1923 Recap: The Tedium of 'the Tedium of Healing'

1923

Ghost of Zebrina

Season 1 Episode 5

Editor’s Rating 3 stars ***

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Photo: Vulture; Photo: Christopher Saunders/Paramount+

We already know four months have fallen from the calendar between the black day Cara Dutton wrote to recall Spencer from the bush and the day his fiancée finally read the note aloud to him. And so I expected 1923 to return from its winter hiatus with an invigorating time jump — the promise of its favorite son’s urgent homecoming. Alas, no such luck. While a whole semi-dry January has gone by in real-time, it’s been but a few days or just a few hours for most of 1923’s storylines. Which means we pick up on this frosty February evening in a moment as grim as any we’ve seen: Harrison Ford is bedridden; Teonna is on the lam; Emma is dying of her own grief.

In fact, everyone in 1923 is dying all of the time. I know this is true of you and me and every character on every show about human beings, but rarely is the air so oppressively thick with the threat of collective, inescapable demise. “Life had become a series of melancholy routines,” Elsa tells us via narration as Cara washes her husband’s wounds and Emma tends to John’s burial plot. “Our family had lost itself in the tedium of healing,” she adds, painting a rosier picture than I would. This does not look like healing. The young and the old are dying, drip by drip, riding their horses in the direction of their own unadorned graves.

Except maybe Teonna, who is charging at life with whatever spirit she’s managed to hold onto. One thing that’s troubled me about her story line — besides the unabated graphic violence — is how unmoored it’s appeared from what’s happening with the Duttons. But this week, on “Ghost of Zebrina,” Taylor Sheridan finally closes the thematic loop. Spencer Dutton is struggling to secure passage back to the family ranch at the same time Teonna is sleeping rough in what will one day become Badlands National Park. They’re both on journeys of homecoming, though Spencer’s is a duty-bound return and Teonna’s a desperate escape. But finally these separate threads are connected by an underlying logic: Neither Spencer nor Teonna can rest until they submit to the pull of their own ancestral lands.

So let’s talk about Teonna’s plight first. It upsets me the most, and thus I’d like to get it out of the way, preferably in one headlong breath. After killing Sister Mary and — surprise! — also the nun who raped her in the tub, Teonna flees the Indian school in which she’s been held prisoner since the series began. On foot, she ventures into the rugged landscape where she’ll have to trudge 400 miles, outwit hungry wolves, and take shelter on the distinctive flat-topped spires of South Dakota to make it home. Eventually, her bad luck runs out, and a sheep-herding Native American called Hank agrees to bring her to safety. Meanwhile, back at the school, Father Renaud initiates a manhunt to find the double murderer, but (1) Teonna cleverly erased her tracks with branches resourcefully tied to her waist, and (2) I’m doubtful the pasty deacons Renaud dispatched can hack even a few hours out of doors.

Back in East Africa, Spencer has made comparatively little progress in the direction of Yellowstone. When he and Alex arrive in Mombasa, he learns the only way to America is via England on an ocean liner that takes a month to get there and doesn’t leave for another three weeks. Resolved that he doesn’t have seven weeks to waste on what will ultimately be only a third of his journey, he seeks out a less salubrious alternative to the RMS Franconia (which, for all y’all history nerds, will be requisitioned in WWII and retrofitted as a troopship). He offers a gruff tugboat captain with an angry, bloody cough 30 quid for the privilege of being his deckhand as far as the Suez Canal, an arrangement Spencer deems too dangerous for Alexandra. And though he does write her a not-quite Dear John letter — he promises to send for her one day … — he can’t quite commit to it. Take me now or lose me forever is Alex’s response when she wakes during his half-assed effort to skulk out in the early hours. Spencer makes the right choice, praise be.

