washington tells Joe during his alternate dimension wanderings, there is a murder — several murders, if we’re counting Halsey’s and Cata’s on top of Vines’s, not to mention George’s disappearance — to be solved; there’s hardly any time to spare, in the fiction of this world or in the writers room that conjures it. But that writers room knows that what holds Dark Winds together is Joe’s changing, complex inner life. This week, we’re given more pieces of the puzzle of who Joe Leaphorn is, and more importantly, why he is.
There are three interlocking timelines to this week’s episode: a dreamscape, present reality, and Margaret’s narration of the story of the Battle of the Yé’iitsoh, fought by the Hero Twins Monster Slayer and Born For Water. As Margaret’s telling overlaps with Joe’s own battle against the monster and his journey through the deep recesses of his consciousness, Joe at times reflects the twins and, at times, the monster. Last week, evoking the same myth, he told Margaret that he feared he’d crossed the line in his heart that separated the two. But what makes the Hero Twins heroes, Yé’iitsoh a monster, and Joe a man?
In brief, the story that Margaret tells, illustrated by a theatrical production, goes like this: the Twins wanted to go hunting, but their mother was scared that they’d bring back monsters to the hogan. Their grandmother advises them to go to the sky and visit their father, the Sun, who’d give them powerful weapons to destroy Yé’iitsoh and the monsters that roamed the earth. The Sun gives them the Lightning and the Sunbeam, but the weapons’ power proves useless against Yé’iitsoh. It’s only when Monster Slayer has the idea to turn the monster’s own knives against him that they are able to defeat Yé’iitsoh. But when the Twins return home with his head, their mother can’t recognize them. They were “changed by what they’d seen and what they’d done.” Monster Slayer’s beauty was such that it frightened his mother.
The first reflection of the Hero Twins that Joe encounters in his dreamscape is the image of himself as a child with his young cousin, Will. After collapsing from a darting arrow that hit him in the neck in his present reality, supposedly shot by Yé’iitsoh, Joe wakes up in a stretch of desert tinted orange by a blazing sun. He follows a trail of blood to a priest who will turn out to be the hinge of the whole episode, not to mention Joe’s moral code, and a stray soccer ball leads him to young Joe and Will. He follows them to his childhood home, where things are off-kilter: blood runs from the bathroom faucet, ants swarm in the guest room, his dinner plate is broken in two. His father, mother, cousin, and younger self all acknowledge his presence but can’t tell him what he’s doing there. Over dinner, young Joe pleads to his dad, Henry, that he doesn’t want to go to church.
This timeline follows a dream logic: places are and are not themselves, furnished in familiar ways while serving alternate purposes. When Joe returns to the dreamscape, after briefly opening his eyes to a distraught George warning him that the monster is getting closer, Joe sees the same priest, now alive, delivering mass at Kayenta Police Station. His father, cousin, and younger self all sit in the pews, but Joe can’t stay; he has to go back to George. The priest, whose name we never learn, tells him that he can’t return to George in the desert until he has solved his own murder.
A purpose puts some order to this alternate reality and the possibility of an end to it: Joe can surface only long enough to tell George to take his gun and go to his truck. Then he’s at the Kayenta Police Station, handcuffed to the interrogation table. He’s relieved to see Emma walk in, but she’s furious with him. He’d promised to build a fence for her garden and still hasn’t, and the rabbits are eating her vegetables. He explains, somewhat condescendingly, that he needs to solve the priest’s murder so that he can get to George, who is waiting for him. But she’s through — he is always putting his cases first and her needs second. She fishes the handcuff key from the insides of a green pepper and swallows it. I love this moment of fury from Emma — a sense of responsibility for their marriage is, or at least should be, part of him. She meets Joe’s tenacity with her own right to be uncompromising, an approach she’s just starting to take in their real life.
Joe is able to force his way out of the interrogation room, but he lands inside the station’s locked cell as Will sweeps the floor. He calls out, but his cousin can’t hear him. Frustration becomes despair when he sees the priest come in and take Will into the office, shutting the door and shutters behind him, despite Joe’s increasingly louder interventions. This is a heavy-hitting moment; it’s the first we’ve learned that there is child abuse in Joe’s past. Beyond that, though, it resonates because it has the plain, painful legibility of nightmares: behind bars, Joe is helpless to do anything. He can’t help his cousin even as he knows what is about to happen to him.
In a brief return to the present reality, Joe is finally able to get the dart out of his neck and regain movement long enough to see Yé’iitsoh approaching. The monster attacks him; they struggle for a while, and Joe bludgeons him with a rock before collapsing again. When he wakes up in the dreamscape, he’s back in the same blazing stretch of desert where we began, following the same trail of blood to the priest, who runs from him. Joe tackles and cuffs him, taking him to the station’s cell, now located in his home kitchen. Here, the dreamscape, Margaret’s telling of the Hero Twins myth, and Joe’s present reality align: the priest is Yé’iitsoh; Joe and George are the twins. But another obstacle stands in the way of Joe’s final confrontation with the monster-priest. Is it any wonder that it comes in the shape and purpose of a white person representing the interests of the United States of America?
