An entire episode worth of spiritual breakthroughs probably wasn’t what you were expecting from Dark Winds. But in this world, you can’t separate a man’s spiritual crisis from his daily battles. So if you think about it, it makes sense that Dark Winds has dedicated the entire 6th episode of the third season to a very unavoidable journey for Leaphorn. That’s what all these signs and symbolisms have been leading to so far. Leaphorn needed to look within himself to find the answers that the medicine woman withheld from him. But she did that for the right reasons. Only Leaphorn could navigate the foggy memories that had defined the man he ended up becoming. So while it’s not a comfortable experience, it’s something that will only help Leaphorn come to terms with his moral transgressions.
Spoiler Alert
Where does Leaphorn go when he’s unconscious?
The reenactment of the story of the Navajo Hero Twins draws a bold parallel to Leaphorn’s story. It’s Dark Winds’ way of acknowledging Leaphorn as the savior that he is. It’s now that we get to know that Leaphorn’s experience is not too dissimilar to the Navajo legend of the Hero Twins. But first, let me give you some more context before I attempt to highlight the connections between the two. We’re finally at the point where Dark Winds circles back to what we saw at the start of the season. A dart going straight into Leaphorn’s neck. And the person of interest looked very much like a monster. Since then, we’ve seen this monster, someone Leaphorn identifies as Ye’iitsoh, act a threat to Leaphorn and everyone he’s trying to save. We now know that the first time we saw Ye’iitsoh wasn’t the first time for Leaphorn. He’s been out looking for him, even though he’s terrified of actually running into him. And now that his search for Ye’iitsoh has become the same as his search for George, there’s a possibility that Ye’iitsoh follows Leaphorn. That might’ve been how he ended up in Shorty’s cabin in the woods. And now he’s shown up again near the coal mines, where Leaphorn has arrived following George’s trail.
Whatever was on the dart that goes into Leaphorn’s neck must’ve been potent. It knocks him out and sends him down a path he didn’t expect to tread. And this is where the story of the Hero Twins and their battle with Ye’iitsoh comes in. The first parallel is obvious. The Hero Twins faced Ye’iitsoh and won out against his wrath. And a strange turn of fate means it’s somehow Leaphorn’s job to deal with the monster he’s been seeing. In the Navajo legend, Monster Slayer and Born for Water left the safety of their mother’s love to kill the monsters and cleanse the yellow world of evil. If there’s anyone who knows a thing or two about taking care of monsters, it’s Joe Leaphorn. Since Ye’iitsoh’s been on his mind a lot lately, it makes sense that Leaphorn’s mind frames his search for the answers along the line of the Hero Twins’ story. So even though he might not be aware of that yet, he’s one of the Hero Twins when his subconscious mind wakes up in the yellow desert. We don’t know the man whose corpse he finds on the way. But it’s this man’s blood that leads him to two boys who also resemble the Hero Twins. Since the last person he’s seen is George, he mistakes the older kid for him. But the kid’s not George at all. He’s a teen Leaphorn, and that little guy is Leaphorn’s cousin, William.
Like how the Hero Twins go to their grandmother’s house to find a way to slay Ye’iitsoh, Leaphorn follows teenage Joe and little Will to his parents’ house. Everyone other than Leaphorn seems to know why he’s gone back to that part of his adolescence. But they can’t really help him out. He has to figure out the purpose of this visit by himself. There are signs of the monster around. He even finds a branch that looks like the ones on Ye’iitsoh. It can’t be a good thing that in this memory, Leaphorn’s plate is broken in half the same way his plate broke a few days ago. His anguish over the murder he committed makes the water turn to blood. The people in Leaphorn’s memory can’t give him the answers because they’re not exactly real. It’s Leaphorn’s mind figuring it’s way out of a daunting crisis. So he’s basically talking to himself. The only other real voice he hears in that memory is that of George. But George is not in his memory. He’s in the real world trying to wake Leaphorn up. George could’ve skipped the place and saved his own life. But it’s his gutsy decision to stick around and help out Leaphorn that makes him kind of like the other Hero Twin.
What does Leaphorn remember?
Leaphorn’s pretty beat up. So it’s not gonna be very easy for George to wake him up. Even when Leaphorn tries to come to his senses, he goes back to the yellow world again. When he was at his parents’ house, he relived the memory of his father pushing him to go to church like his cousin Will. Joe didn’t want to go to church. And the look on Will’s face isn’t that of a very happy child. When Leaphorn finds himself in the desert again and goes inside what looks like a mix of the police station and a church, he sees the guy whose corpse he saw. He was the priest at the church that Joe Leaphorn and Will used to go to when they were kids. And his memories of the priest are the clues Leaphorn has been following in this convoluted journey. The priest was killed. And since Leaphorn’s now a cop, the priest wants him to solve his murder case. The process of Leaphorn’s spiritual healing seems to be a puzzle of sorts. He’s repeatedly told that he needs to find out who killed the priest to be able to go anywhere in this maze. This is the part of the spiritual process that gives Leaphorn the strength to get up in the real world. It’s almost like knowing what he needs to do has given him the strength to keep at it. In the play, the Hero Twins’ grandmother sends them to the House of the Sun to seek weapons fit to battle Ye’iitsoh.
