Dark Winds Recap: No Regrets
The thrill of the detective genre — with which Dark Winds shares a few tropes, particularly when it comes to Joe Leaphorn — is to watch as the pieces of the case come together, forming a picture that is as surprising as it is logical. It should all fit in a way that makes sense, but we couldn’t have seen it coming, though many of our astute readers did see it coming. This week’s revelation of Dr. Reynolds as Ernesto Cata’s murderer scratches that itch while leaving room for more: Though he definitely killed Cata, we can’t be totally sure yet that he also killed Halsey. In fact, for now, Joe is convinced that the two murders aren’t connected.
He hypothesizes that before he even knows Reynolds is the guy he’s looking for. When the episode opens, Joe is still in the desert, nearly bled out but still lucid enough to give Chee directions over the radio. Chee first finds Joe’s truck, which, along with his wallet, is looted and abandoned. George was supposed to be waiting there for the lieutenant. A closer range means that Joe can come in more clearly over the radio, and when Chee eventually finds him, he wants to rush Joe straight to the hospital. But Joe instructs him to go after the suspect, who is still injured and still on foot — in other words, not very far.
In a virtuosic struggle, Chee almost gets Reynolds, whose dark hood seems to have been stapled onto his head, because no matter how much tackling and wrestling and shooting at Chee is able to manage, the hood never lifts an inch above his eyes. That becomes Chee’s excuse when Joe later teases him about missing a shotgun hit from, like, two feet away. Chee gets as close as holding on to him, but Reynolds drives away, nearly dragging Chee through the desert with him.
While Chee fought off Reynolds, Joe was waking up in the hospital, where a packed bag suggests that Emma might have been there but decided not to stay. We learn that last week’s journey through the deep recesses of Joe’s consciousness was the effect of a certain popular horse tranquilizer: The dart he was shot with had been poisoned with ketamine. After a few episodes’ absence, it was Gordo who had the dart analyzed, and he’s back to help Joe find the culprit of this thing once and for all.
One gratifying aspect of the way this show is structured — this season perhaps more than others — is that it constantly places Joe at forks on the road. Disturbed and even changed by the clarity that came to him when he was in the K-Hole, the effects of Joe’s epiphanies now ripple through his unfolding personal crises: the crumbling state of his marriage and the fact that Agent Washington will not give up until she has something with which to indict him. Joe vents to Gordo about the people — Emma, J.J. — and the things — his self-righteousness, the inviolability of his moral code — he has lost, some unjustly, some as consequences of his own choices. Having faced the bottom of the barrel, in the form of the Yé’iitsoh who appeared for him, he has accepted he can’t fix the past in any way other than moving forward. Gordo reassures him that whatever happens, Joe won’t have to be alone. Buddy-cop movie when? I need to see these two shoot the shit while staking out.
Out of the hospital, Joe goes over to the canyon where he’d found George’s camp to catch up with Chee and the rest of the NTP and Scarborough PD. They’re still on the lookout for both Reynolds and George, who has once again disappeared, this time with the contents of Joe’s wallet. Joe had already figured out that George was looking to leave the reservation, and among his things, they find a timetable for trains to Reno, where George’s mother lives. More significantly, they find some white rocks, haphazardly disguised with mud, that look like coal but aren’t.
Later, at the station, Joe discovers that they are broken pieces of a clay mold that perfectly fits the arrowhead found in Ernesto Cata’s mouth — the very same arrowhead Reynolds had determined was fake. It’s all Joe needs to blow the case open. They drive up to the dig site, where Reynolds’s partner, Terri, tells them their grant ran out, so she is following Reynolds to Scarborough. She is confused when Joe and Chee show her the mold — she accounted for every artifact found on-site, so it couldn’t have come from there. Then, she remembers that the last thing she found, after Reynolds told her to stop digging, was a chip of an arrowhead — the exact missing piece of the one they have.
Joe completes the puzzle: Reynolds was “seeding the site,” which means that he was purposefully planting discoveries — in this case, a Folsom arrowhead — that would support his long-held theory that the Folsom and Navajo people had crossed paths in the area. He’d flaked off the arrowhead and buried the chip so that Terri would find it. Ernesto and George were checking out the trailer, screwing around and being boys, the night Reynolds secretly came to the site to finish the plan. The boys found the arrowhead and took it; Ernesto put it in his mouth when he realized they might get caught. Reynolds killed Ernesto, but George was able to flee. Reynolds, Joe says, “has made his reputation coming to places like this and taking whatever he needed from us and from our dead. And no one is allowed to take a thing from him.”
