Dark Winds Cliffhanger in Season 4, Episode 5

[This story contains spoilers for Dark Winds through season four, episode five, “Atída’ahiilyaagíí (Those Who Harmed One Another).”]

One thing Dark Winds excels at is the art of the cliffhanger.

Last week’s episode was true to form: Joe Leaphorn (Zahn McClarnon) was staking out a party where Chee (Kiowa Gordon) was undercover looking for Leroy, the cousin of the runaway teenager Billie (Isabel DeRoy-Olson), whom the Navajo Tribal Police have been trying to protect all season. He saw something strange in a nearby warehouse, and when he went to investigate, he was jumped by two men, leaving his safety in doubt.

Fortunately for Leaphorn, at the beginning of episode five, which aired Sunday, it is revealed that the people who knocked him out were actually government agents on a stakeout of their own. FBI agents that Chee has worked with before, to be exact.

After questioning him — with some kicks to the ribs to jog his memory — they ascertain that Leaphorn is a police officer and let him go. His first stop is the hospital, where his estranged wife, Emma (Deanna Allison), provides treatment.

That brings us to another thing that Dark Winds does well, which is providing a balance between the high-suspense world of police work and the characters’ heartfelt emotional journeys. After leaving Joe at the end of season three and decamping to L.A., Emma was largely offscreen for the first half of this season. “Having her come in toward the middle of the season really shows that absence,” Allison notes in a Zoom interview with THR. “That silence with her, with her presence not being there. I liked that we showed that part of it, with her being gone and his life vacant.”

When Joe arrives in L.A. and calls her in episode four, “It’s been some time since they spoke. There was one other episode where Emma’s friend Helen is like, ‘You should call her,’ because he straight up ghosted her,” Allison says with a laugh. “But at the same time, they’re going through such grief and emotional poverty because she had to lie for him [and break] their code that they both have given to their profession and to each other.”

Allison is referring to Emma’s interview in season three with FBI agent Sylvia Washington, which retriggered all the heartache she experienced after the death of their son, Joe Jr. Emma’s decision to go to L.A. was essential for her own well-being and ability to live according to her values, Allison adds.

“This is just a time to separate that and reconstruct a whole new balance, a new normal,” she says. “She’s back in the clinic. One thing about Navajo people, one of our duties is to be of service to the community. … She’s happy to be back at work, she’s happy to be needed, and there are still women and children and elderly, the underserved, and [helping them] brings her joy and happiness in her work, her purpose. So Joe finds her in the middle of that. She’s finding her new normal, she’s finding her purpose.”

After the couple have a brief lunch together in episode four, Joe again comes to see Emma in this week’s episode. This time, he’s seeking treatment for the injuries inflicted by the FBI agents. But when she advises him to get an X-ray, Joe declines, saying he’d rather she just patch him up so he can get back to solving his case.

“That’s his pattern. She knows exactly who he is,” Allison explains. “We’re all hoping that he’s going through the healing and doing the work. But that’s one of those emotions that will always be him, and I think she’s trying to be cool, calm, collected. She’s working, and all of a sudden it’s like, boom. He is stubborn. He won’t get the X-ray.”

She resolves to treat him like any other patient who won’t get treatment, “but it’s her husband,” Allison adds. “She knows when he’s not doing well. It’s obvious when you are somebody who has that partnership. But she’s not trying to engage too much in that. For her, she’s like, ‘Same pattern, OK, fine.’ And I think that’s what that little moment was. She’s like, ‘I want you to make a healthy choice. This is doctor recommended.’ And Joe doesn’t always listen. He [marches] to the beat of his [own] drum, which she loves, but when it comes to his health and his emotional state, she’s definitely very caring and nurturing. She’s a nurse, so she wants to do what’s right for him. But of course, he has to accept treatment.”

In the end, Joe notices Emma’s disapproval and agrees to the X-ray. Once that’s taken care of, he heads to the FBI office with Chee and Bernadette (Jessica Matten). Though Chee’s former colleagues are less than forthcoming, the Tribal Police team realize that the whole situation with the assassin Vaggan (Franka Potente) and her pursuit of Billie might be connected to a major federal case involving an illicit import/export business.

