AMC’s Dark Winds is a Western noir thriller based on the adventures of Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn and detective Jim Chee, written by Anthony Grove Hillerman. Set during the 1970s, the TV show follows a series of gruesome crimes taking place on the Navajo reservation in the Southwestern United States. The first and second seasons center around two different cases with one connecting link between them, so in order to make this recap much more entertaining, I won’t be following the sequence of events shown in the first two seasons and would like to tell you a story that would refresh your memory about the characters and everything that took place to prepare you for the latest season 3. So here we go.
Spoiler Alert
An Explosion in the Well
In 1968, three years before the main events of the show, Joe and his wife Emma lost their only son, Joe Jr., in an explosion on the Drumco oil drilling site in Kayenta. Everyone in the area believed it was an accident that took the lives of six of their people, and therefore the drilling site was quickly shut down. Throughout the series, Joe blamed himself for his son’s death, as he believed he could have averted such a tragedy if he had listened to his wife. Emma wanted Joe to convince their son to go to college for higher studies so he could have a bright future, but Joe Jr. didn’t want to leave. He wanted to stay close to his girlfriend, Anna Atcitty, and earn enough money to start a family. Joe didn’t nudge him enough because he too wanted his son to stay close to the family, a decision that Joe regretted till the end of season 2.
An Armored Car Heist
After the Drumco explosion, the entire community blamed the White man for their loss, forcing Drumco out of business, at least in the area. They had no other choice but to sell the cursed drilling site to another White man’s company, BJ Vines Mining Company. The thing was, the names on the lease changed, but the intentions remained the same. BJ Vines, or Ben, wasn’t any less evil. He was a direct threat to the community, who didn’t have the best intentions in mind for the Navajo people. This was the reason why James Tso and Frank, the core members of an extremist group called the Buffalo Society, paid Ben a visit and asked him to stay off their land, but Ben, being a shrewd businessman, didn’t budge. James and Frank knew that they needed money to stop a White settler from purchasing more land in the area. In 1971, the duo, with the help of an FBI agent, Leland Whitover, masterminded an armored car heist in Gallup and escaped via a helicopter.
After the robbery, James Tso and Frank returned to Kayenta and shot the pilot dead, dumping the helicopter and the pilot’s dead body in a pond near the property that belonged to James’ grandfather, Hosteen Tso. It was suggested that Hosteen had seen the helicopter and considered it a bad omen, which was why he visited an elderly blind woman named Margaret, who was staying with her 19-year-old granddaughter, Anna, at Big Rock Motel. Hosteen wanted to tell Margaret about his visions, which would have exposed the crimes of the Buffalo Society to the world. And therefore, in order to cover up their tracks, James and his lover, who practiced witchcraft, killed Hosteen and Anna, only leaving Margaret alive because she couldn’t have possibly seen the real face of the monsters.
James and Frank had also found a way to launder the stolen money. They came across a corrupt Christian missionary, Devoted Dan, who used to deal in used cars. James clicked pictures of the “pious” man enjoying with a young girl in the back of his van and blackmailed him to launder the money, through which James started purchasing the land surrounding the Drumco land to stop Ben from reopening the drilling site.
Joe Connects the Dots
While investigating Hosteen’s murder case, Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn found out that Hosteen had twin grandsons, Benjamin and James. And the man who visited Joe in the tribal police station, dressed as a Christian priest, wasn’t Benjamin, but James, a convicted state criminal, who was already in violation of his parole and had been hiding on the Navajo reservation. He took the disguise of his brother to stay close to his grandfather’s property and take care of the stolen money. The thing is, James and Frank wanted to do the right thing. They stood for the decolonization and liberation of the Native people and wanted to protect them from the White settlers, but they went too far with their measures. They started killing their own people in the name of the greater good. And even though James was committed to the cause till the very end, Frank couldn’t shake off the thought that James killed his own grandfather and a 19-year-old girl to serve his agenda. Frank never wanted to spill the blood of his own people in the name of revolution, which eventually led to a falling out between the two.
