It turns out I watched Season 2 years ago …. but NOT Season 1!
There wasn’t much familiar about S1 except the bit players who lingered into next season … many of the Navajos and BJ Vines were familiar, but the storyline was not.
Season 1
- S1 E1 Armored car heist in Gallup. FBI arrives. Jim Chee arrives.
- S1 E2 Flashback to Leaphorn’s son’s death. Chee is FBI.
- S1 E3 Bank robbers lose the money, kidnap Mormons, get it back.
- S1 E4 Looking for the helicopter. Nice kid gets killed.
- S1 E5 Bernie learns about Chee. Love is on the rocks!
- S1 E6 Busy episode! Dirty FBI agent, robbers get theirs, Mormons are saved!
E1 We are slowly introduced to all the back story we need through flashbacks. We starts out with an armored car heist in Gallup. Some old fellow is feeding his sheep and marvels at the getaway helicopter flying low over his head. He turns up dead an episode later.
Jim Chee is the new guy assigned to Leaphorn’s substation. Shortly thereafter the FBI shows up. The FBI guy and Leaphorn have a total lack of respect for each other. Leaphorn calls him “Highpockets” which is better than his name, so that’s what we will call him. Nobody is surprised when it turns out that Chee is actually FBI, assigned to keep track of the armored car investigation.
E2 starts with flashback to “Three years before the Armored Car Heist”. The indians are having a “Native American Church” ceremony and the nice black fellow that runs the Trading Post attends. Not sure what the ceremony was about, but the punch line was that the Master of Ceremonies with the memorable name of Dillon Charley warns Navajo Guy Atcitty to say home from work tomorrow.
Guy Atcitty is the dad of the dead girl. He worked at the explosion site and has a lot of bad history with Leaphorn.
Guy stays home, and the next morning there is a big explosion at the Drumco Oil drilling site which kills Leaphorn’s beloved only child, Joe Junior. This super-sad event drives the whole season!
Then we get the introductory credits and are back to the present day.
Leaphorn is suspicious of the water run-off at the old dead guy’s home.
We spend more time in this episode with the other one of the main good guys – Bernadette Manuelito. She is the tall, lanky sergeant in the substation. I imagine she was second honcho in the station before Chee popped in, but right now she just sitting at a desk while Chee gets all the “come with me” assignments.
I am not crazy for her as I was for the Grantchester women. She’s very pretty and likeable and a great character, but that ole ZING just isn’t there. Probably just as well, concentrate on the show 🙂
.. later … They do a lot camera shots showing her excellent bone structure and a charming little wisp of hair that gets loose all the time.
We have the first annoying plot device of the season. The robbers pull off this brilliantly executed armored car heist. Then for some reason they stash the very large stacks of $20 bills behind a cheap painting which ends up for sale at the trading post where it as bought by an impossibly cheerful Mormon family. Duh!
After buying the ugly painting for some reason, the Mormons are on the road for 5 minutes before they are the ditch by a scary native dude. He takes the painting and the $$ and imprisons the Mormons in the bad guy’s cave / hideout.
Not we’ve got three mysteries going:
- the armored car heist (officially FBI jurisdiction, not Navajos)
- a dead grandpa and young girl
- now a missing family. Their Chrysler sedan is found empty on the roadside WITHOUT the family of four that was just at the trading post an hour ago.
The local stoner thinks they clearly were abducted by aliens!
Joe finds a preggo girl at the murder site. She fits in somehow, but I forgot how. I like her a lot as a character though…
Joe is having a flashback for some reason:
He is at Guy’s hogan, and Guy’s (murdered) daughter appears at the door in Joe Jr’s letter jacket.
There’s a little bit at the end of this episode worth mentioning. Joe’s wife Emma is counseling the preggo girl.
Emma says that the reason she didn’t have more kids was that the government doctor tied off her tubes after the first baby.
That make my blood boil when I heard it, then again when I typed this, and yet again right now as I am proof-reading. That is seriously eff-ed up!.
E3 No flashback this week!
