‘Dark Winds’ Heart-Wrenching Season 3 Finale Explained

[This story contains major spoilers from the season three finale of Dark Winds, “Béésh Łį́į́ (Iron Horse).”]

Joe Leaphorn (Zahn McClarnon) has been through a lot in three seasons of Dark Winds: He’s rescued countless innocent victims from bad guys, struggled to find “Indian justice” for the murder of his son, and earned broken bones and severe lacerations in his dogged efforts to protect his Navajo community. But at the end of the third season, he receives a wound that cuts even deeper: His wife, Emma (Deanna Allison), leaves him because she can no longer bear to live with someone so blinded by his grief and driven by his work that her own needs are always an afterthought.

That’s not to say the entire season finale was bleak. There was plenty of satisfying action as well, with Joe and Chee (Kiowa Gordon) chasing down Dr. Reynolds on a train to stop him from killing George Bowlegs, and Bernadette (Jessica Matten) extracting herself from certain death to take down a drug-smuggling and human-trafficking ring almost single-handedly. Even Leaphorn had some solace, as Agent Washington (Jenna Elfman) finally dropped her investigation into the murder of B.J. Vines after Emma backed up Joe’s alibi in a final act of loyalty before she left.

To break it all down, The Hollywood Reporter spoke separately on Zoom with showrunner John Wirth, who co-wrote the finale (with Steven Paul Judd), and executive producer Chris Eyre, who directed the hour. They each had some surprises to share, including why that train might be familiar to anyone who jumped on the Barbenheimer phenomenon, and which book you might want to pick up if you just can’t wait until season four for more Dark Winds.

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There was a lot to wrap up heading into the finale, and I found myself wondering how all the problems could be fixed, given how little time was left in the season. It turns out that’s not really what happened, as Joe and Emma are now separated. How do you feel about where we’ve left them?

CHRIS EYRE I was as interested as anybody else about how Joe and Emma’s relationship mended itself — or didn’t — but I was hoping that it did and thankfully I got to have an inside perspective on it, but I guess the best way to answer is I’m still trying to search what’s going to become of them. In episode eight, we end with Joe realizing he has to do more to get Emma back and that’s kind of apropos of the fact that she’s a matriarch and he really needs to figure out what to do in order to restore his family and himself. I was really torn by the fact that they’re still not completely mended and healed. I think that’s apropos of the series and drama and real life and the Native-esque portion of this, in that we’re trying to create three-dimensional characters. I’m still heartbroken that they’re not completely mended, but I have a lot of hope and I want to see what happens for them especially.

It’s interesting because it ends with Leaphorn listening to Emma’s words on the recorder and she has protected him, which is also heart wrenching. She has not given away his secret as his wife, but she needs him to become a better person. It’s kind of left with that, that maybe he can become the better person that she needs him to be. I think it’s an amazing marriage insight and I’m sure isn’t far from a lot of people.

John, when we spoke earlier in the season, you mentioned how invested you are in Joe and Emma’s marriage. Is there some hope for them?

JOHN WIRTH It’s a TV show, so [unlike in] real life, they’re castmembers, and unless something momentous was happening with one of them leaving the show, it’s likely they’re going to have some sort of a relationship. It’s hard to dramatize a relationship without conflict on television; it gets boring very quickly. I am invested in that marriage, and I enjoy writing it, and I enjoy other people writing it on the show.

This story just seemed to evolve and go this way as the season carried on and got more intense, and especially after episode 306 [with Joe’s ketamine dream] was so intense and kind of a break for the Leaphorn character, it just made sense that it would blow back on the marriage. I think it’s like with any marriage, you can only take so much, and I think Emma reached her breaking point, she was just like, “I just can’t do it anymore.”

He’s a very strong character, he goes his own way, he has a code. We explored this idea that he’s the big sheepdog for the Navajo Nation and he takes on responsibilities which are sort of beyond the pale for most Navajo people. They have a strong tradition and culture around death, around how they interact with the concept of death and human beings that die and dead bodies and so forth, and Leaphorn really had to throw himself into the breach of that on behalf of his people, at the expense of his marriage, at some point, and as we see it costs him.

I don’t think he expected it, I don’t think she expected it, it just worked that way and it happened. It gives us a lot of stuff to work with in season four: Are we going to break the marriage apart, are we going to mend it, do they get back together, do they start dating again? There are so many options for us going forward, built upon this pyramid of conflict. It’s been good for us as writers, thinking about what to do with them in season four.

I haven’t read the books, but my understanding is their marriage storyline goes a different way. Are you creating this aspect of the story as you go along? [Note: Book spoilers ahead.]

