Thursday, October 6, 2022

Great To Be Back In Big Sky Country

 

 

            A confession: despite my considering Big Sky one of the best series of the last two years, my schedule got so crowded in the early months of 2022 that I ended up abandoning it when it returned to the airwaves in February.  Therefore I have no idea just how the search for Ronald and Scarlett ended or how things ended for Wolf.  Nevertheless, I decided to do something I rarely do when I stop watching a series and start over relatively fresh when Season 3 (branded ‘Deadly Trails’ by ABC) started a few weeks ago.

            I was relieved that the series has decided to start with a relatively new mystery this year – as well as starting out with occasional procedurals as the season opens. This is a pattern that Justified one of the great accomplishments of the 2010s was superb at and, given that the open plains of Montana are the same kind of breeding grounds for the outlaws we would meet in Harlan County, is a fair comparison. 

            To catch up, Cassie (Kylie Bunbury) is now working on her own since Mark and Jerrie are apparently chasing down the Syndicate that was exposed back in Season 1.  Jenny (Kathryn Winnick) is still at the Montana sheriff’s office and is now working with the new sheriff Beau Arlen. Jensen Ackles is the newest addition to the cast, and after spending so much of Supernatural impersonating lawmen, it’s good to see that he can actually play a real one. Like Dean Winchester, he has a family connection nearby (we’ll get there) and he’s easy on the eyes. Jenny is wary of him; Cassie and he are circling each other and Denise… clearly wants to jump him. (Dee Dee Pfeiffer continues to have the time of her life on this show.)

            The underlying plot of this season involves a camping troop in the mountains headed by the butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-her mouth (but strangely enough, does in her coffee) Sunny (Reba McIntire) She is perhaps the most obnoxiously cheerful troop master you’d ever meet, and she needs that cheer because the guests she’s got on her trail are ornery. There’s Paige and Mark, who are bickering from the moment we meet them…and whom we very quickly learn are not who they seem to be. There’s Emily, Beau’s daughter who’s doing a podcast and whose stepfather (Henry Ian Cusick getting to play someone untrustworthy for a change) is trying to keep a tight leash on her but seems far too curious about the secrets she’s keeping.  There’s Beau, the hunky guide and her new husband who seem to be big one happy family… until you learn he’s her second husband. And then there’s the clearly disturbed young man whose wandering in the woods and who kills a hiker in the opening trailer.  We’re not that surprised to learn Sunny is his mother or that she’s been covering for his crimes. It is, however, a surprise to learn just how long she might have been doing it when Denise relates a story of the ‘Bleeding Heart Killer from twenty years ago’ and all the hearts we see carved into trees. All of this would be a major juggling act for Sunny, and things have already disintegrated when Paige and Mark disappear…and only Mark comes back. We saw Mark in the last episode, and he didn’t look like someone who just got lost. How long will Sunny be able to keep juggling these chainsaws, especially considering Cassie is looking for the missing hiker and Beau is very nervous about his daughter BEFORE that?

            Meanwhile, the past is coming for Jenny in a big way. In the last episode, we met her mother Gigi, (Rosanna Arquette, how great to see you again.)  Gigi is a grifter who was conning her way across Idaho, and whose latest partner grifted a Montana rancher.  From the moment the two are in the same room, we can sense the history between them and none of it is pleasant. For all the darkness and cynicism we see in Jenny towards her mother, there’s a small glimmer in her that really wants to believe in the good in her. So when the final con is played, and she learns yet again that her mother has betrayed her – this time stealing $30,000 from her – there’s a brokenness in her that we haven’t seen since she learned Cody was dead. And she will be even less thrilled when she learns that Gigi has teamed up with last season’s major villain, Tonya which has officially confirms Jenny’s certainty that she hasn’t got legit.

            Big Sky is one of those series that has always been willing to swing for the fences and often they have done so by casting so many characters against type or have them lean in. Reba McIntire’s acting and music career has been built on being wholesome and trustworthy, so the writers are gambling that her image is a mask for a darker kind of evil.  The fact that evil is masked under the idea of ‘family values’ is actually on brand.  A similar change is done with the character of Tanya, who is played by Jamie-Lynn Siegler known to the world as Meadow Soprano. Meadow spent much of the series verging between resentment of her father’s crimes, but ultimately decided to pursue a path as a lawyer to represent the mob by the series end. It is interesting to consider Tonya as a version of Meadow fully mature, someone who can appear to be in the world of legitimacy that her father could never truly represent but have a seamy underbelly. Jenny and Cassie know better, but they can’t prove it, partly because when Tonya smiles, you can’t read it the same way you knew by Tony’s pleasant face that it was clearly a mask.

            There’s all the long overdue fact that this is a crime procedural where the protagonists and the villains are both women – something that I’ve never seen on network television before and whose only example I have on cable or streaming is Damages, another excellent and underrated FX series.  When a network series is willing to swing at two of the greatest undervalued shows of all time, you know that its doing something right. Big Sky is not as ambitious or excellent as either of those series were – yet – but every so often, it sings that way.  If I were the kind of person to make unnatural comparisons, I could compare Cassie or Jenny to Raylan Givens, Sunny to Mags Bennett and Tonya to say, Lydia from Breaking Bad. But that would be giving the writers too little credit. All these characters are original, fully drawn, and fascinating. ABC has gone out on a limb to keep Big Sky alive all this time, and I hope they continue to have faith in this product because it’s nothing short of brilliant.

My score: 4.75 stars.

No comments:

Post a Comment