With his suspect in custody, Leaphorn races against the clock to get a confession.
Warning: This is an overview of Episode 205 of Dark Winds, 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 AMC or AMC+.
Lt. Joe Leaphorn (Zahn McClarnon) uses any means necessary to link his prisoner to the drill site explosion. Sgt. Bernadette “Bernie” Manuelito (Jessica Matten) learns her application for the Border Control has been accepted. Jim Chee (Kiowa Gordon) follows Rosemary Vines to a People of Darkness gathering. What are we to make of this? Here are our five takeaways from “Black Hole Sun,” Episode 205 of Dark Winds.
Takeaway No. 1
Things got awfully tense as the badly battered but relentlessly obsessed Joe Leaphorn continued to question the similarly banged-up but malevolently evasive Colton Wolf (Nicholas Logan) in the police station interrogation room. (At one point, it looked like Joe would literally scalp the SOB — and let’s face it, most of us would have enjoyed seeing that.) Joe knew his time was limited, since Sheriff Gordo (A Martinez) was growing increasingly impatient to claim custody of the prisoner and charge him with at least three murders. (“We got enough evidence to bury him in the Grand Canyon!”) And while Gordo reluctantly agreed to give Joe a few more hours to tie up loose ends, the sheriff remained skeptical of the lieutenant’s efforts to uncover the reason for Wolf’s killing spree: “Monsters,” Gordo snapped, “don’t need reasons.” Unfortunately, Gordo wound up regretting what he wished for: The killer managed to escape from the sheriff’s custody — seriously injuring Gordo in the process — more or less pushing Joe back to Square One in the episode’s final moments.
Takeaway No. 2
So just what are Wolf’s motives? We got some background info in noir-flavored flashbacks revealing that, as a youngster, he came home one day to find his obviously disturbed mom had fatally shot his father and sister. We were teased with the hint that young Colton took the gun away from his mother and killed her. But that didn’t explain why, as an adult, the Blond Assassin had been hiring private investigators to track down his estranged mom. One of those PI’s, a 1970s cool Black cat named Deloyd Webster (Tank Jones), agreed to help Joe by falsely claiming he had located Colton’s long-missing parent. But even that didn’t help Joe uncover what he was most intent on discovering: Why did Colton cause the Drumco drill site explosion years earlier that claimed Joe’s son as one of six victims? Unfortunately, Colton — or whatever his real name is — managed to deduce that Joe’s son died in the blast. Even more unfortunately, Colton used that info to cruelly taunt Joe. Hence, the near-scalping.
Takeaway No. 3
And speaking of private eyes: Chee kept tabs on Rosemary Vines (Jeri Ryan), as he was hired to do by her husband B.J. Vines (John Henry Diehl), and wound up following her to a remote moonlit gathering of the People of Darkness cult presided over by B.J. The meeting was a kinda-sorta celebration of the eclipse that occurred that day, an event B.J. described as a demonstration the power of darkness over light (or something like that). But Chee knew better: The event merely served as yet another reason for trendy white folks to “borrow” Indigenous customs and consume massive amounts of peyote. The last time we saw Chee in this episode, he was hiding from People of Darkness thugs intent on capturing — and maybe killing — him.
Takeaway No. 4
Back home with his wife Emma (Deanna Allison), Joe told her he wanted to put their son’s death behind them by bringing Joe Jr.’s killer to justice. But Emma, while sympathetic and for the most part encouraging, expressed doubt that they would ever be able to fully recover from their loss. In fact, she admitted to Joe something some of us have long suspected — that she invited young Sally Growing Thunder (Elva Guerra) and her baby into their home mainly because she wanted to once again feel the joy of having an infant around them. Not for the first time, it was implied that Emma is no longer able to have children herself. Which might explain why, a few scenes later, she agreed to have Mary Landon (Jacqueline Byers), the L.A. Times reporter looking into forced sterilizations of Native women, join a meeting in the Leaphorn living room for other Navajo women who have been affected by twisted interpretations of the Family Planning Services Act.
Takeaway No. 5
Next week’s episode will be the Season 2 finale for Dark Winds, and like Joe Leaphorn, the show’s writers have only a limited amount of time to tie up their own loose ends. Like, will Sgt. Bernadette “Bernie” Manuelito accept the Border Patrol job she’s been offered? Will she tell Chee (or anyone else) more about her years-ago date with Elvis Presley while she was stationed in Germany during her military servicey? Will she regret telling Dean (Zakota Shade) to not dodge the Vietnam War era draft? (Remember: The series is set in 1971.) And what about Colton? What is the guy’s real name? Why is he searching for a mother who may be dead? What was his motive for showing up on that fateful day at the drill site under the assumed name of a dead man? Does he have a connection to B.J.? If so, what is it? And when he claimed his name was Alfred Neuman, was he trying to pose as this guy?
