Deadwood Episode Guide: Tell Your God To Ready For Blood

Written by David Milch and Ted Mann

Directed by Mark Tinker

The third (and unfortunately, the last) season of Deadwood has never quite been viewed with the same scope as the first two. Part of that may have come from the dismay that by the time the season began airing in June of 2006, the public knew, due to the unfortunate announcements of HBO, that there wasn’t going to be a fourth one, that the series would forever be an incomplete statement. There is a tendency among the public to view series that end too soon as failure, and that may have carried over.

There were also several problems with the third season, none of them enough to ruin the series overall, but many which interrupted its flow. The biggest problem with the third season is also one of its greatest strengths: George Hearst has finally taken a position in the camp, and he will spend it as the figure of capitalism trying to gain complete dominance of it. This led to the casting Gerald McRaney as Hearst, a very good television actor before hand who, like so much of the rest of the cast, would do his greatest work in Deadwood. And as the third season begins, Hearst’s maneuvers will begin to encompass the entire camp.

The episode begins six weeks after the second season concluded, and it starts with a murder in the Gem of a Cornishman. Because the dialogue is incomprehensible, the murder seems so as well, though Al seems to get a very good handle on what – he doesn’t know the why, but he knows that Hearst had the murder occur in the Gem to get a reaction from him and Bullock.

The speechmaking for the elections is making everybody uncomfortable. Seth goes to Martha and asks her to go over the wording of his speeches. Charlie is petrified just as the idea of having to speak from the audience. Sol is officially running for mayor, and Farnum seems more than comfortable than the idea of standing against it. When Ellsworth walks Sofia to school (Sofia now seems far more energetic than she has at any point in the series) she mentions who’d she’d vote for, and the baking of bread. Even Harry Manning, the bartender from Nutall’s saloon (who notoriously killed the wrong man by accident in the season 2 premiere) is being set up for favors by the drunkard Fields. And Al continues his efforts to try and manipulate events from afar.  He wants Sol to be mayor, and he wants Trixie to be happy, but he knows the mayor can’t be seen at a whorehouse. So weeks earlier, he has Adams buy a house for the sole purpose of getting out of ownership of it, making Sol owner. He then has Trixie move into Shaugnessy’s hotel (we’ll get to that in a minute) so that she can ‘pop out of it and manipulate (Sol’s) johnson’). This deviousness infuriates Trixie when she figures out what’s going on, and purely baffles Sol, who admits he never saw himself as a homeowner.

When Seth hears about the murder of the Cornishman from Charlie, he enters his usual level of slow burn. First he goes to Al, and demands to know why he wasn’t told about it earlier, and Al tries to tell him that he doesn’t want him go off half-cocked when he goes to see Hearst a few minutes later. Bullock moves to the hotel (Hearst’s now) and has a very strained meeting with him. Hearst has an easy time toying with Bullock, but ultimately he cares less about the murder of the Cornishman, and more about acquiring Alma’s claim. Bullock gets pissed:

Bullock: You stay out of our fucking affairs.

Hearst: Affairs of that sort aren’t my interest, Mr. Bullock. My only passion’s the color.

When he implies that Bullock’s has a biblical knowledge of Alma, Seth excused himself, heads downstairs and proceeds to beat E.B. so badly, Richardson has to go to the Gem to get people to get Farnum to safety.

Bullock and Swearengen react differently. Bullock goes to the jail, and puts himself in the holding cell, thoroughly considering the idea that he needs to withdraw from the race. Al has already tried to talk him out of this, but Charlie responds more logically by explaining how much worse the camp would be if Manning was Sheriff. Bullock then realizes that he probably gave his relationship with Alma away, and that his own temper, as it tends to do, outvoted him.

When Al deals with it, he sits next to E.B. and gives one of the most comic threats he’s ever done

Al: Life will be over for you, and Death will offer no relief. I will profane your fucking remains, E.B.

Farnum: Not my remains, Al.

Al: Gabriel’s trumpet will produce you from the ass of a pig.

Farnum already terrified tells him the truth, and Al believes him, and cancels the night’s speeches for him ‘to recover’.

This leads to one of the few times that Al walks the streets of the camp. He goes to Hearst’s room, and the two have a meeting, which starts out convivial, and gets progressively darker. We get to the purpose of the shooting: the Cornishmen who aggregated in the Gem that morning were ‘agitators’, i.e., planning to unionize. Neither man cares about the threat that might mean in the short term, but Al gathers his menace and tells Hearst he will be a problem – he will cancel the elections altogether, he will rip up the agreement with Yankton - if there is another murder in his joint. We know how dangerous Al is, so when seconds after Hearst leaves he tells Captain Turner to begin the planning of another murder in exactly the same fashion, we realize that he is operating on a completely different level than we are used to.

Al knows that there is to be trouble again (he says the title phrase to Richardson on his way out) and says that he can understand what’s going to happen next, and that he doesn’t know why Hearst needs to control the camp. This may be the first time that Al has acknowledge that he is, for all intents and purposes, a big fish only in the small pond of Deadwood, and it may account for how he has trouble going forward through most of the season.

But he’s not the only one having a problem. Joanie is dealing with Cy’s stabbing by returning to the Bella Union, which has begun to resemble a circle of hell. Lila, the whore who took Joanie’s place after she left, has developed an addiction to drugs, and the backroom is, as Joanie puts it, “smelling like a hogwhore’s cunt.” Leon and Con are snapping at each other in the cage, and the place is a lot emptier. And Cy seems to be going through a bizarre mania combining God and whoring, and every time Joanie goes to see him, it seems to take more out of her. Even if agony, Cy remains ruthless and dissecting:

TOLLIVER: You listen to me young lady, what brings a gun to the temple is lack of gainful occupation and being useful to others. I don’t see you trying to kill yourself here. All you do here is good for the girls and me too.

JOANIE: I don’t want to run girls no more.

TOLLIVER: That’s turning from your gift and your training.

JOANIE: When you speak I feel like it’s the devil talking.

And the devil still has pull over her: she checks into Shaugnessy’s hotel (the owner bitching about how she left the room last time) and puts a gun to her head again. Again, she manages not to pull the trigger, but we get the feeling this isn’t the first time she’s come here with that purpose in mind.

By now, the Chez Ami has become the de facto schoolhouse for the children of the camp. Mose is still serving as a ‘watchmen’, and Jane is still bitching about his presence, months after recovering from being shot. She claims he’s scaring the children, even after Martha tells her later she’s not.

Jane is still trying to find a purpose in the camp, still getting drunk, and still being a pain in the ass. When Martha comes to discuss her about a lesson plan she has about her scouting for Custer, it takes a lot of energy for her to agree to do it. But it is critical it happens, because it is here we see salvation for both Jane and Joanie, and maybe a lesson for the camp as well. The penultimate scene revolves around a discussion between the two in which Jane nags about her repeated voyages to Tolliver’s as if she going to leave the Chez Ami. Joanie confesses her own problems (but not their depth) and Jane says something that might serve as the motto for the entire camp (and maybe the series as a whole:

Every day takes figuring out all over again how to fucking live.

Alma may be finding that out soon enough. She has settled into a house with Ellsworth and Sofia, and actually seems better off, but the second they leave to walk her to school, she collapses. We know that carrying a child to term may kill her, but even so she is terrified of even taking the laudanum solution that she worked so hard to kick in Season 1. The Doc convinces her to take it, and persuades Ellsworth to make sure she does. But we know how addiction plays out, and that Alma first became addicted when she was married to a man she didn’t love. The worst possible scenario for her may be coming at the worst possible time for all in the camp.