Season 4 Ends With a Shocking Murder

[This story contains spoilers from the Dark Winds season four finale, “Ni’ Hodisxos” (The Glittering World).]

Heading into the final episode of Dark Winds season four, which aired Sunday, things were looking pretty bleak for Joe Leaphorn and Billie, the teenager he and the Navajo Tribal Police have been trying to protect all season long. Irene Vaggan (Franka Potente) proved to be a worthy adversary for Leaphorn, and an unpredictable one. 

After abducting Leaphorn (Zahn McClarnon) and Billie (Isabel DeRoy-Olson) in the penultimate episode, Vaggan held them in her bunker as sort of a dollhouse family, trying to manipulate them into pretending the kind of filial bonds she’d never experienced.

In the end, Joe’s quick thinking and observation allowed him to free Billie and himself and finally arrest Vaggan. He also unraveled Vaggan’s plot to have her boss, mobster Dominic McNair (Titus Welliver), cleared through false testimony. Chee (Kiowa Gordon), meanwhile, found healing from his ghost sickness after the whole community turned out for his ceremony.

But just when it looked like Joe was ready to ride off into the proverbial sunset of retirement, there was another shocking turn: Gordo Sena (A. Martinez) had been murdered. Earlier in the episode, Sena had told Leaphorn that he wished he hadn’t retired himself, saying he wanted to die with his boots on, and mentioned that he had been digging into some old, unsolved cases.

THR talked separately with showrunner John Wirth and the show’s stars about all the resolutions from the finale — and everything that’s still not right on the Navajo reservation as we look forward to season five.

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In Tony Hillerman’s book The Ghostway, which inspired this season, Vaggan was a man. In the show, she was a woman with an unsettling fascination with Leaphorn. Why the change?

JOHN WIRTH [SHOWRUNNER] [In the novel,] the character of Vaggan is very much like Colton Wolf that we did in season two, played beautifully but Nick Logan, so my first thought was: This character should be a woman. We had lots of conversations about if that’s believable that in 1972, you have a psychopath who works as an assassin for a guy who’s running a gang in San Pedro. But we just decided to buy into it, and we created a backstory that made sense for her in terms of being raised in Germany during the war.

Her grandfather and father were Nazis, and they escaped to South America, and so they were determined that she would be the one to usher in the Fourth Reich and gave her all this training. Then when she had to flee from South America to California, she realized that “I have skills that I could use in this underworld and make some money.” That’s where it all started.

She also was fascinated with these novels when she was growing up during the war, by a writer named Karl May. They were fantasy novels about the Southwest and Native American tribes, and so she had identified with a couple of characters in that book and had fallen in love with a couple of warriors, one warrior character in particular. So, when she finds herself on the reservation on a job for Dominic McNair and runs into Joe Leaphorn just by accident in the trading post [back in the first episode], it’s a surprise to her that she sees standing, right in front of her, in the flesh, the man of her dreams. That’s when the obsession starts, and as you see throughout the course of the season that obsession grows to a pretty dramatic place.

Why does Vaggan go to the strange lengths she does to coerce Billie and Joe into playing family instead of killing them?

FRANKA POTENTE [IRENE VAGGAN] She has all these ideas of family, which she never had. In her mind, she’s just fabricating this narrative that culminates into, it’s like a play that she’s putting on where she’s like, “You’re going to be the dad and I’m going to be the mom, and she’s going to be the kid, and we’re going to live here in this weird bunker situation. We’re going to eat like a family.” Irene is kind of putting together a play, and it’s for her. She wants everyone to like it, but it’s like, “I want to play family.”

[Later, when she eventually tries to remove Joe and Billie’s bonds] she feels safe enough in this weirdness that she created that she feels like she’s known him for a while now. It’s a gift to herself that she feels she’s earned. She’s like, “OK, so we trust each other now.” Irene has no idea what love or trust means because her life has been so void of it. So, she just kind of creates it by herself and makes [Joe] the protagonist of it. So then when it’s betrayed, it’s just so awful. And it should feel really sad … for the audience. (Laughs.)

Is Joe repulsed by Vaggan, or does he like her just a little bit?

POTENTE I think in my mind, I was like, “I think Leaphorn likes me now.”

ZAHN MCCLARNON [JOE LEAPHORN] There was some dark, deep-seated obsession that Vaggan had for Leaphorn, but I think that it was reciprocated, a little bit. A little endearing once in a while, but he would swat it out of the way real quick. I think Joe found her kind of strangely fascinating.