Both James and Whitover Are Dead
In season 1’s ending, Bernadette “Bern” Manuelito, a sergeant at the local police station, tracked down James’ lover and tried to make an arrest, but she wouldn’t give up easily. In a violent clash between the two, James’ lover lost her life in the ensuing fire in her house. Meanwhile, Joe’s new deputy, Jim Chee, an undercover agent for the FBI, found out about his handler, Whitover’s involvement in the robbery, and followed him to James and Frank’s hideout. Around the same time, Joe reached the cave and confronted James and Frank, asking them to surrender, but soon Whitover walked in and pointed a gun at Joe. Frank couldn’t believe that James had joined hands with a White man and tainted their cause. He had a sudden change of heart and tried to stop Whitover, which was when the corrupt FBI agent shot Frank. Whitover didn’t want to get involved in the Indians’ mess and just wanted his money to have an early retirement, but before he could escape the valley, Jim stopped him near the cave’s exit. Jim wanted to arrest Whitover, but before he could do so, Anna’s father, Guy, appeared out of nowhere and shot him dead. James tried to escape, but Joe followed him to a hut where Joe tried his best to convince James to drop the weapon, but he didn’t want to go back to prison again. Joe left the hut, and James shot himself dead.
Meanwhile, Bern, who had escorted the kidnapped Mormon family to safety, returned to the cave to find Whitover dead. Jim knew that if they left the body in the open, it would open a whole can of worms, which no one would be able to deal with, and therefore put Whitover’s body in the cave and triggered an explosion, destroying all the evidence. In his report, Jim mentioned that Frank shot Whitover, and the latter himself died in the explosion. However, three months later, after the final investigation came to an end, Joe told Jim that the FBI only found one body in the cave. Frank likely fled. Soon after the whole fiasco, Jim left the agency and became a private investigator, while Joe and Emma took in the teenager Sally Growing Thunder, the daughter of James’s lover. James had raped Sally, and she was pregnant with James’ child. Joe and Emma decided to help Sally look after her newborn baby, which helped the grieving parents fill some of the void left by their son’s death.
A New Investigation Unravels Old Secrets
The second season of Dark Winds began with a Native American, Emerson Charley, previously diagnosed with cancer, dying in a car explosion outside the hospital. As Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn visited the crime scene, he picked up a timer spring at the explosion site, implying that someone had planted a bomb in Emerson’s car. Sheriff Gordo Sena couldn’t make sense of it, as who would want to kill an old man already dying of cancer? Joe believed that Emerson was going to expose some really dark secrets, which was why the concerned party was in a hurry to get rid of him. So, from here, I won’t burden you with the case investigation, I’ll just lay down the facts.
Emerson’s brother, Dillon Charley, ran a church called the People of Darkness on the Navajo reservation. In 1968, Dillon, after a ceremony, had warned Anna’s father, Guy, not to go to work at the Drumco site, as he had some ominous vision last night. He also asked Guy to tell others to spend the day at home, but Guy didn’t communicate the information, and six people lost their lives in the explosion. Some years later, Dillon was killed in a car accident likely orchestrated by the same men who killed Emerson.
BJ Vines Is The Real Culprit
As Joe got further involved, he figured out that Emerson’s death was directly linked to the Drumco explosion that even killed Joe’s teenage son. Back in the day, a senior physical chemist, Carl Lebeck, working for the geological department, had conducted a survey on Drumco’s drilling site and found traces of high-purity uranium compounds on the property. However, the original report never reached Drumco, as their courier who picked up the documents from the geological bureau handed it to BJ Vines, or Ben, who altered the contents, making Drumco believe that there was no oil or extractable uranium on their land. Ben then hired a psychotic hitman, Colton Wolf, who planted explosives on the oil well, to spook Drumco into selling their property to Ben for cheap. And after the dust settled, he decided to open his own mine on the site to extract the uranium and sell it for profit.
Though the series doesn’t make it clear, I believe Dillon, who had gotten mixed up with the wrong people, likely for money, knew that Ben would blow up the site or pull off a similar act, which was why he wanted Guy and the others to not go to work on that tragic day. And Ben, who didn’t want to leave any loose ends behind, hired Wolf to kill Carl Lebeck, Dillon, and later Emerson. After Dillon’s death, Ben also took over Dillon’s church, the People of Darkness, and turned it into a cult for White people where Ben was hailed as some sort of spiritual healer.
Emerson believed that it was Ben who had cursed him with cancer to hide his crimes, which was why after his diagnosis he asked his son, Tomas, to steal a box from Ben’s locker. He told Tomas that the lockbox held something to break the curse, while in reality it contained the trophies that Ben liked to keep as a token of his victories. It turned out that Tomas was having an affair with Ben’s wife, Rosemary Vines, and therefore used his connection to gain entry to Ben’s estate to steal the box that contained the original reports from the Arizona geological department. After the box went missing in Ben’s absence, Rosemary hired a private detective, who was none other than our handsome Indian, Jim Chee, and asked him to retrieve the box before her husband arrived home from his hunting expedition. Basically, Rosemary wanted the world to know the secrets her vicious husband had been hiding all along while using her father’s money to build an empire of his own where he had imprisoned his wife.