We open at the used car lot of Devoted Dan, “a degenerate missionary and used-car dealer“. That’s his bio in Wikipedia!! They are usually kinder than that, so he must really be a degenerate 🙂 He is played by Rainn Wilson, who everybody out there who is not very young remembers as Dwight from The Office! I expect him to be comic relief, but it turns out he is involved in money-laundering the heist $$. Just seeing him makes me laugh, but he’s not funny here.
“I am the sun bearer“. That sent me back to the google machine. That was Bernie’s way to tell Chee to stop hitting on her. Her specific reference wasn’t clear to me, but the general message of back off was pretty darned clear. 🙂
Most of this episode is about Leaphorn’s niece’s Kinaaldá — a sacred four-day Navajo coming-of-age ceremony marking a girl’s transition into womanhood. The women’s outfits are gorgeously colorful. Tal, lanky Bernidette looked especially awesome. They spend a lot of time on shots of the young girl running “towards the east”. It was strangely moving.
Not sure how it advanced the plot, but I don’t care, it was really cool!
The fake priest dude does a great job of projecting evil just walking into a room. Maybe it’s the creepy music and the lighting, he scared the young woman into a premature birth just by talking to Leaphorn in front of her
E4 We replay the heist flashback of from E1 with more details on what happened. The creepy fake priest and big scary guy did the heist. They killed the guards, then they killed the pilot and rolled the helicopter into the pond…
… And the first thing they do back in real time after the flashback is kill the nice kid who was diving for the wreckage. I didn’t like that at all.
A lot of things happen in this episode. Bernadette went to the swiming hole looking for the kid. We got to see her skinny native butt as she stripped to swin out to his raft. The bad guys figured Leaphorn is on to them and plot to kill him, but Bernie hears the shots and saves him!
The big scary guy is “Frank Nakai who will never die” 🙂 He and the FBI are well known to each other already, so he spills the beans about it to Bernie. Uh Oh … trouble ahead.
The FBI moves in to dive the pond. Chee gets his FBI promotion and shows up in his regulation FBI shirt and tie and really pisses everybody off.
There is a bit of the supernatural going on here also. Wanda the “bad indian” who painted the terrible paints that hid the money is almost killed by a spider bite that happened because the actual scary native sorceress put a spell on her.
Bernie falls asleep on the job because of a spell. Don’t quite get this.
E5 starts with flashback to “Two weeks before the Armored Car Heist”. We learn how Devoted Dan became a money launderer. After the first few minutes, DD just melts away, never to be heard from again, I think.
We have a flashback to before the armored car heist, where we find that Highpockets (the FBI guy) had cut himself in on it. Nakai and the creepy guy with the glasses stay holed up in their cave where they’re keeping the Mormons.
The creepy medicine woman has hexed Bernie, but her and her house full of evil charms burn down, which seems to fix that problem!
E6 The bad guy’s plan seems like a terrible idea from the start:
- They will free the Mormon dad so he can drive to Flagstaff and hook up with Devoted Dan who will give him a camper-van.
- He will drive the camper-van back back to the hideout.
- The bank robbers will hide in the back of the van.
- The Mormon family will be able can drive right through all the checkpoints the FBI has set up to catch the bad guys, because they are a wholesome Mormon family!
- What could go wrong?
The dad is so rattled that he only goes about 10 miles before he crashes the car into a ravine. Guy and another Navajo fish him out of the wreckage.
So much for that great plan!
- Highpockets and Bernie head to the cave.
- Chee talks Navajo her on the police radio to warn her that Highpockets is dirty!
- Bernie runs away while Highpockets is taking a leak.
- Highpockets shoots Chee, but doesn’t kill him.
- Highpockets kills a bad guy in the cave, the other guy escapes.
- Highpockets shoots Joe also!
- Highpockets is about to finish off Chee for the second time when he is shot by Guy, who as appeared because the Mormon dad told him there was trouble and he came out to investigate..
- Chee and Bernie meet up and decide to drag Highpockets back into the cave so Guy can go home and not be involved.
- Explaining why a Navajo killed an FBI agent might not go well.
- Joe tracks down the other bad guy with the thick glasses who eventually kills himself for some reason after having a lot of emotions.
- … time passes ….
- Chee is staying (because of Bernie)
- Joe confronts him because he knows something funny went on back at the cave. But no resolution….
That’s it for Season 1!