While Joe gets unwanted attention from a secret admirer, Chee and Bern have a falling out.
It’s a tense moment in “Ahááldláádígíí (That Which Has Been Torn Apart)” — Episode 3, Season 4 of Dark Winds — as the German assassin Irene Vaggan (Franka Pontente, pictured above) glides stealthily through the home of Lt. Joe Leaphorn (Zahn McClarnon) just as Joe in turn is out in the field looking for her.
First she checks out Joe’s refrigerator — where, of course, she finds a case of RC Cola, Joe’s beverage of choice. (Half-quart bottles, no less!) Then she moves over to Joe’s closet, to find some of his uniforms hanging there. She fingers one of them gently, and then she … then she … well, then she starts to sniff it.
Say what?
I guess we’re done with subtle hints that Vaggan is crushing on Joe and moving into a spot located somewhere between erotic obsession and first-degree kinkiness. At first, I figured there had to be some other explanation for her enjoying the scent — like maybe Joe’s preference for Old Spice aftershave. (We briefly spot a bottle in Joe’s medicine cabinet a little while later.) But no: Flash-forward to the episode’s final scene, and we see Vaggan getting the drop on Joe as he emerges half-clothed from his sweat lodge. Gun in hand, she boldly approaches Joe, strokes his bare chest — and plants a great big sloppy kiss on his mouth.
Just for a second or two, I thought Joe might respond in kind. But he remains immune to her, ahem, charms, probably because he’s still missing his runaway wife, Emma (Deanna Allison, still missing in action). Even so, Vaggan appears undeterred. As she confidently walks away, she promises that they’ll meet again and pick up where they left off. Unless she has to kill him.
To back up a bit: Remember last week when Joe, Bern (Jessica Matten), and Chee (Kiowa Gordon) tracked the seriously wounded Albert Gorman back to the cabin of Billie’s uncle, only to see him dead and covered with a ceremonial blanket inside? And Chee recklessly entered the hogan through a hole that Billie’s uncle had chopped in the north wall so that any malevolent spirits left behind by the deceased could vamoose? (My bad: I wrongly surmised that Vaggan had chopped the hole to get a look at the body; this week, we see she actually had entered through the front door.)
Well, this triggered a terrible flashback for Chee, apparently because the blanket-draped corpse reminded him of how, as a youngster, he discovered his mother’s dead body. (At least I think it was his mom.) Worse, the evil spirits left behind by Albert seem to have found a new home in Chee and started causing the poor guy to suffer severe nosebleeds.
As “Ahááldláádígíí (That Which Has Been Torn Apart)” begins, FBI agents join Joe, Chee, and Bern — aka The Dynamic Trio — while they inspect the scene of the crime. They find Billie’s uncle dead in a nearby cave — laid out almost, not quite, in traditional Navajo fashion. Joe spots a few giveaway mistakes — for example, the corpse’s shoes have not been placed on the wrong feet — to suggest the killer, for some odd reason, meant well. (Yes, Vaggan admits much later while she’s coming on to Joe, that was indeed her intention.) Arguably more important, he notes that the uncle has the telltale bullet hole left by a long-range rifle, in addition to handgun wounds.
One thing leads to another, and The Dynamic Trio deduce that the killer they’re seeking was after Albert’s brother, Leroy, not Albert himself, and that Leroy is already on his way back to Los Angeles. Unfortunately, as the three cops explain to Billie, they have no jurisdiction in L.A. Even more unfortunately, while Vaggan wasn’t busy checking out the RC Cola and sniffing uniforms at Joe’s place, she found (and swiped) a photo of Joe and Emma together, and discovered letters from Emma bearing her current return address. In Los Angeles.
Meanwhile, Chee and Bern have a major falling out when she tells him that Joe wants her, not him, to take over after Joe retires. He does not take this bad news well. First, he gets another nosebleed, and then he digs a bloody tooth out of his mouth. Evil spirits at work? Or signs of fury fueled by a sense of betrayal?
In any event, Chee hightails it over to Joe’s place, just as Joe is preparing to ride off to his sweat lodge again. At first, Joe thinks Chee will join him on the ride there — but, no, that’s not going to happen. “I would have done anything for you,” Chee says, seriously hurt that Joe himself didn’t break the bad news to him. (Just in case there was any lingering doubt: Yes, Chee knows that Joe is responsible for the death of B.J. Vines, but he’s kept quiet about it.) And then the conversation turns really nasty.
“No matter how many times you ride out to the desert,” Chee says, “you can’t sweat away who you are — a liar to your partner, everyone you work with, even your wife.” That last bit hits hard, but it’s hard for Joe to argue the point. Stung and ashamed, Joe rides away to the sweat lodge. And that’s where he has his first face-to-face with Vaggan.
Here are my other takeaways from “Ahááldláádígíí (That Which Has Been Torn Apart).”
Another runaway
Billie agrees to stay with Bern at the latter’s trailer for a while, so she’ll be safe from whoever killed Albert and her uncle. But when Bern admits that Billie may have to return to St. Catherine’s School, the girl runs away and buys a bus ticket to where she hopes to reunite with her only living relative, her cousin Leroy. In Los Angeles.
A nice touch
While trying to coax Billie back to St. Catherine’s, Billie says that, back when she was a frequent runaway during her student days there, she climbed up a flagpole after one of her forcible returns and refused to climb down. Billie is unabashedly impressed: “You’re the one!” Evidently, that incident is still the stuff of legend back at the school.
Another nice touch
How does Joe realize that someone’s been sniffing — er, I mean, rummaging — around his house? It takes him a few seconds, but after he takes a long swig from an ice-cold bottle of RC Cola, he notices that someone has moved his case of the soft drink in the fridge. Obviously, you mess with this dude’s RC at your own peril.
California, here they come
Vaggan repeatedly warns Joe to turn the murder investigation over to the FBI, so she won’t have to remove him from the equation. Naturally, he refuses. Just as naturally, the table is set for the Joe, Bern, and Chee to forget about jurisdiction — and their personal problems — and follow the trail to L.A.
Going Native?
Last week, Vaggan listened to the “Pilgrims’ Chorus” from the third act of Richard Wagner’s Tannhäuser while patching up her van. As we noted, Hitler was a big fan of Wagner. This week, Vaggan indicates that she knows a lot — not everything, but a lot — about Native culture, presumably because she has read books dealing with the subject. Like, perhaps, the western novels of German author Karl May. I don’t tell you else was a fan of Karl May’s westerns, do I?
