Spoiler Alert Do not read if you haven’t watched “HózhóoNaasháa,”The Season 1 finale of “Dark Winds,”Watch streaming on AMC+
After a slow boil the first season, “Dark Winds” ends with a bang — quite literally. The finale wraps up the case of the armored truck robbery that underlaid the six episode first season of AMC’s neo-noir series, which took its plot from Tony Hillerman’s 1978 novel “Listening Woman.”The episode ends with Joe Leaphorn (Zahn Mclarnon), and Jim Chee, Navajo police officers, in a tense standoff in a cave in which the robbers had hidden their money and hostages. And after plenty of twists and turns — including the revelation that Joe’s FBI ally Witover (Noah Emmerich) was actually allied with the robbers the entire time — the stand-off concludes with Jim and Bernadette Manuelito (Jessica Matten) setting off explosives to bury the money and the bodies in the cave.
But while the show’s robbery plot wraps on a fiery note, the real key to the ending is the emotional arcs of Joe, Jim and Bernadette Manuelito (Jessica Matten), which are on full display in the episode. Bernadette and Jim had a brief romance that ended when Bernadette discovered Jim was an FBI agent. They then began to heal their differences by joining forces against Whitover during the stand-off. Joe — after a dramatic conversation with one of the robbers that ends with his suicide — is able to begin living with the pain of the loss of his son Joe Jr., burning his varsity jacket in a Navajo ceremony. And in the quiet final scene of the short but action-packed episode, Joe and Jim come to silently acknowledge how much their bond has come to mean to them in the short time they’ve known each other.
Chris Eyre and Graham Roland, series creator, spoke to us ahead of the finale. Variety about adapting Hillerman’s original books, where the show will go in its next season and why you can’t tell a Western story without Indigenous voices.
What were your biggest changes when adapting the Leaphorn/Chee novels?
Graham RolandThe books serve as a solid foundation for television plots, as you will see in the first series. Because we kept the books in the same time period they were written, the narratives performed well. The character work was what I concentrated on. Kind of “How do you take these characters and make them compelling enough to sustain a TV show for many seasons?” Out of that came the idea that Leaphorn had a deceased child, which was not a part of the books and also, in Tony’s books, I think Jim Chee had applied to the FBI but he was a Navajo tribal police officer. I took his name and made him an FBI Agent first. He was then allowed to enter the Navajo tribal Police Department and kept that secret from his fellow contemporaries. This made their stories a little more fleshy. You had a guy trying to investigate a case while also still processing his own child’s death and this guy who’s returning to the reservation, caught between two worlds. Now that I have this, I can kind of see the similarities between these characters. This is what makes for a great long-term television series.
The season is filled with nods and allusions to Westerns of every kind, including classic Westerns like Westerns. “Stagecoach.”What’s the relationship between the show & classic Westerns?
Chris Eyre You can’t have one without the other. You can’t have the Native American Buffalo society without the U.S. government. And you can’t have the Western both sides of the West. I know people do make Westerns without natives and I’m always like, “How can you do that?”You must have one of each. Zahn wearing the cowboy hat embodies the same thing, he’s an Indian cowboy in a certain way. We hearken to all these things that we recall from classic cinema, it’s just part of am inextricable marriage of two cultures that are colliding. And basically, you know, that’s what this world is about, there wouldn’t be the reservation without the over-culture. It creates richer conflicts.
When we talk about the last episode, it starts by revealing that Whitover had been lying to Joe & Jim about his motivations. How did you balance that twist to make it both surprising and also feel earned?
Roland:It was a difficult task. Noah Emmerich had been told about the role before he accepted it. “Hey, it doesn’t read this way in the pilot, but you end up being the big bad.” And his big concern right out of the gate, which was all of our concern, is you don’t have a lot of white characters in the show. How can you make his character which is antagonism’s force, look more real? “Oh, he’s the bad guy.”It was a delicate and beautiful dance. We owe it to the actor for making it so. Chee was one of the things we tried to do. That wasn’t manufactured. While he was trying to use him, if it had all gone his way, I believe he would have brought Chee along with him to Washington and fulfilled all of the promises he made. He truly loved the kid and wanted the best. But at the end of the day, that didn’t trump his own motivations
Was the final episode shot in a cave or on a soundstage?
Eyre:A practical cave entrance was created. We then shot some more complex stuff in the cave that we had created.
Roland:That you even asked me that question is amazing. That it doesn’t look totally fake, that makes me feel very good.
The episode’s climax is the scene in which Joe meets the robber at the shed. This leads to the robber suicide. How did that feel like a natural ending to Joe’s story?