WIRTH Yeah, in the books she gets cancer and dies — she doesn’t die of cancer, she dies of sepsis, I think. If we were going to stick to the books, we would have done that and that doesn’t really work for us. We had to try to do something else, and we do a lot of invention on the show. We create things that aren’t in the books necessarily. The TV show has really become something unto itself. The books exist in their own little universe, and we now have our own little universe. We’re very much based on the world that Tony Hillerman created, the characters, but even if we are adapting a novel, we do a lot of inventing to tell a story that works for a television format and the characters that we have and we’re servicing all of these people, so things change, in a good way I hope.

Chris, you talked about trying to create three-dimensional Native characters. When I spoke to Jessica Matten for episode four, she talked about your long history of bringing Native culture to mainstream audiences, going back to your film Smoke Signals in 1998. Can you talk about why that’s so important to you and whether you feel progress has been made over the years?

EYRE I didn’t really think of it as such a revolutionary thing to put Native people onscreen and the further I got into my career as a filmmaker, the more it dawned on me, and I think other people, that we haven’t really had much progress with [representation of] Native people in the big screen and small screen in the 100-some years of movies, which is kind of curious. We’ve always been savages or nobles or antagonists, and before things like Dances With Wolves, there was not much insight into who Native people might be.

My first movie, Smoke Signals, was one of the first three-dimensional looks at Native people just being people. The fact that’s abnormal to show onscreen is kind of curious to me, it always has been.

My goal, I tease and say it’s “brown, round” (laughs) because my face is brown and round — like [showing] brown, round faces onscreen. I joke about that, but it shouldn’t be an absence. We were some of the first people in moving images in 1894 with Thomas Edison’s kinetoscope, and in Times Square they played penny movies of the Laguna Pueblo Indians [showing ceremonies and dances] that he had shot and taken to the East Coast. So we’ve always been in the movies, but to actually change the narrative of who Native people are has been a big challenge. Smoke Signals was my first effort at that in a commercial sense, and Dark Winds is the latter, which is literally for me just about restoring the three-dimensionality of Native people as people onscreen.

It’s best evidenced when you look at what John Wirth and the writers room have done in terms of showing Emma and Joe. I think about the end of season two, when they are in Monument Valley and they’re riding in the sunset on the motorcycle. All of the sudden, I said to myself, “It’s incredible that I’m seeing a Native couple in a functioning marriage that happen to be in love and are just going about the trials of their life like any American couple.” They happen to be Native and that’s a first because I’ve never seen two Native characters in love, you know, in any depth on the small screen or large screen in the history of movies, almost. It’s one of those curious things.

When we were finishing season two in Monument Valley, I thought what a wonderful day it was because we got to shoot Native people in Monument Valley. The very first images I saw as a young person were the John Wayne movies where he was in Monument Valley, and I just had this sense of rewriting history by placing our characters, Emma and Joe, in Monument Valley and reclaiming that narrative.

Speaking of the great history of Westerns, the name of the finale episode is “Iron Horse,” and it has that chase on the train. Is that something you’ve always wanted to do?

EYRE That didn’t get by you! An iron horse hearkens to the railroad, and what the railroad brought to the West, which was expansion, and thereby Native people were somewhat driven back by the expansion of the railroad in the West. It was interesting to shoot on the iron horse, and we shot here in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on an actual train. The funny part is it’s owned by George R.R. Martin, one of our executive producers. How many people can say they have a friend who owns a train? He owns the rail line and the train, along with another mutual partner in Santa Fe named Bill Banowsky, they own the Sky Railway. It goes from Santa Fe to a little town called Lamy, New Mexico, that intersects with Amtrak; it goes east to west and it’s about 20 miles of track.

It was used on Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan used the train in his movie, and it’s been used in other movies. We shot on that train to the delight of George R.R. Martin, and we got to do a sequence that — it’s not Mission: Impossible, but it’s a pretty cool sequence — with the doctor/bad guy and a gun fight with Chee and Leaphorn. It was a blast to shoot on the train and do drone shots and see the West. Just to play with the iron horse and the idea with Native characters.

WIRTH I did Hell on Wheels [which follows a Confederate soldier after the Civil War, and aired from 2011-16 on AMC] and we had a lot of train stuff in that show. You know, cowboys and trains kind of go together, and in a neo-Western like this one, it felt like there would be a train. It was presented to me that we had access to a train here in Santa Fe, so I thought it’d be a crime not to use it. George has a train, apparently. We just decided to build a story around the train, and we had to go back and lay in a few clues [earlier in the season] about where the character George was going to go and how we ended up at the train, but it was really fun being down there. Being around the trains and running around the train yard was cool.

