Deadwood Episode Guide: A Lie Agreed Upon, Part 2

Written by Jody Worth

Directed by Ed Bianchi

The episode begins with the Doc following up his treatment of Swearengen, and we start to get a clearer picture of what might really have inspired the fight in the last episode. Cochran keeps trying to get an idea about Al’s urinary output, and Al keeps refusing to answer. Swearengen plays the entire episode in a state of constant pain, and while some writers might merely state as symbolic of the confusion of just how to handle the challenge Bullock laid down, it is a very real problem. This becomes very clear when Al asks Dolly to come up “to stick her thumb up his ass” and we here a scream that resonates the floor below. Swearengen’s habit of trying to deal with one problem at a time is resulting in him pushing his own well-being to the back burner, and we can tell there’s going to be a cost for it.

Bullock is going through his own emotional turmoil. In the scene that follows with Alma, he finally brings up that he hadn’t expected his wife and son to arrive so soon, but now that she’s here, he gives her a clear choice: either they leave the camp together, or they both remain but sever all connection. For him to put the choice in Alma’s hands is both reasonable and completely unfair: admittedly his behavior has been very self-destructive – the charge he laid down to Swearengen demonstrates this, if nothing else – but Alma really feels a connection to the camp that is far deeper than his. In her ongoing conversation with Miss Isringhausen,  she makes it clear that she now feels something of a mother’s connection to Sofia, however indirect it may be. More importantly, she is now in charge of her own destiny for what is undoubtedly the first time in her entire life. For Bullock to put this all upon her in order to live a life “that would be like living on a volcano” is one of the cruelest things he will ever do.

But it’s very clear that Bullock isn’t thinking rationally. This is made obvious when he has a conversation with Sol in which he tries to float the idea of his leaving the camp:

SOL: What we’ve built and what we’ve been through you don’t get to walk away without saying why.

BULLOCK: You know why.

SOL: That don’t mean you don’t have to say it. I’m sick of knowing and you not saying.

BULLOCK: I love her.

SOL: Good, you fucking said it. And now I get to tell you you’re wrong. You loved her these months and stayed. It ain’t love that’d make you run but shame. Now let me ask you this: do you think shame would end once you cleared the camp.

BULLOCK: It’s shameful either way, Sol.

STAR: It’s LIFE either way, Seth.

Sol is, as always, the voice of clear-headedness (though, in the typical Deadwood way of doubling, when he says these words he is high on laudanum). But even with his rational thought, Bullock seems determined to go through with his self-destructive actions. Charlie, who is in a lesser state of injury than Star, walks with him, and then conveniently manages to sham light-headedness to try and wait ‘til Bullock cools off. Seth then very coolly relates his own history to Charlie – how he’d gotten separated from his brother before the Civil War, how he never visited him until after his brother had ridden off on what would be his fatal cavalry charge, and how he went down to Mexico to recover his body. As he relates the story, he clearly becomes more ridden down with his own personal agony, and there is a possibility that he might just have been able to walk away from this – were it not for the return of another familiar face.

We briefly saw Jane in a state of drunkenness when the coach road by, but she marks her official return to camp when she shows up at Doc hamstrung by her own bridle. She makes a casual remark that she has come back to camp “to die”, and the Doc offers to examine her, ‘so that future generations might learn’. As you can imagine, her liver has swelled dramatically in the interim, and she still has no desire to stop drinking. She has, however, expressed an interest in seeing Charlie, and she shows up at what turns out to be the worst possible time, fanning the flames for Bullock to challenge Swearengen for his gun and badge.

But the interim, Swearengen has had time to reflect, mostly because Adams had decided to tell him that Bullock might be of use to him in the future, when it comes to being a stalking horse for Montana against the interest of Yankton. Swearengen listens to this with reluctance, realizing that his bloodthirsty nature may have to take a back seat to his interests.

