This text accommodates spoilers by season 3 of Reservation Canine.
At first look, the scene seems to be like a well-worn slasher setup: A girl approaches a weathered manor and cautiously crosses the brink. The frightened look in her eyes indicators impending violence, instructing audiences to brace themselves. However in a current episode of Reservation Canine, the stellar FX ensemble comedy a few group of Native teenagers, the everyday plotline will get a poignant overhaul. We quickly be taught that the eerie dwelling, entered by the mysterious Deer Woman (performed by Kaniehtiio Horn)—a personality based mostly on Native folklore—stands on the identical website because the boarding college that she was compelled to attend with different Native youngsters.
Over the course of the episode, which was directed by the filmmaker Danis Goulet, the present focuses on the injuries she sustained lengthy earlier than she made it to that creaky porch. Shot within the model of a Seventies art-horror movie, these boarding-school scenes paint a terrifying image of childhood torment. In a prisonlike ambiance managed by nuns talking a garbled language, the younger Deer Woman witnesses the shadowy figures commit a slew of escalating abuses: forcibly slicing a Native baby’s hair, hitting the scholars who communicate their very own language, dragging them out of their beds at night time and right into a room with a person identified cryptically as “Mr. Minor.”
Written by the Reservation Canine co-creators Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi together with Chad Charlie, who has additionally acted on the sequence, this episode, titled “Deer Woman,” is daring and visually arresting, largely departing from the present’s typical indie-film aesthetics. By framing one character’s story in such a viscerally unnerving model, Reservation Canine explores the bigger, real-life tragedy of the assimilationist boarding faculties which have terrorized Indigenous peoples in North America. It’s a part of an impressed resolution, within the present’s third and remaining season, to flesh out the backstories of its sprawling ensemble with genre-melding, multi-episode arcs that subtly illustrate the connections between painful occasions previous and current. The elders of Reservation Canine be taught classes that additionally form the way forward for the teenage protagonists, making this remaining installment one thing of a group coming-of-age story.
Earlier than Deer Woman’s journey to the location of her boarding college, she encounters Bear (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai), one of many present’s principal characters, at a diner the place he’s stranded with no approach dwelling. In its first two seasons, Reservation Canine centered on Bear and the remainder of the titular crew, all of whom had been reeling from the demise of their buddy Daniel and plotting to make it out of Okern, the city they reside in on their Oklahoma reservation. However now that Bear, Cheese (Lane Issue), Elora (Devery Jacobs), and Willie Jack (Paulina Alexis) have returned from final season’s clandestine California journey to honor Daniel, the Rez Canine are spending much more time being supervised by their elders—and, within the course of, studying in regards to the histories which have structured reservation life as they understand it.
The present has all the time made room for the adults to reckon with their very own points, and this season, their elevated proximity to the teenagers has introduced these ruptures to the fore. Within the episode “Maximus,” Bear is hit with a dart whereas strolling by the desert alone and wakes up blindfolded, tied to a chair in an unfamiliar trailer. Reservation Canine’ episodes continuously zoom in on one principal character at a time, and those following Bear have usually tended to focus on how resistant he’s to acknowledging uncomfortable feelings—or to admitting that he wants different individuals. Right here, Bear will get a glimpse of what his life may be like if he continues on that trajectory: Maximus (Graham Greene), the embattled man holding Bear captive, reveals that he’s from Okern, too, and his time there may be partly guilty for a lifetime of loneliness and repeated institutionalization. When cops descend upon his trailer on the finish of the episode, his give up is unsurprising however wrenching to observe.
Utilizing narrative to discover the afterlives of grief is frequent on tv, however a part of what makes Reservation Canine so outstanding is how deftly the sequence incorporates the tales of elders akin to Maximus into the arc of its principal characters’ improvement. By interacting with older generations, the Rez Canine have grown as younger individuals, as mates, and as members of a group wherein many adults haven’t meaningfully confronted their very own grief. When he lastly makes it dwelling to Okern, Bear’s time with Maximus actually impacts how he interacts together with his family and friends. However simply as Reservation Canine grants Deer Woman a weighty backstory, the present additionally treats Maximus as greater than a catalyst to Bear’s progress.
There have been quite a few first-rate casting selections on the sequence all through its run to date, however Greene is arguably its most profound: The Oneida actor is extensively identified for enjoying the stereotypically taciturn Sioux drugs man Kicking Fowl alongside Kevin Costner in Dances With Wolves. (That efficiency landed him a Greatest Supporting Actor nod on the 1991 Academy Awards, making him the second Indigenous man to ever be nominated in that class. Thus far, no appearing Oscars have gone to any Indigenous individuals.) On Reservation Canine, Greene’s character doesn’t exist solely to assist Bear perceive his personal loneliness; his ache is palpable, and his experiences are handled with care.
Different episodes this season have returned to Maximus and the decades-old roots of his isolation. Final week’s “Home Manufactured from Bongs” was a trippy fever dream firmly located within the ’70s atmosphere that formed Maximus, paying shut and empathetic consideration to how he first started drifting as a young person. This week’s “Frankfurter Sandwich” is a surprising episode that highlights the present’s trademark humor even because it lays naked a few of the guilt felt by the reservation’s elder males, who perform like well-meaning uncles for the youngsters. As the boys relay Maximus’s story to Cheese, they acknowledge for the primary time how closely they really feel the lack of the group member they uncared for.
These confessions push Cheese, who’d been withdrawing from the Rez Canine, to reconnect together with his mates. And for viewers, who’ve seen Maximus carted away by police as an grownup and shunned by his friends as a young person, watching his former mates grapple with their position in his institutionalization is a layered expertise that underscores how sensitively the sequence maps its narrative. As Reservation Canine approaches its conclusion, the present’s willingness to confront all of its characters’ pasts—and, by extension, the nation’s—nonetheless grants it a artistic edge that will likely be value revisiting as soon as it’s over.