Despite the link between the two cases, the feds brush off the offer to pool their resources. Shut off from FBI support, Chee decides to again go undercover to follow their only lead: Sonny (Chaske Spencer), the recruiter for the illegal operation, who claims to know Billie’s cousin Leroy.

Fans of the Twilight movies will remember that Gordon and Spencer have an onscreen history. “We were in the Wolf Pack together,” Gordon recalls. “It was my first job, so it was really fun to get in a sandbox with him, and the writers just let us play and have so much fun. It was such a different vibe when it was just the two of us, outside of the normal storylines, it was really nice fun that we had together.”

He adds of Spencer, “He got to really sink his teeth into that [character], and we just got to go back and forth with each other. It was everything you could ask for as actors and friends and colleagues, to be like, ‘Hey, you want to come do this show? It’s a great little role for you.’”

This wasn’t the first Twilight reunion on Dark Winds, as Alex Meraz played Bernadette’s love interest Ivan in season three. “Hopefully we can do another one somehow,” Gordon says. “I don’t know who we could get, but it’d be fun to just keep it going.”

While Chee is working with Sonny, his cover is almost blown by an elderly woman who claims to remember him. She says in Navajo that she remembers Chee calling out, “Mother, mother, mother.” Fortunately, Sonny, who grew up in L.A., doesn’t speak Navajo. Chee brushes her off and tells Sonny that the woman is crazy, hoping to avoid raising any suspicions.

They next go to a strip club, where Sonny leaves Chee at the bar while he goes to the back room to conduct some business. As he waits, Chee mulls over his argument with Bernadette about her keeping the news of Leaphorn’s upcoming retirement from him. He gets some insight from an unlikely source — a sex worker. Says Gordon, “She tells me, ‘Why did she lie, to protect you?’ And I’m like, ‘Oh, I didn’t think about that.’”

The moment of reflection is cut short, though, when Sonny comes running from the back room, followed by a man who starts shooting. Sonny is hit, but they get away and return to Sonny’s apartment. After Chee stitches up Sonny’s shoulder wound, he passes out, allowing Chee to do some digging.

He finds an address for Leroy, but when he goes there the apartment is empty. He breaks in, but is soon beset by another episode of the ghost sickness that has been plaguing him since he entered the death hogan earlier in the season. First, he realizes the cut on his side has suddenly started bleeding through the bandages. Even more ominously, he hears labored breathing coming from the other room, where he discovers an unknown person lying on the floor, completely covered by a blanket.

Gordon explains that Chee’s ghost sickness is intertwined with his unprocessed emotional trauma. “Chee just has all these ballooned emotions and old wounds that he didn’t really heal from,” Gordon says. “He lost his mom very young, he didn’t have any place to go, and so all that is bubbling up, and he has to work through all these things while he’s still trying to be the best he can be. Because he’s still trying to prove that he’s very capable [even though he was] passed over for the lieutenant job.”

Matten adds that Chee’s seemingly supernatural sickness represents a very real Navajo cultural tradition. “Mad respect to the writers for being able to show certain traditions within the Navajo culture that are somewhat taboo to speak about, but to actually get permission to speak about those aspects that very much exist,” she says. “What this season has done is created an environment to visually show an audience the beliefs from a psychological place and a traditional place at the same time, so you can see the tie-in between culture and tradition versus psychology, and how Indigenous people, specifically this tribe, interpret psychological wounds as something someone can maybe say is mythological.

“I thought it was very interesting how the directors and writers decided to shoot this, because we get some creepy scenes,” she adds. “I’m a big chicken, but it’s impressive because it’s showing you literally the horror of someone experiencing PTSD and visually what that looks like. When he’s going through ghost sickness, those physical wounds are a metaphor for the emotional and spiritual and psychological wounds that he’s going through.”

But very quickly, the episode ends right where the last one did — with a cliffhanger. In the midst of Chee’s vision of the body, reality intrudes, as Sonny arrives and pulls a gun on him, demanding to know who he really is. Viewers are left to wait until next week to find out if, and how, he gets out of this one.

Dark Winds airs on AMC and streams on AMC+, with new episodes airing weekly on Sundays. In case you missed it, you can find more coverage from episode one here and episode three here. Check back for more insights from the show’s team as the season progresses.