Agent Washington arrives to ask Joe just what the hell he is doing; he is supposed to be solving this man’s murder. Joe tries to reason with her: the priest is a child abuser who should be behind bars. But she can’t hear him any more than Will could. Instead, she instructs him to dance with the powers that be; the same powers that can acquit a priest for abusing a child but not a Diné man for seeking justice for his son. Waltzing with him, Washington explains that where Joe sees monsters, society sees good men deserving of the law’s protection and second chances. It’s only by squaring the difference between “real justice” and justice as defined by his badge that he will be able to get rid of the monster.
Joe wakes up in the desert just as George runs out of bullets with which to fire at Yé’iitsoh. As he reloads the gun, George ties a tourniquet around the wound the monster had inflicted on Joe’s leg, and he loses consciousness again. He wakes up in his childhood bedroom with his younger self, who tells him he’s found a way to stop the priest: they’ll shoot him with Henry’s gun. Joe tries to stop him, saying that a young boy shouldn’t carry the responsibility of killing someone, an act that will change you forever. But young Joe reminds him they already do; it’s too late.
Realization gradually dawns on Joe. “We killed him, didn’t we?” he asks. He opens the door of the room into Kayenta Police Station, where he stands face to face with the priest just as, at the end of last week’s episode, he found himself facing Yé’iitsoh. Joe’s pistol vanishes into a finger gun, and he tackles the priest, ultimately suffocating him. Joe figures this is the solution to the mystery: to protect his cousin, himself, and other boys in the Navajo Nation, he killed the priest, and memory is just now returning to him. But the priest regains consciousness to explain that this is not what happened. At the time, his death was presumed; officially, he went missing, just like B.J. Vines.
It’s finally Henry, Joe’s dad, who knows the whole truth. Just outside the station, Henry levels dirt on what looks to be a grave. When Joe told his father that Will had been abused by the priest, Henry — at the time, lieutenant of the Navajo Tribal Police, like his son — tried to get justice through the “official” channels. He tried the U.S. Attorney’s office, the courthouse, and a judge. He couldn’t arrest the priest himself because he had no jurisdiction, and the people who did have it wouldn’t. So, like he inspired his son to do many years later, he delivered his own Indian justice. In a world where “our people get the punishment without the protection,” Henry tells Joe, “we only have one choice,” though he knows that neither of them can be truly at peace with the bargain. The situation is impossible, irresolute— the B.J. Vineses and priests of the world shouldn’t get to walk away scot free. But the price for justice is the weight of responsibility: it’s all Henry and Joe can tell themselves to live with what they did.
“There’s no such thing as monsters,” Henry tells Joe, in response to the episode’s fundamental question: In slaying a monster, did Joe become a monster himself? “There’s just people who do bad things and other people who do bad things to stop them,” his father concludes. The solution of the priest’s murder has the power to liberate Joe because it sheds light on the truth he was missing: the line that separates monsters from men can’t be crossed because it doesn’t exist. There’s nothing to separate men from monsters; nothing, at least, other than the purpose behind a person’s actions. Henry and Joe can bear the weight of their choices because they were made in pursuit of justice; and though that can’t ever be enough, it’s not nothing, either. Henry teaches Joe that if he is looking for a definitive answer — whether what he did was right or wrong — he is asking the wrong question.
When he wakes up in the desert, Joe tells George to run to the truck while he continues to chase the monster, though severely injured. After missing a few rounds, he is finally able to get him on the shoulder. Joe follows a trail of blood to a rock on which he can see the print of a human hand. The sight makes him laugh incredulously, deliriously. He is just able to get Chee on the radio to tell him he’s been injured and that they are pursuing a suspect who is on foot, wearing dark clothes, about 6’2”. Most importantly, he tells Chee the suspect is not a monster; he’s just a man.
One of the lessons of the Hero Twins myth, if we are to interpret it as a cautionary tale, is that only the monster’s own weapons had the power to hurt him. If it’s fear of monstrosity that fuels the Yé’iitsoh that appears for Joe, it’s only by looking into the pit of that fear — tracing it back to where it comes from; finding peace in its existence — that he is able to do away with the monster. In Joe’s present reality, that’s a sign of hope: if the monster is not, in fact, a monster but just a man, that means they have access to the same tools. It means that Joe can fight him. He can continue to seek justice, past be damned.
Case Notes
• After two-quarters of a season balancing between mythical and human dangers, Dark Winds nips the question of whether Yé’iitsoh is a character or metaphor in the bud. Now the question is: if it’s not Yé’iitsoh wreaking havoc around the reservation, who is behind the brutal murders of Ernesto Cata and Halsey? With George on our side, we might be finally inching towards some answers. For my money, Spenser and that weasel Muños have something to do it with.
• “Abidoo’niidee” solved the problem of backstory inventively: we got a lot of information about Joe’s past through the dreamscape that could have seemed heavy-handed if it’d come up in dialogue or even in flashback. This caution about how to best draw out the contours of a character’s past remains exclusive to Joe in the Dark Winds universe, though — I want to get more out of Chee and Bern in the same thoughtful way.