Dark Winds season 4 finale recap
One of the many wonderful things about AMC’s Dark Winds is how it defies the traditional habit of procedurals that work harder to satisfy their audience than they do to stay true to their characters. So many productions would have made this season about reuniting Joe and Emma Leaphorn. Not only does Dark Winds leave them hundreds of miles apart at the end of this moving episode, but they also conclude on a series of emotional and practical cliff-hangers. Joe vacillates about retiring, especially with Emma making it clear that she doesn’t really want him to, and Jim considers taking a job in Los Angeles as Agent Cheeseburger. Both decisions are put on hold with a tragic phone call that will carry us into a fifth season that can’t come soon enough.
Another distinguishing characteristic of Dark Winds is how respectfully it portrays Navajo culture. One of the season’s best moments comes when so many of the characters we love show up for Jim Chee, who thinks no one will be there for his ceremony. When the cars come over the horizon, there’s a smile on Bern’s face and a catch in Jim’s throat that are just two of the nuanced details that elevate this show. The people who have come to support Jim prepare for what will come after the ceremony as he goes into the structure in which it will take place, and, importantly, we don’t follow. We stay outside, which is such a beautiful choice. We have seen what matters: what this means to Jim and the people who support him, even an old teacher who saw something in him at a young age and the G-man who gave him that fast-food nickname.
Of course, all of this comes after the true climax of the season, during the first half-hour of this long episode. It’s here where Zahn McClarnon gets to do some of the best work of his career, the kind of performance that would net him an Emmy nod in a just world. He’s forced to play a range of emotions from anger to courage to vulnerability to, ultimately, triumph. And the show’s themes surface through this section and McClarnon’s work, including how we can’t force family and we can’t appropriate culture. It’s a battle between two people who would do anything to have a traditional family again, but it’s a contrast between a villain who tries to force into reality a life that she hasn’t earned and a hero who desperately wants to regain something he’s lost.
The showdown reveals the increasing depth of Irene Vaggan’s mental illness. She has kidnapped Joe and Billie with the demented belief that she can force them to be a family. Using her longtime obsession with Indigenous culture, she forces Joe and Billie to behave like her husband and daughter. She gases them to move them from sleep to a family dinner she imagines will somehow be a happy one.
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