POTENTE It’s a lot of attention that he’s getting, you know? Where he lives, that doesn’t happen.

MCCLARNON He definitely got some strange attention from Vaggan, that’s for sure.

How important was it for Chee that everyone showed up to support him at the healing ceremony? He was trying to be strong when he thought no one was going to come, but you could tell he was hurt.

KIOWA GORDON [JIM CHEE] When I first read the script, I was tearing up. And on the day, I was like, “You can’t just fall apart here and make it super sappy,” there had to be some relief and resolve and just some stoicism that’s like, “This is happening, but you’ve got to put on a brave face.” To see the people that were coming out of the woodwork, just showing up in their cars, was really eye-opening to Chee. He didn’t realize how much (Gordon gets emotional), sorry, how much people actually cared about him. That revelation meant so much to him, and to have Bernadette [Jessica Matten] by his side and Margaret Cigaret [Betty Ann Tsosie] there to give the Ghostway, having Leaphorn there, having my back; Emma [Deanna Allison] shows up; my old FBI buddy, Toby Shaw [Luke Barnett]; Sena, A. Martinez shows up; my old schoolteacher, played by the wonderful Gail Wirth; it just was such a catharsis that was reached that you never thought would come. That just meant the world to Chee.

Emma comes to the reservation for Chee’s ceremony, but then she goes back to L.A. What would need to happen for her to return home and reunite with Joe?

DEANNA ALLISON [EMMA] I particularly believe that right now she just needs to have her own mental clarity. She needs to replenish soul. You need the peace, the love, the strength, in order to give that back onto others. And if you have a home that’s in emotional poverty, how do you regenerate that, unless you let that individual go and find themselves? This is the Navajo point of view I’m coming from. It’s OK to let somebody find themselves how they need to. We come from a culture of warriors, women and men, and so we understand that there are going to be tough times. But it’s how we continue to move through it. Only you can find that in your own hózhó [harmony and balance]. I can’t tell anyone else how to find their hózhó, whether it’s prayer, ceremony, physical exercises, or however you need to find it.

But if you’re going back into the same energy that’s keeping you from that, it’s hard to keep progressing. So she had to make that decision to go and find her mental clarity and take that leap of faith. She’ll always love her husband. They had a family together, they’ve been married for years. When you coexist as a family, you’ll always be there for them. It never stops. One thing about the Navajo is we’re very devoted, loyal people. We are willing give people second chances, third chances, fourth chances, because everyone has an opportunity to make that change, to follow their own beauty way.

That’s where I feel like she is with Chee and all of them, they know that. She is that pillar for them to vent and talk to. [She acts as an auntie to them, and has] relationships where people can come and talk about their feelings and emotions and what’s plaguing them. Chee really looked up to her as somebody that helped him with that. It’s implied that he contacted her, that he needed her. So she comes back to help him in support of what he needs.

That’s where we come at the end of the season. She does see Leaphorn there, but she’s there for a specific purpose, which is Chee, who reached out, who’s not doing too well and he’s like, “I need a ceremony, I need a blessing, I need good spirits around me.” So thankfully she still has that in her and she can come back. And she was like, “I still have my calling back at home. There are still people who need me” — Chee, Bern, they’re her family. She still has family on the reservation, as well. I felt like that was her doorway back, [someone said] “We need you,” and she was more than happy to answer that.

How do you feel about where we leave Emma and Joe for now?

MCCLARNON Joe loves his wife madly. I’ll leave it at that. He loves Emma madly. That’s the love of his life.

ALLISON It is a very special relationship. It’s a long marriage, and you also have to go back to the time of the 1970s, even before that. Looking back at this journey, starting from season one, they started off with such traumatic experiences already from the loss of their son. You see Emma trying to move on and find that light. She’s really hoping to find that husband who, she sees his potential. [She’s] like, “I see it, but if only they could just talk lovingly to themselves or if they could just really believe it.”

But at the same time, that’s her husband. That is somebody who she made a commitment to. She takes all of her morals and her traditional grounding very seriously. There’s a lot of grief that happened that pulled that marriage apart. It’d be really nice to see [them back together]. But sometimes that’s what a love story can consist of. It’s not all the fairy tale that we all sometimes wish, but in order to get to the fairy tale there are some of these really hard moments, pivotal moments, that [you have to] withstand in a very solid, committed, loving Navajo marriage.