Chee and Joe send Terri out to Scarborough to give Gordo a statement and wait until they’ve found Reynolds, who still needs to kill George — the only witness to Ernesto’s murder — before he can get away scot-free. They know where they’ll be the next morning at 11:07: at the train station, boarding to Reno. Reynolds’s weapon of choice is a three-thronged shovel that looks a lot like the kind of thing that could’ve ripped Halsey’s body nearly in half, and before we can fully buy Joe’s theory that Budge is behind Halsey’s murder, let us remember that Suzanne, Halsey’s erstwhile chili-farm co-worker/cult disciple/drug-ring conspirator, told him that the boys used to hang out around the farm, too.
Speaking of Budge: This week, we catch up with Bern, newly returned to Hachita from Juarez, where she figured out that her workplace fling is most definitely in cahoots with Spenser. She’s already on edge, and only more so when, developing the film she shot in Juarez, she realizes that some of the prints are ruined. Even then, Bern makes a significant discovery about what the use of the word “pig” means. The Mexican girl she’d found at the border with her mom used it, as did Halsey when he was running from Joe and Chee at the farm.
“Pig,” Bern tells her friend and roommate Eleanda in a very bad call, stands for Pipeline Inspection Gadgets, meant for cleaning the oil pipes but “perfect for smuggling drugs.” Bern knows that it’s game time: The drugs she saw being loaded onto trucks in Juarez will be at Spenser Ranch already. Eleanda hesitates, but ultimately agrees to help by getting a search warrant from a judge she knows won’t ask any questions. Hoping to take Muños’s eyes off her back, Bern tells him she’s decided the whole thing is too risky, so she’ll back off for a while. He tries to contain his relief, but it’s pretty obvious that he’s glad for that and for the fact she insists on footing the bill, though at this point, he might’ve already put together that she doesn’t want anything to do with his money. Back at the station, he goes into Ed Henry’s office to beg out of the whole operation. “There is no out,” Ed Henry explains simply and devastatingly. Muños was paid only to look the other way, but he should’ve known that once you’re under the thumb of a man like Budge, your freedom and your will are no longer your own.
Rolling up to a deserted Spenser Ranch with what will turn out to be a useless warrant, Bern and Eleanda inspect the sheds. While Eleanda returns to her truck to “call for backup,” Bern finds a family of three locked behind a steel door next to the white van that first put her on this devil’s path of human baseness. Before she can say anything, she turns to find Eleanda pointing a gun at her while Budge shoves a hood over her head. I mean, are you serious? Is nothing sacred, not even the relationship between two women in a male-dominated field? It was a good twist. I really didn’t see it coming.
Bern’s mistake was to trust so openly, though she can hardly be faulted for wanting to find allies in a new town and department. The theme of trust is also at the core of Emma’s character arc this season: Her faith in her husband has been corroded, though she knows she can’t fully trust the people who are after him, either. Agent Washington comes by the house, after the search warrant — which, at this point, seems like it happened 500 years ago — to return a box of things. She tries to appeal to Emma’s role as “a matriarch of this community”: Emma has always looked out for others, put others above herself, and at what cost? “Your husband’s life is a lie,” Washington says theatrically. “Yours doesn’t have to be.”
Emma does accept Agent Washington’s invitation to talk more, though she doesn’t say what Washington wants to hear. She talks about the isolation of her grief and Joe’s selfishness when he chose to inhabit a prison of his own suffering, leaving her to face her own sadness alone. Everything she says leads Washington to believe that she will finally turn on Joe and confirm he wasn’t with her the night Vines disappeared, but that’s not what Emma wants. She wants, it seems, to free herself of this tangled knot, to be unburdened of the problem — and she knows, like we do, like Washington does, that turning on Joe now would only burden her further. Joe tries to talk to her, but she doesn’t want to speak to him. She leaves the station with half her life packed in the bed of a sky-blue truck, on her way to stay with her sister in Fillmore until she doesn’t know when. As she drives away, Joe getting smaller in the rearview mirror, she cries — out of sadness, and maybe a little out of relief, too.