Deadwood Episode Guide: A Rich FInd

As much as the carnage that surrounded the last episode infused everything, this episode which takes place the day after, reveals the fallout and just how horrible events are beginning to become.

Hearst was clearly a monster before all of this happened, but now that Turner, the man who served as the chief manipulator for his plans for the camp is gone, he has lost even the veneer of civility.  He treats everyone with even more disdain then he did before, not that he was Emily Post to begin with. This becomes even more clear when the major arrival to this camp appears: Odell, Aunt Lou’s son.

When Odell arrives and Aunt Lou regards him with genuine affection, Hearst is clearly angry –  any cover that he considered her with affection is gone the minute he sees anyone who is a rival for his attention, even should that be her own blood.  Like every other relationship he has, it’s just a cover. And it becomes even more clear that Odell’s relationship with his mother is even more fraught when we learn that she sent him to Liberia, a country in Africa that was supposed to be the white man’s solutions to the Negro question, but as Odell makes abundantly clear, was just another place for the black man to get fucked. There was no work for Americans, the educated black men screwed them out of money, until the Englishmen then went and did the same. The idea of a better life for the black man is made abundantly clear to be a falsehood anywhere. And the only way Odell can see to get anything out of life is to try and get money out of his mother’s employer.

As if to make this doubly clear, a lot of attention in this episode is spent to Steve, who spends much of the episode trying to make clear he feels absolutely no guilt about what Hostetler did, even though he spends that same period getting increasingly drunk, berating Tom, who makes abundantly clear how much of an asshole he finds him, and flinching every time he sees either Fields or Odell. When Odell comes into the bar to get drunk before his meeting with Hearst, he gets angry, but spends the remainder of his time utterly unable to look him in the eye.

Aunt Lou, who knows just how dangerous Hearst can be, runs to the livery after her son leaves, gives Fields all the money she has in the world, and basically begs him to get her son to leave the camp. Fields makes a genuine attempt at it, clearly discussing his plans for the money that Hostetler got for selling the livery, and Odell refuses to give him the time of day.  When Aunt Lou learns about this, she is terrified, and one of the last shots of the episode is her running down the thoroughfare, begging the Lord ‘not to have him take her boy. You’ve taken so much else.”

And indeed, she has every reason to be terrified. When we see Hearst in the jail, Charlie Utter claims not to recognize him, and then in mocking tones, makes a motion towards the body of the Cornishmen found in thoroughfare with the knife still in it.  Hearst ignores Utter’s jibes, but when Bullock comes to let him out, Hearst pulls the knife out of the Cornishman, wipes it clean, and puts in his pocket.

He barely goes through the nature of civility with Tolliver later on when Cy dares to tell him that Alma is back on the dope, and there might be any number of ways for her to have an ‘accident’. Instead, Hearst is furious that Tolliver didn’t tell him this the previous day (ignoring completely the fact that there was no way for him to tell him this) and then asks him to hold off for a bit.

Tolliver is himself genuinely alarmed and actually goes as far to bribe Farnum for further information, a move that Farnum takes as something that Al has gone forward with, and either way, genuinely reveals that E.B. is truly terrified by what is happening.

What Tolliver doesn’t know is that Leon has come to realize just how dangerous his boss is. In a monologue with his own reflection, Leon admits that he’s going to try and find a way to avoid his boss bringing him to a bloody end. (This is, in fact, a prophecy.) Leon then goes to the bank, and tells Alma that he will no longer supply her with dope. For his trouble, Trixie sticks a gun in his ear to warn him off after the fact, and than Trixie confronts Alma immediately afterwards.  It says just how lost Alma is that she turns on Trixie and fires her. This leads to her coming home to find Ellsworth there, where he makes it abundantly clear that his marriage to her will only lead to her worsening.

As all of this is going amiss, Bullock and Utter return to the hardware store to discuss the severity of the situation. At this point Charlie, who is almost always the voice of discretion, makes the argument that they should strike first “because that’s what Bill would have done.” He discusses a very elaborate plan where Swearengen’s men would attack Hearst’s people at the mines, while Bullock and he took Hearst out. When Sol points out: “There’d be nothing left of the camp.” Utter points out the obvious: “What do you think’ll be left when Hearst gets done with it?”

Indeed, Hearst makes this abundantly clear near the end when he is talking with Richardson. When Richardson says that he is stupid, Hearst says “Better than some in this town.” Then he says quite bluntly: “I plan to tear it all down.” Farnum, holed up in his quarters, asks himself: “Does he mean the hotel or everything?”

The only person who might have the answer to this is Swearengen, but he has no more solutions than he did earlier. As a result, he spends most of the episode snapping at all of his colleagues. He snarls at Adams for not paying attention to his instructions (even though he’s done exactly that), he berates Trixie when she comes into his office asking “to turning a trick” (though admittedly by this point he’s more concerned with her improving her life than anything else), and is actually civil to Farnum when he comes. When Dan finally enters his office, starting to show signs of coming out of his stupor, Al tasks him with going to Cheyenne in order to hire guns. “Unless I can think of an alternative.” He knows that in a war with Hearst, they will lose but the solution still eludes him.

Finally, Bullock shows up in the Gem, and says “Charlie Uttter thinks it’ll come to blood. When Bullock says we ought to strike first, Al again uses his forest metaphor, with a more fitting conclusion:

SWEARENGEN: If blood’s what it finally comes to, a hundred years from now the forest is what they’ll find. Dewy morning’s lost its appeal to me. I prefer to wake up indoors.”

Al knows that he doesn’t have a solution, but he also knows he can no longer go it alone. He tells Dan to hold off going to Cheyenne, tells Johnny to get out the peaches, and says to Seth: “Let’s be baffled among friends.”

It is this action more than anything else that demonstrates that Swearengen has changed, however much he appalls the idea. When Farnum begs Al to save them, his remark after he’s left is “Haven’t I always?” But at this point, with the full might of Hearst and all he represents drawing down upon the camp, he knows that the only possibility of a way through is together.

And yet the image of Aunt Lou haunts us, as the one who knows him best, knowing what he will do.