I have seen from my own mentors and grandparents, and even my parents, just nothing but love and devotion. Just lead through love and kindness in a time of fear, and that kind of energy, that’s what I’ve always seen in my Navajo culture. I love that we’re able to show that, but also at the same time marriage is sometimes a difficult situation, especially the circumstances that Emma and Joe have gone through.

We have to remember that she had forced sterilization, too. For her to lose her only son that was her pride and joy that she grew in her own womb, there’s an imprint that is left in your body, so it’s taken a lot of strength for her to still have levity and love and kindness in her heart. One of the Navajo proverbs is, you continue the service for your family, your community, and those are ways that you can replenish love back into your heart and your soul. It is complicated.

I really want to show that strength and love of the Navajo woman. We’re warriors as well. We birth warriors. We have Navajo women warrior names. In order to be a warrior, sometimes you have to go through pressing times. I think she’s in her peaceful warrior era.

We find out at the end of the season that Gordo Sena has been murdered. Was there any other reason that could have been compelling enough for Joe to change his mind about retiring?

WIRTH We played an entire season with him having made the decision right from the get-go to retire. I felt like anything short of an act of God at the end would have really been a bad play for our audience. I’m always the guy that wants to kill people off in TV shows, and when I was doing Hell on Wheels, also an AMC show, we got to the end of that series in season six and when we were discussing how to end the show, I said, “Maybe we should kill Cullen Bohannon,” who was the hero, and one of my writers said, “Are you out of your mind? I’ve been on a journey with this character for six years. You’re just going to kill this guy, and I’ll say, ‘Why did I go through that?’”

It made sense. So for Leaphorn to tell you, “I’m going to retire, I’ve thought about this. I’ve got a succession plan, I’ve reintroduced myself to the sweat lodge and to all these things to help myself go through it,” and then at the end of eight episodes, having taken the audience through this incredible journey that we went on this year and say, “You know what, I changed my mind.” [People would say] “What are you smoking over there? That doesn’t work for me.”

The only real possible solution was an act of God which made it inevitable for him to have to stay. The only thing significant enough would be someone being murdered on or near the Navajo Nation. Then as writers, you say, “Who’s the list?” Is it Emma, is it Bernadette, Chee, is it Sena? So we decided that it should be Gordo Sena and I have to say also, by the way, in the three seasons Sena was in [starting in season two], he became a much bigger part of the soul of the show than anybody ever imagined. That’s a credit to A. Martinez, who’s a soulful, incredibly gifted actor and a wonderful guy. I honestly really fretted over it. I hated to do it, and I could have easily not done it and been very happy to have him continue on the show in the same way that he’s been on the show.

MCCLARNON The main reason why he didn’t retire is he loses his close friend and he needs to get to the bottom of that. But Joe definitely is seeking some kind of spiritual connection this season, what the Diné people within the Navajo culture call hózhó, which is balance and peace of mind, and he leans into his cultural ceremonies this season to find that. He has some existential issues going on with possibly his wife leaving him, and also the retirement. Joe is struggling for some answers, and he has been for four seasons obviously with his past trauma, but Joe is struggling with possibly losing everything that means something to him. He’s already lost his kid, but he’s possibly losing his wife and what that would mean to his identity, losing his wife and retiring from his job. 

The show has already been renewed for season five. What can you tell us about the show’s evolution?

WIRTH The story [for season four] really gave us the opportunity to explore who [Chee] is, what his backstory was, and how it made him into the man that he is and what his relationship was with his mother and how that informs who he is in the present day, his relationship with Bernadette, his relationship in the season before with Shorty Bowlegs [Derek Hinkey] and that whole family, and we’re actually playing another aspect of that whole story in season five.

It’s interesting, once you start unwrapping these people, stories start presenting themselves, which is really nice for an ongoing serialized series like this. For example, after season one, I thought that story was over and then for season two that set up — we didn’t mean to, but by accident — it set up the exploration of what happened to [Emma and Joe’s son] J.J. It was murder, so what does that mean, and solving that opened up — again, not in a planned way — a story about how a person can internalize the actions that Joe Leaphorn took against B.J. Vines and how that could drive him crazy. It brought up all the other things that he had repressed from his own childhood [that were explored in season three].

I love how the show works in that way. Things come up that you didn’t see, you didn’t plan for, and you just play them out. Something happens at the end of the season, and it opens a door to tell a story in a way you hadn’t anticipated. It deepens the experience of watching the show.

All eight episodes of Dark Winds season four are now streaming on AMC+. In case you missed it, you can find more coverage from episode one here, episode three here, episode five here and episode seven here.