Dark Winds Recap: Half-Truths

The walls — meaning the FBI — are closing in on Joe. A couple of episodes ago, I mentioned that I was watching closely for Emma’s character development this season since she has felt underwritten in the past. This week, Joe’s choice to leave Vines in the desert starts forcing her to action. Besides Emma, the only other person who knows for sure that Joe is responsible for Vines’s disappearance is Gordo, who insists that he doesn’t know that, and neither does Joe. Now I’m wondering whether Gordo was kept in the show to make things more difficult for Joe — though his loyalty seems well-established, the more people know the truth about that night, the worse things look for our lieutenant.

Knowing the truth puts Emma in an impossible position. After Joe translates for Washington in an interrogation with a sheepherder whose land borders the ravine where Vines’s body was found, Washington finally makes her suspicions plain. The sheepherder tells her that he saw a GMC truck in the area on the night Vines disappeared, though it was too dark to see the license plate or get a look at the driver. Washington points out that while there are more than 40 GMC trucks registered on the reservation, only one of them belongs to a man whose son was killed by Vines. Joe preemptively defends himself: he was at home with his wife on the night Vines went missing. But when Washington asks whether Emma would corroborate that statement, he can’t answer for sure.

When he gets home, Emma is waiting for him to tell her the whole truth of what happened that night. We have interpreted Joe’s decision to take revenge on Vines in a hundred different ways, but Emma throws a harsh, bright light on the whole thing. “The land didn’t kill him,” she tells Joe simply. “You did.” I don’t think Emma will turn on Joe, but by the way she’s reacting, I don’t think she’ll just ignore it and move on, either. Thinking through Emma’s options, I remembered Sally — she was important to Emma throughout the first two seasons, but so far she hasn’t been back. What would happen if Emma decided to leave Joe for however long, however permanently? By giving her a dilemma that propels her to action, the show is opening a door for Emma to make a choice with enduring consequence, perhaps even surprising herself, her husband, or the audience. I hope the writers continue to see her character through that way.

On a smaller scale, Bern is put in a similar situation by the love triangle between her, Chee, and Muños, who she kisses after getting dropped off at home from the border (romantic). Later that same morning, Chee calls to let her know about the picture they found at the farm. As it turns out, it’s her official Border Patrol ID photo, which would only be available to someone inside the Border Patrol office, meaning at least one of her coworkers is in cahoots with Spenser. It would be twisty and fun if the traitor turned out to be Muños, but this thing reeks of Ed Henry. Bern knows that, and Eleanda — the only person Bern can fully trust — knows it, too. She advises Bern to proceed with caution: They won’t have more than one chance to take Ed Henry down, so if they tried, it’d have to be perfect.

Knowing that Bern is at least indirectly in danger lights a fire under Chee’s ass to make the eight-hour drive from the Navajo Nation to Hachita in just six hours. When he gets there, he catches her up on what they’ve found about AGS Industries, which owns both the farm — really a drug house — and Spenser Oil. They conclude that Spenser is trafficking drugs, not women, as Bern had initially suspected. In a moment so heavy with exposition it wouldn’t have made it past Bern’s shift at the weigh station, they speculate that Spenser is probably filling his tankers with cocaine and moving them through the border to then distribute out of the reservation.

Mercifully, Bern and Chee also talk about things that don’t have to do with the investigation, like their abandoned love story. Just seeing the way Muños looks at Bern puts Chee in an immediate funk. He wants to leave, but Bern convinces him to spend the night on her couch. Unable to sleep, Chee comes out with what he’s really wanted to say since he arrived in Hachita: He wants her to come home with him. But Bern is building a new life for herself, which might just include Muños, to whose house she drives after Chee leaves. Bern and Chee’s love story is tragic because their lives mirror each other — Chee had to go home to find himself while Bern had to leave. Still, there is something about their emotional attachment that feels thin, too Hollywood, as if the show felt a commercial need to include at least one romantic plot. Their feelings toward each other aren’t specific enough to transcend the circumstantial aspect of their relationship; my hope is that they will deepen with Muños as an added obstacle and increased stakes.

Feelings aside, Bern and Chee have a lot of work to do. If they can prove the connection between Halsey and Spenser, they would have enough to indict them both; besides having a motive for Halsey to have killed Ernesto Cata, he might have worried that Ernesto, having figured out what the farm was up to, would talk. That’s Joe’s hypothesis, at least. But Halsey, while a first-rate scumbag, is pretty convincing when he tells Joe he had nothing to do with Ernesto’s murder.

Joe manages to bring Halsey in for interrogation after Suzanne, who lived because Joe decided to stay with her, tells him about a motel where they often stayed. Though Halsey might have thought he covered his tracks when, at the beginning of the episode, he blew up the red truck, he didn’t know about Joe’s superior tracking skills and sealed his own fate when he left the tire marks of his getaway car behind. Halsey has time to make one phone call before Joe catches up with him, and he calls Budge, who can only wish him luck — to escape the Navajo Tribal Police or Spenser himself. Either way, it doesn’t look great for him.

At the Kayenta Police Station’s interrogation room, after being pressed by Joe and Gordo, Halsey says he’s willing to talk about Spenser in exchange for immunity from drug charges. Gordo takes him up on it, though Joe is still convinced that it was Halsey who killed Ernesto and struck Shorty Bowlegs in the head back in the cabin. But he knows, against reason, that something more insidious is at play. In her hospital room, Suzanne told him more than just where Halsey went. She described a vision she had while unconscious of getting snatched in the desert by a figure that sounds a lot like Ye’iitsoh. As she spoke, the lights above her head flickered ominously.

They flicker similarly at the end of the episode, back at the station, when Joe returns at night after his conversation with Emma. He sends the deputy who’d been standing watch home, and as Halsey complains that he’s hungry, the lights go out. Joe goes outside into the windy night — another sign that Ye’iitsoh might be near — to check the fuse box. He has to run back in when he hears Halsey screaming from his cell. Inside, Halsey is bleeding so profusely that Joe slips in a puddle of his blood. His head is cut nearly clean off — it’s almost as if he’s been half-eaten.

We’re halfway through the season, so let us zoom out to the big picture. Bern’s investigation of the Spenser Ranch and the NTP’s investigation into Ernesto’s death have intersected definitively, but we still don’t know where George Bowlegs is or why he might have run from speaking with Joe and Chee. The presence of the arrowhead in Ernesto’s mouth, coupled with the vision Joe had of coughing up a bloody arrowhead last week, is enough to make us think that Ernesto might have been killed Ye’iitsoh; but if that’s true, why is George so afraid to speak with Joe? And what about Teddi Isaacs, who seemed disproportionately rattled by the news of Ernesto’s death, and who has been around the reservation long enough to potentially have also encountered the figure? If Ye’iitsoh is behind the murders, then from Halsey’s death this week and Suzanne’s description of her vision, we know it doesn’t only target Diné. Could Spenser be involved with forces much bigger and more mysterious than his own?