Deadwood Episode Guide: A Constant Throb

Written by W. Earl Brown

Directed by Mark Tinker

We are reaching the point of climax in the third season, and alliances are beginning to finally solidify.  Hearst is making his final effort to try and bring about his total control over the camp. His main effort of the episode comes in the opening minutes.

Alma has been managing to recover from her addiction. In the previous episode Trixie calmly said that she looked better from a distance and at presence. It is not clear whether Hearst knows of this, and the fact is, it’s irrelevant: he doesn’t care if she’s sober or loaded, he wants her holdings. In this episode, he makes his most direct approach: shots are fired within inches of missing Alma as she walks to the bank. With Bullock out at Sturgis campaigning and Ellsworth absent, Swearengen and the crew from the Gem leap into action to save her. (Al literally does so, jumping from the veranda.) They secure her in his office (after an amusing bit in the whores’ quarters where Al gently comforts Alma about the fact she probably soiled herself), and then the entire contingent begins to plan. At this point, almost the entire camp has realized the importance of Swearengen; even Charlie Utter is willing to take orders from Al, however reluctantly.

The camp being galvanized into action would seem to be a nod to the impatience of the audience for some kind of final movement against Hearst. But Al has now regained the clarity of focus he has been missing ever since Turner and Hearst attacked him near the beginning of the season. He realized that the shots fired at Alma were meant to provoke Bullock or Ellsworth to respond with violence, causing the battle that he knows Hearst would surely win. So he decides to completely deny Hearst anything:

SWEARENGEN: We want his piss pot’s play hours occupied by confusion and grievance. We want him sitting, sulking like a three-year old whose toys won’t do his bidding… Hearst’s not to see he’s had half a fucking cunt hair’s effect on any of the comings and goings in this camp.

And that’s exactly what he spends the episode doing. He begins to make his movements to wire for the guns from Cheyenne – even utilizing Hawkeye from Silas, which he clearly doesn’t want – he makes sure that everybody sends their wires through the secret door in his office, rather than going around out front, and finally manages to persuade Alma to complete her walk to the bank. He has Dan knock out Ellsworth and tie him up, so he can’t react with vengeance, and wired Seth while keeping things very vague.

And though he can’t see the end result, it is very clear that Hearst is feeling the effects of it. When the episode opens, he is breakfasting with Jarry, and casually comments on Alma being shot at. He then has a long conversation with Jarry, in which the commissioner refuses to believe that Hearst has any responsibility for it, and it becomes very clear that he openly wants credit. When he sends his man Barrett, who replaced Turner as Hearst’s grounds commander in the previous episode, to send a message to Al, it becomes very clear that Barrett is nowhere near up to the task as Turner was. Barrett then comes to his office with the message and the reply.

The confrontation is classic Swearengen. He manages to woo Barrett into a false sense of security, and just when Barrett thinks Al is ‘a halfway decent person’, he attacks and visibly taunts him, accusing him of shooting at Alma and the beating he laid on Merrick in the previous episode. In the final extremities, Barrett sells out his employer, telling him about his plans. Al goes to his veranda where Hearst is waiting from across the way, and casually says: “Taking the air.” Al then returns, finishes the beating and slits his throat. We know that Swearengen has completely regained his cunning, because he then openly taunts the man who he considers dangerous, by telling him his man has fled to Bismarck, and mocking him for his message (which was offering ‘protection’ to Alma.) Hearst leaves the office with a scowl, and we don’t want to think what his mood is like now. Minutes before, he hammered on Farnum’s door (the hotel manager has been wisely hiding most of the episode) and then torments him with a series of angry questions that E.B. couldn’t give a smart reply to when he wasn’t scared shitless, and finished the diatribe by spitting on E.B. and telling him that he would be pissed if he returns to see it wiped off. The bastard has put in the situation of feeling sympathy for E.B. Farnum.

The critical actions of this episode are therefore that everybody is trying to proceed as if everything is normal, rather than assume that things are going to be disrupted. Tolliver, who at this point is clearly on the outside looking in from both the camp and Hearst, seems to have reacted to last night by mutilating his stab wound. When a new prostitute has arrived, he can’t even be bothered to go through with the niceties he could manage when he got here – he calls the whore ‘Stupid’, which is the same name he gave Lila, gives her the most perfunctory of introductions, including not to take dope from Leon, and can barely manage the enthusiasm to say ‘Welcome to the Bella Union’.  Martha continues to conduct the business of the school, with first Adams, then Charlie, and finally Joanie and Jane standing guard. And at the end of the episode at the Bullock household, Seth is clearly inwardly seething, so Sol tries to distract him by talking about resupplying the hardware story to help with the livery, and Martha setting the table for dinner, and finishing the episode by saying: “Let us say grace.” They all know that Seth can’t concentrate on anything but his fears and anger, so the only thing his family can do is pretend that it’s just another night.

But for all the actions that take place around Al and Alma, the highpoint of the episode involves Jane and Joanie. Jane is clearly irked about the idea of Charlie taking orders from Swearengen, and takes Joanie’s diplomatic touch to make him leave standing guard. When the night is over, and the two are undressing in Joanie’s room, Jane delivers a monologue that, in a rarity for Deadwood, sums up the complete trajectory for a character. She relates to Joanie a dream that weaves together about anxiety about loss and shame, and yet the possibility for redemption. We learn that her major trauma is about the loss of Wild Bill combined with her shame of not being able to defend Sofia against Swearengen. Charlie is the messenger in this dream, telling her that they are outside the Number 10 where in a few days Wild Bill will be murdered. Charlie tells her this is also the night where she walked out to the creek to weep. Then Charlie reminds her that this is also the night where she and Charlie will abscond the child and sing her to sleep.

In a rare moment of self-reflection, she connects the moment in the previous episode when they walked the kids to school and she held Joanie’s hand because she was too drunk to walk on her own.

JANE: And Charlie helped me find the little girl, the very night I got scared and run, and the both of us sang a rung to her, and you went ahead and kissed me.

In response to this, Joanie gently takes Jane’s face in her hands and kisses her. Because of Joanie’s love, Jane can do something that almost no one else in Deadwood has managed to do, or will manage to do – push past her shame and find redemption. This is ironic, considering that she is doing so by entering a lesbian relationship that the world of the camp (and in some places, even now) will never look on with parity.

There may be significance to this in the fact that the Joanie-Jane narrative is entirely separate from the Hearst storylines of the third season: they are the only characters not threatened by the changes sweeping through Deadwood. Is there a possibility that Milch and his writers, usually the most cynical in all of television, are saying that there is a chance that love is the one thing that survive the coming of civilization? Because of the abrupt termination of the series, we will never for sure. I’d like to believe in this possibility, but to quote another author who trafficked in this type of business: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”