It’s getting pretty spooky out there in the Wild West. The third episode of American Primeval makes a sharp left turn from “survival adventure” to “survival horror,” as our heroes encounter a clan of deformed, inbred, degenerate (and French) wilderness dwellers straight out of The Hills Have Eyes. From the cackling, inexplicably cartoonish-looking old woman who uses a doll-carrying little girl as bait to lure a concerned Sara in, to the pinch-faced Nightbreed-looking goon who’s the last guy to make the mistake of fucking with Sara, it’s a nasty bit of business straight out of the horror section of an old video store.
Like many of the earliest examples of this genre, it has no compunction about making good on the implied threat all women in stories like this face. With very little fanfare, and maximum violence applied to her son Devin to shut him up about it, Sara is taken away by the group’s ringleader and raped in a shack. We don’t see it, we don’t hear it, the show cuts away, but we see her led out afterwards, her face a riot of emotions, none of them healthy.
Isaac, who’d warned her against helping the little girl (Sara’s instinct to disregard Isaac is basically always wrong, which is…interesting?), is helpless this whole time. Frankly, he only has himself to blame: If he suspected trickery, he should have said so, instead of allowing Sara to assume he was just being heartless. But he did help Two Moons escape, at least, and Two Moons saves Sara from a second assault, this time by the deformed many, by whacking him in the head with a burning branch. This gives Sara the opportunity to grab his gun and straight up massacre everyone in the camp — except the old lady, who’s left to lament the dead en français. (Turns out Sara is a crack shot. Who knew?)
This little rape-revenge movie saga provides a stark contrast to what’s going on with Abish over in Wolf Clan headquarters. Though Red Feather steals her locket as a punishment for yet another escape attempt, he’s made no move to assault her or even just romance her, however that would work between a prisoner and her captor. She’s mostly left to spend time with the other women in the clan. And when the Wolves have to move back to the main Shoshone village to hide from the Army — Captain Dellinger got a bum tip from the Mormons that Wolf Clan was responsible for the big massacre, and his scouting party got slaughtered by the Wolves as a result — Abish is treated like a visiting superstar.
Red Feather, of course, is no prince. This is the guy who presided over the murder of every other Mormon woman who survived the initial attack, after all. But the sexual predation of the French illustrates that savagery is not the sole province of people with dark skin. I mean, duh.
There’s another horror-movie monster waiting to emerge here, I suspect. Jacob Pratt, the partially scalped massacre survivor, lost more than a chunk of his hairline in that attack — he lost his mind. He’s now out looking for Abish, accompanied by a team of searchers led by Brother Cook, one of the members of the Mormon’s Nauvoo Legion who secretly conducted the raid, and Virgil, the Fort Bridger thug out to collect the bounty on Sara. The thinking is that the survivors may have stuck together, and finding Sara may lead to Abish or vice versa. Needless to say, if you care about either woman, you gotta hope this murderous search-and-rescue team falls flat on its ass.
Which it may well do. Right at the end of the episode, Jacob recognizes Cook’s timepiece as having belonged to a friend and fellow Mormon who was killed during the massacre. Now he knows Mormons were involved…Mormons upon whom his life, and the search for his wife, now depends. I’d be worried for him, if it weren’t so clear he’s about to go full Gollum and start strangling people for crossing him. I’m much more worried for Tilly (Kyle Davis), Virgil’s associate, who keeps taunting Jacob for being annoying. (Fair — he really is annoying.) Taunt at your own risk, pal.
The episode’s other big development takes place back at Fort Bridger. No less a personage than Brigham Young himself comes to pay Jim Bridger a visit, after last week’s hostile “negotiations” with Nauvoo Legion commander Wild Bill Hickman (Alex Breaux) went south. Young leaves Bridger with the impression that he can probably get a tremendously good price if he sells the fort…but the Mormons are gonna have the fort, whether he sells it to them or not. Will he make a stand or take the money and run?
American Primeval is taking an open-world video game approach to its brand of revisionist Western. As our characters wander around, they encounter all kinds: friendly Mormons and murderous ones, friendly indigenous people and murderous ones, friendly settlers and murderous ones. You just never quite know which one is which when you stumble into them, until the shooting starts.
This approach can be a little, well, video-gamey. As a horror guy, I was certainly tickled when a blind cackling hillbilly witch showed up to lure our heroes into Consanguinity Corner, but you can only take a show that otherwise self-evidently prides itself on gritty realism when Leatherface and Grandpa from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre show up.
Yet at the end of the episode, Captain Dellinger writes a lovely and heartfelt letter or journal entry in which he laments the way he feels he’s losing his essential character in the ceaselessly violent world he’s entered. “Hatred” and “brutality” are everywhere, driving out “compassion and basic tenderness.”
“I am overcome at this time by a deep pain from a tremendous and always present lack of love,” he writes. “So few in these lands know of grace. There is only brutality here.” He’s painting things with an awfully broad brush, as the concurrent shots of Abish being treated with care and kindness by the Shoshone women demonstrate. But he’s not wrong overall. American Primeval may have a kind of shopworn way of showing it, but it really is exhausting to think about how many people in this land of ours like it better when they know others are suffering.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
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