Joe and Chee raced against time to find Tomas to inquire about the lockbox and its contents, but before they could reach him, Ben called in Colton Wolf, who killed Tomas in the desert and burned the documents in the box. From the site, Joe picked up a buckle that belonged to his late son. He couldn’t understand why Ben was keeping his son’s buckle in his locker, but soon Joe figured out the truth. Ben took pride in being a hunter… a killer, and Joe Jr.’s buckle was a trophy for him that reminded him how he had tricked the Indians and taken over their lands.
Joe Left BJ Vines To Die
Colton Wolf, the killer BJ Vines had hired, was quite a case study himself. When he was young, his mother, likely suffering from mental illness, shot her husband and young daughter while Colton was away. When Colton returned home, he found his mother holding a gun in the bedroom. Colton was filled with anger and rage. He didn’t know what to do and therefore took the gun from his mother and likely shot her, a death he couldn’t actually make peace with. He believed his mother was alive, and as he grew up, he used his money earned from his assassination contracts to hire private detectives to find his dead mother. Yes, it all sounds insane, but that was the man Ben had hired. I guess he knew that Colton was a ticking time bomb who would one day or another blow up in his face. When Joe arrested Colton, it was the moment Ben realized that it was time to cut all ties with the man. The lad somehow managed to escape police custody and arrived at Ben’s door to get some money to run away. Ben tricked him into believing that he was on his side, but as soon as Colton started to walk away, Ben took out his hunting rifle and shot him in the back like a coward. He then took the money he had given to Colton, along with a pendulum to keep as a souvenir of his victory against the monster.
In Dark Winds season 2’s ending, Joe, certain of Ben’s involvement in the Drumco disaster and many other murders that took place on the reservation, arrested Ben for conspiracy to commit homicide, but he was soon released on bail. Joe believed that he would be able to bring justice to his son and all those people who lost their lives, but he was wrong. This was when he recalled his father, Henry’s words, from when he had told Joe that American law will always favor the White man and ignore the loss of the Native Americans Ben had killed to serve his interest. Henry said that the Charleys and his grandson, Joe Jr., deserved Indian justice. But Joe didn’t want to soak his hands in blood. However, when Ben got out on bail, Joe had no other option but to serve this man with the justice he truly deserved. He abducted Ben from his estate and left him in the desert, where he froze to his death.
Sena Leaves His Position
In season 2’s ending, Sheriff Gordo Sena, who was previously attacked by Colton Wolf, paid a visit to Joe and told him that he was taking an early retirement as he wanted to spend the rest of his days with his wife. He told Joe that now he could arrest BJ Vines as the man had skipped bail and a judge had issued a warrant in his name. Funny thing is, throughout this interaction, Joe didn’t dare look Sena in the eye because he knew that the man would figure out what exactly had happened to BJ Vines. I believe Sena knew, and he didn’t want to bother himself with the details as Joe did the right thing getting rid of such an evil man.
Bernadette Takes Up The New Job
In Dark Winds season 2, Bernadette, willing to rise up the ladder, applied for a job on the Border Patrol, who were looking for some Native officers after the Congress passed a bill. At first, Joe didn’t want Bern to leave him or her position but then he was reminded that he did the same thing with his son, and therefore quickly changed his decision and told Bern to pursue her dreams. In season 2’s ending, Bern, after putting in a lot of thought, took the job to find her own way in life. Joe melted his son’s buckle and cast a feather to give to Bern as a parting gift implying he didn’t want to cage the little bird anymore. Finally, Bern left Kayenta, bidding goodbye to her lover, Jim Chee, who decided to stay back in the reservation and fill in Bern’s shoes to help Joe with upcoming cases. But worry not, this isn’t sad news. I’ve seen the trailer for season 3, and yes Bern is coming back, so we can expect their romance to bloom in the next season.
Joe and Emma Find Some Closure
In the end, Joe and Emma held a ceremony at their house to celebrate the first laugh of Sally’s newborn. Throughout season 1 and season 2, Sally saw herself as a victim of her circumstances who would have to spend the rest of her life in the desert just like her mother. But when her son laughed for the first time, it filled her with a new hope that there was nothing wrong with her. Even Emma and Joe didn’t want to hold back Sally anymore, and therefore, in the end, Sally made the decision to leave the reservation to find a new life in the city. I believe Joe and Emma made peace with her decision as they didn’t want to repeat the same mistakes they made with their son. And yes, Joe finally fixed his bike and took Emma for a ride, implying they found some closure for their son’s death.
