Season 4 of AMC’s Dark Winds, which is loosely based on Tony Hillerman’s novel The Shipway, begins with Lt. Joe Leaphorn at a crossroads. In fact, there are changes afoot for all three of the show’s main characters. But the biggest change might be the show’s setting, which will take the Navajo police officers to Los Angeles to track a missing teen.
DARK WINDS SEASON 4: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: The headlights of a van go down a dark road. The van parks, and we see someone grabbing guns and bullets. Then the van gets moving again.
The Gist: A teenage girl and a young man are in a diner, and the man angrily says that he needs to find someone. Then, the white van rolls up to the diner, and a woman (Franka Potente) armed to the hilt gets out; she’s looking for the young man, and when he doesn’t give up so easily, the shooting starts. The diner owner and waitress are shot, but the young man and the girl escape.
“15 HOURS EARLIER.” Navajo Police lieutenant Joe Leaphorn (Zahn McClarnon) is by himself out in the wilderness, building a fire and spending some time in a sweat lodge. When he goes hunting for deer, he sees a buck look straight at him; that affects him so much that he takes the sight off his rifle in order to shoot the buck.
He’s been trying to figure things out since his wife Emma (Deanna Allison) left him to move to Los Angeles, which we see when he comes back to an empty house. At the same time, Bernadette Manuelito (Jessica Matten), who quit the Border Patrol, and Navajo Sgt. Jim Chee (Kiowa Gordon) are sleeping together, but that doesn’t stop Chee from trying to convince Bernadette to come back to work with the Navajo Police. She’s not sure.
Later that day, Leaphorn goes to visit her and bring her some of his kill, but he’s also there to tell her that he’s looking to retire, and he wants her to take over the squad. Even though she hasn’t been there for awhile, he still feels she has more of a feel about the people on the rez than Chee does, despite his fantastic skills as an investigator.
Chee and Leaphorn get a call about a teen named Billie Tsosie (Isabel DeRoy-Olson), who has run away from St. Catherine’s, a Catholic boarding school. After going to the school and hearing from the general store owner that saw them, they find out from the girl’s father that she’s probably with her cousin, a criminal named Albert Gorman (Avery Hale), likely headed to California.
After talking things over with Chee, though not mentioning Leaphorn’s retirement, Bernadette decides to come back to the Navajo Police, and she volunteers to go to St. Catherine’s, where she used to attend, to get Billie’s classmates to open up more.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? As with the first three seasons, Dark Winds reminds us a lot of Longmire; both McClarnon and A Martinez, who plays county sheriff Gordo Sena, worked on that series, too
Our Take: It certainly feels like this will be a season of change on Dark Winds, with Bern coming back to work and having to negotiate working with Chee while fostering a relationship with him, and keeping this promotion to lieutenant under wraps until Leaphorn makes it public. Leaphorn will likely spend the season trying to figure out if he really wants to leave the rez and if he has any sort of chance to get Emma back. Bern is putting her Border Patrol experience in the past. Chee will have to deal with being passed over. Even people like Gordo are dealing with some life changes, as we see when Leaphorn encounters Gordo and his wife Sena (Linda Hamilton), who is suffering from cognitive decline.
The three main characters will be dealing with all of this as they track Billie to Los Angeles. It’s a bit of a risk by showrunner John Wirth and his writing team to take the characters off the rez, but it’ll be interesting to see all of them dealing with the dynamics of L.A.’s gritty, 1970s era underbelly. All three of them aren’t naive, as they’ve all spent periods of their lives away from the rez, but seeing them run into issues that have less to do with Navajo mysticism and more to do with straightforward criminal activity. How that will tie into the bigger themes of the season is still to be determined, but we suspect they’ll tie in somehow.
Performance Worth Watching: As always, Zahn McClarnon is the show’s moral and emotional center as Joe Leaphorn. Even as he questions his future, as he’s doing here, there’s a calm about Leaphorn that’s fully due to McClarnon’s performance.
Sex And Skin: None.
Parting Shot: Leaphorn and Bernadette find the results of the shootout at the diner.
Sleeper Star: Franke Potente’s character, Irene Vaggan, is still a mystery in the first episode. Is she a bounty hunter? A killer for hire? Something else?
Most Pilot-y Line: The music playing while Leaphorn and Manuelito search the diner will end up getting tattooed on your brain because it’s so friggin’ creepy.
Our Call: STREAM IT. While the fourth season of Dark Winds is taking a chance by going off the rez, seeing Leaphorn, Chee and Manuelito facing big changes brings interesting context to what might be normally be considered a standard police thriller case.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