Eyre: For me, when I think of Joe Leaphorn, he’s living in these two worlds, and he’s law enforcement, but he aches for this guy who’s so damaged that he does the act that he does, which is horrible. Indian country, there’s some high suicide rates. Leaphorn tells Leaphorn not to go to the door and he then puts his head down. All he can do is pray. Then it becomes this beautiful prayer, as the writers did. It transformed it into something greater. It’s kind of cathartic for me.
Roland:The prayer went through several iterations as a piece of writing. I think I’m right about that, Chris, in the sense that there was the first version that came out. It is clear that those writers put a lot of effort into that scene. It took a lot of teamwork to achieve that result. It was a team effort to not only get it right, but also to make it authentic.
Eyre: To me, it shows everything we’re talking about, Leaphorn walking between these worlds and he sees the duality of his job and he puts it into this prayer.
How much consultation did the Navajo Community provide on your show?
Eyre:For language and culture, we had Navajo experts on set. Then we had the added benefit of having Navajo elders for background and people such as Betty [Ann Tsosie] who plays the grandmother, and Harrison Lowe, who’s in the beginning of the show. We were able to use the help of fluent Navajo speakers. Sometimes, the problem is that dialects can be very different. Language can also become more slang over time as it evolves through generations. So there’s traditional Navajo, and there’s a looser Navajo. And there was a lot of different influences, but we’re lucky to have all those people as contributors that helped us. And the Navajo people that I’ve talked to love the series. There’s always room for us to improve every season, which we’ll do.
Roland: We also had Navajo writers in our writers room, which was very helpful because they not only could they answer a lot of our questions, but if they didn’t know they had a community of people that they could go to to ask so at every point in the process.
What do you think it is about the journey that Joe went on that he was able to begin the process of moving on from his son’s death?
Roland: I don’t want this to come across as he’s found Chee, so he’s found a replacement for his son. But I think Chee filled a big hole in his life, so that’s one part of him being able to move on. It is also about realizing that the grief he was holding onto was hurting him as well as the people he loved. It was for his sake as well as for his wife and those who loved him.
Eyre: I don’t think he’s moved on. I think that he’s learned to live with it. And the poetry of it is that he gives up this jacket finally, that he’s taken one step. And it’s very poetic that, you know, we opened with the jacket in the first episode, and at the end, he’s able to do what he’s supposed to do. One episode he even said “It’s a good idea to have a jacket.” “She’s not supposed to be wearing that jacket” when he’s talking about Anna. It is just emblematic of letting go and he just decides to burn it like he’s supposed to or bury it culturally. And he does what he’s supposed to do finally, after the season and arcs, and it’s just the poetic act of believing he is going to move forward.
Roland: I think that’s a very interesting point, Chris brought up. Most Americans and most people in the audience believe that when someone dies, you want to keep those things that are close to your heart. However, the Navajo culture has a different view. It was a way to let go of grief and to get rid the possessions of the one you have lost. There’s something really beautiful about that.
Jim almost tells Joe some things in the last scene, and Joe just responds. “I know.”The episode then cuts to credits. You wanted to end the season with this conversation hanging on.
Roland: So what happened was the the writers had written the first draft of the finale, and I read it for the first time and liked it, but it didn’t have a scene that ended with the two leads. Because I felt it was lacking this, I went back and pitched that scene. It was necessary to resolve the emotional journey they had gone through. But what about this particular line? it really wasn’t meant to be some sort of mystery. It was intended to be an emotional thing. Joe and Jim were both very slow to express themselves. Jim would have offered his apology if he had continued to speak, apologizing for lying about everything that had happened. Joe, however, seems to have said it. “I know”His way of saying, “Let him off the hook” was his way to say, “It’s not necessary. We did this together, we’re in this together. And you don’t have anything to apologize to me for.”
In general, how did you think about developing their relationship together since it’s really the core of the show. What was your approach to developing that chemistry from both a writing and directorial perspective?
Roland:It was fortunate that Kiowa Zahn and Zahn knew each other before the show and had previously worked together. So we had that going for us, the chemistry wasn’t necessarily something that needed to fake because they already had it as two working actors and two people. It was an important part of the show, and it was something that we all hoped would be on screen. We never intended this to be a buddy cop and I don’t think this is a buddy cop show, but when we started to get some of those dailies back of their first scenes together, I remember thinking “Wow, this is a whole layer of the show that I hadn’t been looking for.”The scene was set up and the actor joined it, and it just jumped off the screen. It was difficult for me to find that balance between the father and son dynamic, and to be able to work with cops on a murder investigation together, while still keeping their points about their own culture, their history, and their community.
The second season of the series is already confirmed. Are you going to tackle a book? Are you a fan of a particular book?
Roland: We do. We spoke a lot about the second series, even though we were only halfway through the first. And what book would we tackle next. We’ve already chosen one. I don’t know if I’m allowed to say what book it is. I don’t want to step on the new showrunner’s toes. But that’s kind of our model, one book a season.
This interview has been edited.