It was also very, very hot. That’s just the reality of shooting in Santa Fe, they have a monsoon season here in New Mexico and we’re always trying to wrap before we get the monsoons, because you get rain, but more importantly you get lightning activity. I remember we had to shut down on a number of occasions for these electrical storms to pass. That’s always challenging when you’re shooting film, because you only have so much daylight, you only have so many hours with the crew and it becomes a whole thing. People have their phones out, looking at weather apps and trying to figure out how much longer it’s going to be before it passes. It’s kind of exciting.

At the end of the train sequence, they have a standoff with Dr. Reynolds, and there’s a moment where you think Joe is going to have to shoot him, but Chee ends up shooting. Given all the discussion this season of how a man is bound to you when you’ve killed him, what do you think is the significance of Chee killing him instead of Joe?

EYRE I think it alleviated Joe some, I mean Joe’s getting to be pretty — he is a deep character. I think it’s part of the community aspect of it, which is he’s saved by his partner, and I guess that’s part of the buddy movie. Chee is the underling, or maybe younger Leaphorn in training, so to speak, and he comes up and is able to help his hero, or the patriarch of the Western in this case, and I think that’s what the community is about, is them taking care of their business together.

In the next scene where Joe is telling George it’s not his fault that his friend Ernesto died, is it fair to say he’s also thinking some of his own personal experiences?

WIRTH That’s the way I wrote it. I’ve written a lot of cop shows over the years and one of my own personal beefs — when you’re writing contemporary cop shows, sometimes you’re lucky enough to hang around with real police officers, and I’ve done quite a bit of that over the years. I have a beef on some cop shows when the cops say to the victim of a crime, like if my brother gets murdered (in a macho voice), “We’re gonna get this guy, don’t worry about it. Whatever we have to do, we’re gonna find him.” That always feels false to me because that’s not something you would want to say to somebody, because maybe you can’t [find the killer] and then what? So that’s where I always start in a scene like that.

George really went through a lot, and I think Leaphorn was sort of replaying his own life story with George; because he was not able to save his own son, he was very determined to save this boy, and he did save this boy and the boy felt responsible for what happened to his friend just as Joe felt responsible for what happened to his son. I wanted him to acknowledge in that moment, where George said, “I feel guilty, it’s my fault,” I think I wrote the line for Leaphorn, which is just, “I know.” I thought it was very powerful in the moment and I was very happy with how it all played out.

Those scenes, if you write them in a one-sided way, you don’t have much going on. Ultimately, you have to come at it from both sides, and then if you’re lucky everything works and you end up with something really compelling. That moment, it’s only several seconds but it really was kind of beautiful, and then cutting over to [Gordo] Sena [played by A Martinez] and Chee and their little exchange about what they thought was going on over there, I thought also really worked out well. [Sena speculates that they’re talking about “all the things us mere mortals can’t control.”] A Martinez is the perfect guy to give a line like that too, because he can sell it.

The train scene wasn’t the only action in the episode; Bernadette also went through quite an ordeal. What was your favorite part of her experience in this episode?

EYRE My favorite part of Bernadette’s experience was almost being buried alive, which is a scary scene to shoot, even being on the outside and pretending she’s buried alive, to sit there and use the backhoe and pour dirt over the cab of the pickup and have the pickup reinforced so it doesn’t collapse on the actress, Jessica, and watch the windows fill up with dirt and she’s handcuffed to the steering wheel, coming out a drug-induced sleep by Budge [Raoul Max Trujillo]. It was pretty scary to shoot it, it felt scary to shoot it — what Bern was going through, it was horror. It’s absolute horror to think you’re being buried alive and she’s going to get buried alive in this episode. It turned out really well, and I was afraid for her. I thought that was the best part of the episode for her.

And then she gets out and is able to kill Budge using the metal feather that Joe gave her in season two. Little did we know that was a Chekhov’s gun! Was that always the plan for where it would end up?

WIRTH No, that kind of came up very late in the scene work. I want to say that was my idea, but I don’t know, it very well may have been someone else’s, but it was a good one. It went back so many episodes in the show and I think for superfans who watch every episode it must have been satisfying. It was very satisfying for me and it just made sense, it was there.

Right, she didn’t have much else on hand that she could use to protect herself.

WIRTH Yeah, I liked the way that worked out. We had a lot of conversations what to do with it after that: Would she keep it, would she melt it down, would she give it to somebody? We had a lot of conversations with Manny and Jen Wheeler, our Navajo [cultural] consultants, about what would Navajo attitudes be about something like that, that was used in that way. We decided just to let it go.

Things look hopeful for Bernadette and Chee at the end, when we see them reunite on her property as he’s feeding her horses. After three seasons, does this mean they’re finally together?