Because if we’re going to be stuck on a tugboat with taciturn Spencer, we absolutely need Alex for levity. She’s the only central character who speaks beyond the demands of politeness and necessity. She tells her little jokes and even delivers the saccharine clunkers — her maritime declaration that though their vacation is ending, their “adventure is just beginning” is a prime example — archly. Helen Mirren’s Cara Dutton might be the heart and soul of the show, but even she reeks of doom in the wind. Alex is the only vital branch on this decaying family tree.

Or so we hope. Our seafaring trio hasn’t made it far before the captain perishes of what I assume is TB, leaving Alex and Spencer to fend for themselves, which they cannot. These landlubbers don’t know shit about boats. The episode ends in a collision with a massive abandoned ghost ship that capsizes the tugboat. As the camera pulls away from the wreckage, there are no signs of life, no one scrambling for a gulp of salty air in the heavy seas. I can’t believe Spencer and Alex are dead. I can’t imagine that someone as alive as Alex could ever be so suddenly dead, and yet this show isn’t too precious when it comes to saving Duttons. For example, I did not expect them to let Emma die so swiftly from her broken heart.

Poor Cara Dutton, who has plenty of allies in Bozeman’s other cattle-ranching families, but no soldiers. After John’s death, Emma, who for decades was her most reliable companion, wastes away. Cara’s forced to sell the cattle to pay the mortgage on the ranch. Jacob is still mostly bedridden after the shoot-out with Banner’s men, though he’s slowly improving. He’s no longer the acting head of the family, but by the end of the episode, he’s something of a consigliere, advising Cara on what moves Banner might be making.

And orphaned Jack is too overcome with hate — for Banner, for the cowboys who’ve deserted the Yellowstone, for the way things are — to be useful to anyone. Though there is hope. When Elizabeth tells him the hate in his heart has crowded out even his love for her, they finally marry, even if they’re the only ones technically present to hear the vows. Before long, Elizabeth is pregnant, perhaps with John Dutton II, the man who will one day be John Dutton III’s father. I pray that the whole long line of them continues to wear those fun wool chaps.

Cara’s allies have suffered, yes, but her enemies have grown powerful. Banner is a rich man now by way of his alliance with Donald Whitfield — the miner who wants Yellowstone for gold. Whitfield upgrades Banner’s log-and-sod cabin to a stately home with running water, gas, and electricity. Banner appears slightly wary as he begins to understand the scope of Whitfield’s predatory ambition, but not so much that he refuses the keys to the castle. He’ll help Whitfield buy up the whole valley if that’s what it takes to live well, and they start with the Strafford ranch abandoned by Elizabeth’s mother.

If the Dutton way of life is a stand-in for Taylor Sheridan’s conception of the good, Whitfield may be his clearest distillation yet of what ails the modern world. “Cities are the mastery of one’s surroundings,” Whitfield declares, his every word lousy with hubris and alienation from the land. Even the word “surrounding” would be anathema to Sheridan’s heroes. The world doesn’t “surround” you. You’re of it. Whitfield’s Achilles’ heel, of course, is that he thinks Jacob is dead, which means he grossly underestimates the Dutton clan.

Praying for reinforcements, Cara starts each day with a carriage ride to the post office to pick up a telegram from her nephew that never arrives. That is until Alex corrects Spencer’s mistaken belief that there’s no way to reach Montana from Mombasa. Soon, a flotilla of ships is passing word from Kilindini Harbour to the Indian Ocean and up the Red Sea through the Suez Canal that Spencer Dutton is on the move. Eventually, a telegram is sent to a one-room post office serving Paradise Valley and the ranchers who live just past the route of the mailman, beyond the electricity that powers modern life.

One day soon, his aunt will hold it in her hand, though after the splashy little trick Sheridan played with time at the end of episode four, it’s very unclear what’s happening when. (The first snow has yet to fall, so I think we can assume it’s still the year 1923, at least.) Cara cries from the sheer relief that help is on the way; there will be more Duttons to take up this fight. The question is this: When she holds the telegram in her hand, is Spencer just embarking on his adventure home — the one the episode teases, again and again, will be his last — or is he already drowning in a dark and swirling sea?