A misunderstanding leads to a battle with serious consequences in the second-to-last Season One episode.
Warning: This is an overview of Episode 109 of 1883, so there will be scads of spoilers here. We strongly recommend that you not read this if you have not yet watched the episode on Paramount+.
Shea, Thomas and James try to avoid a calamity, Cookie gives some very bad advice, and Elsa takes one for the team. What are we to make of this? Here are our five takeaways from “Racing Clouds,” Episode 109 of 1883.
Takeaway No. 1
You knew what was coming as soon as she put on that dress, right?
Takeaway No. 2
Things seemed bad enough when Josef (Marc Rissmann) was bitten by a rattlesnake and his wife Risa (Anna Fiamora) was thrown from her horse, prompting consideration of a Plan B that would call for detouring to a nearby fort where they could get medical attention. But then the party happened across a Lakota encampment where women and children had been slaughtered, and horses obviously stolen, while the men were out hunting. It took Shea (Sam Elliott) only a little while (though longer than he would have liked) to recognize that if they didn’t track down the parties responsible for this butchery, the Lakota — and every other tribe whose land they’d be passing through in the weeks and months ahead — would blame them for the massacre. James (Tim McGraw) may be nominally the leader of the group now, but he agreed with Shea’s assessment — indicating that even the strong-willed Confederate vet acknowledges the grizzled Pinkerton agent has more experience in dealing with such situations.
Takeaway No. 3
So Shea, James and Thomas (LaMonica Garrett) left Wade (James Landry Hébert) and Colton (Noah Le Gros) behind to defend the rest of the party while they rode out to execute some rough justice — as a kinda-sorta good will gesture toward the Lakota — and told everyone to wait in place until they got back. It didn’t take long for the three men to catch up with the self-appointed “deputies” who had killed the women and children. Their leader made a serious error in judgment by insulting Shea (“You’re lucky to still be sitting on a horse, old man! Don’t let your mouth start a fight that your pistol can’t finish!”), and didn’t live long enough to regret his mistake. And James demonstrated his keen prowess as a tactician while the good guys disposed of all the other bad guys. Unfortunately, back at the temporarily halted wagon train, Cookie (James Jordan) convinced a sizeable number of the immigrants to ignore any orders to stay put, and join him in vamoosing past the site of the slaughter and off to the nearby fort. That is, he did everything short of painting on the side of his chuck wagon “We Killed Your Women And Children!” to look guilty in the eyes of the returning Lakota men. Leaving us to marvel at how a character who initially appeared designed to provide little more than foul-mouthed comic relief could trigger such monumental disaster.
Takeaway No. 4
Long before Margaret (Faith Hill) decided that perhaps she and her children should also join the race to the fort, she worried that Elsa (Isabel May) might draw undue attention from any hormonally inflamed soldiers stationed there, and demanded that her daughter doff the cowboy/Comanche attire she’d been wearing, and put on a respectable dress. Yes, the same dress we saw Elsa wearing in the flash-forward that kicked off Episode 101 — and, for that matter, the entire series. One can only wonder if the sight of Elsa in cowboy/Comanche garb might have given the Lakota warriors pause before they attacked the wagon train. (And maybe, looking back, Margaret might have the same second thoughts sooner or later?) But no: The vengeful Lakota, wrongly assuming Elsa and all the other wagon train passengers had killed their loved ones, commenced their assault — with Cookie, not surprisingly, first on their hit list. (Diehard western fans doubtless were delighted to hear someone actually yell: “Circle the wagons!”) The body count might have been much higher had Elsa not demonstrated courage under fire, even with an arrow in her gut, and convinced the Lakota leader (Tokala Black Elk) that (a) she and her companions had not attacked their encampment, (b) her father was on a search-and-destroy mission to kill the killers, and (c) she could be trusted because she was the bride of a Comanche warrior. The Lakota leader, it should be noted, was impressed.
Takeaway No. 5
Alas, even though Elsa managed to survive being shot with an arrow, and then having it removed, James and Margaret — and, eventually, Elsa herself — realized that the infection soon would kill her. (So how has Elsa been able to narrate all this time? Hey, how was William Holden’s character able to narrate Sunset Boulevard while his dead body was floating around in a swimming pool?) James solemnly vowed to Margaret that their daughter’s body would not be forgotten in some wilderness grave, and that they would settle wherever they laid her to rest. (Which may explain why, despite all the talk about Oregon, the Dutton Family wound up in Montana.) Overall, “Racing Clouds” was a pretty grim episode — did we mention that Colton had to put a woman out of her misery after she was scalped? — but there was one dialogue exchange that, though deadly serious, did make us smile, if only briefly.
Lakota Leader: “Your daughter’s The Yellow Hair?”
James: “Yeah.”
Lakota Leader: “You act like Comanche, too.”
James: “I’m from Tennessee.”
Lakota Leader: “I don’t know Tennessee.”
James: “It ain’t worth knowing anymore.”
Sorry, Tennesseans — this was good for a much-needed laugh.