EYRE That was so sweet! It was so sweet. I really loved that. Chee is taking care of her horses, knowing she’s coming home. She arrives home in her, like, it was an Opel ’70s car. It pulls up, and they don’t use words. She gets out, leans up against her car watching him feed the horses, he jumps off the pickup truck like a cowboy, he takes his gloves off, smiles at her; she crosses her arms, smiles back. Then we cut back to him and do this nice push into his face and the clouds are so beautiful, they’re billowing, just a dream — his smile is so nice and bright. We cut back to Bernadette and push in close to her, and they’re just peering at each other with this longing, emotional glance and look. It’s a sweet scene between the two of them, and when I was shooting it, I said, “Wow, these guys have some energy.”

I thought it was really sweet, and that’s what I think a lot of what the series is, it’s a home drama. There’s the cop aspect of it, the mystery and the horror element of it, but at its heart, it’s really about following these characters and the progress of their community and their intersection together. My first movie Smoke Signals was a home drama about that family unit. Joe Leaphorn is the center of that, and you root for Bernadette and Chee, and in this case we can see that something’s coming back together, and we hope that in season four Leaphorn will do right and figure out what he needs to mend his relationship with his wife. That’s why I love the series so much, because it’s about the interpersonal relationships of these characters that I love.

What was your favorite moment of the season?

WIRTH I loved episode 306, I thought Erica Tremblay did a beautiful job directing it, and Zahn’s performance was off the charts. Max Hurwitz created the idea, he came into the room with the idea for that and how it would work, with telling the Navajo story about the twins and we flowed between the ketamine dream, the twins mythology told through the children’s play and what was happening in the world. The VFX that we did to create that world of Leaphorn’s dream and the subject matter, getting into the abuse of Native kids by clergy, it was heavy and deep, and really a powerful story for Leaphorn given the season. I feel like I personally didn’t have a lot to do with that episode, I just sort of watched it come together and happen, and it’s beautiful work by everybody. I’m so proud of the episode and so happy for all those guys and the work they did. Jenna Elfman was also quite good in that episode. It’s very creative, it’s a special episode of television for sure.

Are there any plans to have Jenna Elfman back, or any of the other guest stars from this season?

WIRTH No concrete plans really, but she is an FBI agent and the FBI has jurisdiction over the Navajo Nation, so it’s not entirely out of the possibility she could flow back through the story somehow. And Bruce Greenwood’s character [Tom Spenser] is out there in Morocco somewhere.

That was another interesting plot point, that he — the mastermind of the border scam — got away.

WIRTH That was important for me. You know, his character wreaked a lot of havoc amongst everybody in his world and also in world of the Navajo Nation with the whole drug scheme. A lot of people lost their lives and lost their liberty, and I just thought, sometimes rich guys have a way of walking away. It’s not an unusual circumstance and I just thought it was an important thing to dramatize because it happens and we all get mad about it. Giving him a wife who’s in a coma also took the curse off it in a way, because his life is not perfect, either. I was very pleased to have Bruce and Jenna on the show this year.

I’m sure lots of people are looking forward to next season. Is there anything you can tell us about season four yet?

EYRE What can I say about next season? I can say it’s going to be great! (Laughs.) I can say that it’s evolving, right now. I happen to shoot my first episode of season four next week, so I’m really gearing up for that day by day, I’m looking at locations and characters and studying all the stuff the writers have come up with. I’m completely excited about it.

WIRTH We’re using Hillerman’s novel The Ghost Way. One of the things I try to do every season is expand the world of Dark Winds, even if it’s a small thing, like in season two I wanted to see how rich white people live in comparison to how typical Navajo people live and these worlds bump up against each other. We spent a fair amount of time in B.J. Vines’ house and it’s this gorgeous mansion and we go to the Leaphorns’ house and it’s quite a different thing, and we go to the Navajo hogan [i.e., traditional Navajo homes] and that is a much different thing. Then in season three, we go to the border so we have a completely different environment, different world, it looks different, the people are different, there are different cops. In The Ghost Way, part of the story takes places in Los Angeles, so it’s an expansion of the world in a different way in season four.

That will be interesting, to see how you depict 1970s Los Angeles.

WIRTH You can’t find it in Los Angeles. We’ll find it somewhere.

Is there anything else you want to mention that I didn’t ask?

EYRE I just think that the show has this incredible balance to it, which is it’s about the West and it’s about a code of the West and it’s about Leaphorn and the matriarchal leadership of Emma and the home drama, but also has this excitement of mystery and horror in season three, and drama and chase. It’s this great blend that I always wanted to do. Dark Winds, the writers and producers and the actors — Zahn especially, Jessica, Kiowa — they’ve found “it” there’s an “it” to it, and it’s something I haven’t seen on television. I’m just so excited that we found the milieu of it.

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Dark Winds airs on AMC, with all of season three now available to stream on AMC+.