‘Dark Winds’ Season 2 Is a Powerful Indictment of American Racism
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Early in the new season of Dark Winds, a wealthy woman hires Jim Chee to help recover a lockbox that was stolen from her home. A skeptical Chee says that the job sounds simple, “Except nothing ever is.”
You definitely cannot call Dark Winds Season Two simple. It features a pair of mysteries that inevitably connect in complicated ways that can at times require intense concentration to follow. Just as importantly, the series is even more ambitious in its depiction of life, death, and policing on a Navajo reservation in the early Seventies.
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The series has been adapted from Tony Hillerman’s bestselling mystery novel series featuring Chee (played here by Kiowa Gordon) and Joe Leaphorn (Zahn McClarnon). This season’s based on People of Darkness, from the early period when the books featured only one of Leaphorn or Chee. In this case, new showrunner John Wirth has modified the story so it spotlights both men, but particularly Leaphorn. While Chee is doing private eye work for Rosemary Vines (Jeri Ryan, in classic femme fatale mode), Joe is still in uniform, working alongside fellow deputy Bernie Manuelito (Jessica Matten) to find the mysterious blond man (Nicholas Logan) who has been shooting, stabbing, and bombing people in and around the reservation.
While these parallel investigations are happening, Wirth and the show’s other writers (many of them Indigenous) continue to pull back to deal with other sociological and systemic issues affecting Native American people at this moment in history. In the first season, we found out that Joe’s wife, Emma (Deanna Allison), was working to prevent local women from being involuntarily sterilized by local doctors, a byproduct of the Family Planning Services and Population Research Act of 1970. This moves to the forefront of Season Two. An L.A. Times reporter arrives to write a story on this barbaric practice, while teen mom Sally Growing Thunder (Elva Guerra) regrets having brought an unwanted pregnancy to term, even as Joe and Emma help her care for the baby. There’s also material about local young men being drafted to fight in Vietnam on behalf of a country that treats them as second-class citizens, Joe’s shaky relationship with his retired cop father Henry (Joseph Runningfox), Bernie butting up against the glass ceiling of being a cop on the reservation, white appropriation of Navajo rituals, and more.
It’s a lot to squeeze into six episodes, especially once one of our heroes discovers a deeply personal connection to one of the cases. But Wirth and company largely make it work. There are some confusing bits in the two mysteries, but since the Chee plot — which also brings back John Henry Diehl as Rosemary’s wealthy and powerful husband, B.J. — is going for a film noir vibe, that’s par for the course. What matters is how the characters — and Joe Leaphorn in particular — feel about everything that’s happening, and that material lands beautifully.
It cannot be overstated how great Zahn McClarnon is in this role. He is whatever a given moment needs: charismatic, dangerous, vulnerable, stoic, even funny. One of the episodes is largely taken up by a badly injured Joe marching a suspect across the harsh, cold desert terrain in search of rescue. It’s the kind of extended sequence that wouldn’t work at all if the star didn’t have the enormous level of screen presence that McClarnon offers. And there’s another moment at the end of the second episode, where a development in the case turns Joe’s entire world upside down, and McClarnon sells every bit of what could seem like a dumb contrivance in even slightly lesser hands.
(Gordon, Allison, and Matten are also excellent. Even though the series is primarily a Leaphorn/Chee two-hander, the nature of this season essentially turns Manuelito into the second lead, and she more than justifies the extra screen time.)
The desert march episode is emblematic of how Season Two takes even greater advantage of the show’s harsh but beautiful Southwestern setting. The rez is so large that it seems absurd to ask Joe and his colleagues (including A Martinez as local sheriff Gordo Sena) to cover all this territory. At one point, Manuelito and Leaphorn have a suspect cornered and are told that backup is three hours away. And even though Joe is the main character and unlikely to actually die while wandering on foot through the desert, it never feels outside the realm of possibility that he won’t be found in time to avoid dying of exposure.
The series also continues to lean just enough on the period details without seeming too cute about them. There’s a running gag, for instance, about Leaphorn and Manuelito’s disdain for Chee’s new polyester leisure suit. And there’s still a strong balance between how characters interact with the physical world and the spiritual one. One episode has people gathering at the police station to watch the Apollo 15 astronauts take their lunar rover for a spin, with the locals marveling at the idea of driving a car on the moon. But there are also sacred rituals aplenty, along with bogus ones that the People of Darkness cult have attempted to co-opt.
There’s an ongoing debate among the characters about “white justice” versus “Indian justice,” and the frustration of not being able to enforce both equally. When Joe suggests to his father that times have changed, Henry replies, “Times have. But things haven’t.” It’s good to know that things haven’t changed much for this impeccably crafted, often thrilling, deeply satisfying crime drama. Dark Winds has barely scratched the surface of Hillerman’s bibliography; here’s hoping they get to adapt many more books before it’s done.
The first episode of Dark Winds Season Two is streaming now on AMC+ and premieres July 30 on the AMC cable channel. Additional episodes will release weekly, Thursdays for AMC+, Sundays for AMC. I’ve seen the whole six-episode season.
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