The same way, Leaphorn gives George the gun to shoot Ye’iitsoh. But that’s all that Leaphorn manages to do before passing out again. And this time, he’s locked up in the interrogation room. When he’s made to face Emma’s very valid complaints, Leaphorn’s grappling with his guilt and the helplessness of his circumstances. He’s never been able to be there for Emma the way she needed him to be. And he’s beaten himself up over that. The nature of his work has always kept him too busy to truly be present. Now, when Emma swallows the key that could free him from his shackles, he realizes that his failures as a husband aren’t things he could’ve avoided as an empathetic lawman. And the damage he’s done isn’t something he can fix anymore. So all he needs to do is look ahead. But even this guilt had a purpose. It’s what’s holding him prisoner and making him face another kind of guilt he’s carried ever since he was a kid. As he helplessly screams and watches the priest hurt his little cousin, Leaphorn remembers just how horrible it was for him to know that the priest was a predator. He couldn’t do anything about it back then. And the guilt has taken a heavy toll on him. But even in this crisis, Leaphorn’s urge to fix things makes him get up on his feet in the real world. Like the Hero Twins fought Ye’iitsoh, Leaphorn fights the monster and gets terribly wounded in the process. Victory won’t be easy for Leaphorn. It wasn’t easy for the Hero Twins either.
Is Ye’iitsoh a man or a monster?
When Leaphorn is pulled back into the yellow world again, he tackles the priest and locks him up. The priest is persistent with his demand for what he believes is justice. He wants Leaphorn to find his murderer. This is a situation where Leaphorn is being pulled apart by two opposing forces, his duties as a man with a police badge and his responsibilities as the protector of his people. And since there’s no one else who better represents the danger of Leaphorn’s unlawful acts of courage, his mind conjures up Special Agent Sylvia Washington. Washington is here to remind Leaphorn that his job has limitations. She stands for the part of Leaphorn’s mind that makes him a rule-follower at his job. That part of him knows that all he’s expected to do as a cop is to help push the false image of safety. People want to know that the men of God can’t be hurt. It will mess up their whole structure of faith to believe that a priest can be an evil man. And Leaphorn’s job is to reaffirm their faith by catching the priest’s killer. When Leaphorn wakes up again, he takes another step towards victory by reloading the empty magazine for George, bringing them even closer to the legend of the Hero Twins.
Leaphorn’s soul hasn’t found what it’s been seeking yet. So he keeps getting pulled back into the memories that are potent with emotions that have long troubled him. I guess at some point, his mind figures that the person he should be speaking to is himself. They’re his emotions. So who other than a teen Joe can give him more clarity about what made him who he is? When he sees the gun in Joe’s hand, he knows that Joe means to protect his cousin and all the other kids who’ve fallen victim to the White man’s religion. And Joe means to do so by crossing that line that separates a man from a killer. But Leaphorn isn’t exactly right when he suspects himself of being the priest’s murderer. He thinks that, as a teenager, he dipped his foot into the world of darkness by killing the priest and saving his people from him. So when he finds the priest again, he kills him to do what he believes he’s already done before. But he’s not solved the case right. A young Joe only ever burned with the rage that made him want to kill the priest. But he was a kid. He couldn’t go through with it.
Moreover, the priest was only presumed dead. No one ever found him. So how could Joe Leaphorn have known that he’d been killed? It’s the instincts that have always been a part of him. Leaphorn’s always had that detective instinct. So even though he couldn’t do it, he figured that since the priest had gone missing, someone else must’ve done what needed to be done. But there’s one more thing Leaphorn’s mind repressed. When he walks outside and finds his father taking care of the priest’s unceremonious grave, he comes to terms with something he’s grappled with all his life. His father seems to be the final stop in this harrowing search for answers. Now that he knows that his father had been forced to kill a monster because the White man’s courts refused to punish a representative of the Abrahamic God, he’s gained the perspective that he needed. Leaphorn too has had to resort to one of the worst violations of the law he swore to uphold. He’s been sinking into the kind of darkness that’s got him confused about the cleanliness of his soul. He’s wondered if a part of him has become perpetually dark. But he knows his father is a good man. And if someone like his father could murder a man in cold blood to protect the Dine, Leaphorn can cut himself some slack for doing the same thing by killing BJ Vines.
Henry and Joe Leaphorn have been burdened with the badge that turns a blind eye to the abuse that the Navajo people go through. They’ve had to endure the pangs of despair when the moral complexities of their actions haunted them. They did the right thing. But they’ll never be able to fully believe that. The point that Leaphorn understands through this entire ordeal is that he isn’t a bad person for having killed BJ Vines. But he also has to make peace with the fact that he’ll never be able to achieve a clear answer as to whether he did the right thing or not. This question is a burden he has to bear as the sentinel of real justice. This realization is bound to have a healing effect on Leaphorn. It’ll soothe the jittery, disturbed parts of him. Having his head on straight might be the only way he can avoid being convicted of the crime he was forced to commit. His action is justified by the legend of the Hero Twins. They had to kill Ye’iitsoh to save their people. And Leaphorn had to do the same with BJ Vines. But an experience like this will always have a significant effect on a person. They’ll never truly be the same again. When the Hero Twins came back with Ye’iitsoh’s head, they’d changed so much that their mother didn’t recognize them. They were still the same people. But they were spiritually transformed by their experience. Leaphorn’s case is pretty much the same. He’ll never be the man that he used to be. And while this breakthrough might help him make peace with himself, there’s no telling if Emma will be able to forgive him. But there are other, more immediate things on his plate now.
In Dark Winds episode 6’s ending, Leaphorn wakes up to take care of another monster. Before Leaphorn left, his father told him that monsters are bad men. That claim turns out to be true when Leaphorn shoots Ye’iitsoh and he bleeds like a person. The bloody handprint he leaves behind is undeniable proof that he’s a human being, not a supernatural creature. That’s got to give Leaphorn the clarity that he needed about the case. He couldn’t think straight when he thought that he was chasing a monster. He’ll be able to figure out this Ye’iitsoh impersonator’s trail now that he knows that he doesn’t have supernatural abilities. And because he’s quick to radio Chee and fill him in, I think he’ll be rescued in no time. His future with Emma is still uncertain. But the case is about to be blown wide open.