This doesn’t play particularly well with Dan, who is now clearly jealous of Silas’ closeness to Al. When Adams’ riding partner shows up very late for the first time, and starts chatting up on of the Gem’s whores, he deliberately picks a fight with him. Swearengen holds Johnny off, but when Adams ends up killing another man by accident, he fires a gun in the air.

Dan leaves the scene in tears, but Al talks to him in private, and delicately explains just the kind of man Adams is, as opposed to the kind of man that he and Dority are. It’s obvious that Adams represents a new kind of pupil best suited to this ‘brave new world’, and while Dan may not understand the implications, he is willing to listen to his boss.

Bullock and Swearengen converge at this point. Immediately after Dolly ‘adjusts him’, she offers to suck his prick, something that ‘gives him no pleasure’. While he is in this indelicate condition, Bullock comes to outside with Jane and Charlie in tow, and demands him to come with his gun and badge. Swearengen then delivers another of his priceless ‘blow job monologues’ in which he expresses all of his frustrations with everything he’s had to deal with all this time finally ending with: “Talk about one person fucking up another’s entire fucking day”. But his vision has revealed the larger issue, and he goes out on to the balcony he fell off, and tells him to ‘wait’. He then asks Johnny to get his suit (he has spent the entire period since his injury in long underwear), realizing what he’s going to have to do.

The scene that follows is one of the tensest the series has yet done, mainly because part of Bullock wants to avoid the shame and get shot up. Even Trixie realizes this, and tells Sol “Does he want to fucking die?” Sol reluctantly gets to his feet, and Trixie even more reluctantly gets him a six-shooter, before lifting up the rifle he used earlier. Does she really have the intention to fire on her pimp?

We never quite understand Swearengen’s own reasoning, considering how he expresses to Dolly, just a few minutes earlier, how utterly frustrated he with the entire mess that is coming his way. When Swearengen comes out holding his gun and badge, and says: “I offer these and hope you’ll wear them a good long fucking time in this fucking camp”,  Bullock is clearly astonished before he decides to take them. He then reminds him of the late Reverend Smith, and how he stated that ‘he raises the camp up’, and in that same sentence casually mentions how the Reverend looked: “that cock-eyed look like he was the victim of a lightning stroke?”

The tension dissipates, Trixie goes back to the hardware to look after Sol, and everyone goes back to their respective corners. Except, of course, for Merrick. For most of the first two episode, he has acted as caregiver to Sol and Utter, but now that the mess is over, its clear he wants a story. Understandably, Seth doesn’t want to give it to him, so he goes to the Gem instead. Merrick is in the process of becoming one of Al’s students as well, and tries to speak in the grand terms of Manifest Destiny.  Swearengen replies with his trademark skepticism: “Whereas the warp, woof and fucking weave of my story’s tapestry would foster the illusions of further commerce, huh?” Nevertheless, he gives Merrick a summary that is trademark Swearengen:

Tonight throughout Deadwood heads may be laid to pillow assuaged and reassured, for that purveyor of Profit for Everything Sordid and Vicious, Al Swearengen, already beat to a fare-thee-well by Sheriff Bullock earlier in the day has now returned to the Sheriff the implements and ornaments of his office.

As he tells this story in voiceover, we see major shifts in the camp. Alma, who has decided to stay in the camp herself, gives one of Seth’s bracelets to Miss Isringhausen to give to him. Bullock returns home and finds that Martha has stayed up waiting for him, but that William has gone to sleep. (To symbolize that Seth, unlike Al, believes in the ornaments in his office is demonstrated by having him leave them near his sleeping child.)

Swearengen has given Merrick a story fir for public consumption – the ‘lie agreed upon’ in the title of the last two episodes. He has cemented his alliance with Bullock, and now has made sure that he will be the symbol of a good, Christian man. What the viewer doesn’t know yet is that this monologue will represent a change in Swearengen as well. The wounds he suffered in the episode are by far the least of his problems, and in the episodes to come his own nearly mortal incapacitation will allow for a change in not just how he will shift from antihero to protagonist, and allow an invading force to infiltrate the camp.