It’s preposterous how good Shea Whigham is at delivering dialogue. Boardwalk Empire, Perry Mason, American Primeval — whatever the assignment, he makes every line sound like he’d never heard a word of it before thinking it up right then and there. When Whigham’s Jim Bridger verbally spars with Kim Coates’s appropriately bloviating Brigham Young, he makes the great evangelist sound like a high school freshman at his first debate club event. Sure, Bridger has likely just brought the murderous wrath of the Mormon nation down on his head with his backtalk and intransigence — not to mention his heavily armed squad of employees, mountain men, and Native Americans with nothing left to lose. But Young attacking Bridger now after failing to verbally fluster the grizzled frontiersman in the slightest is a bit like Drake suing after Kendrick Lamar beat the brakes off him in their beef. Even if he wins, he’s a sore loser.
The Mormons are pretty sore alright. As their military leader Wild Bill Hickman puts it while whipping Wolsey, the man whose failure to properly massacre everyone allowed Abish and Jacob Pratt to become loose ends, they’ve been murdered and brutalized over and over again. Utah is where they’re making their stand, come hell or high water, and they’re prepared to unleash hell themselves if that’s what it takes.
Which they do, again, by committing another massacre, again. This time the victims are Captain Dellinger and his Army unit, wiped out to the last man by the Mormons. Even the turncoat who sold the troops out to the Mormons’ Nauvoo Legion gets one in the head for his troubles. But unfortunately for the Mormons, Abish, their prime target, is nowhere to be found.
But they know where she’s gone. Abish is with Red Feather, hiding out in the Shoshone village led by his mother, Winter Bird. Abish warns both leaders that the Mormons will come for her and wipe out every member of the tribe to cover their tracks. Winter Bird suggests they relocate the village to a spot picked out for them by Isaac, her foster son, years earlier. (He wound up moving there himself when Winter Bird chose not to move, and his wife and son were murdered there while he was out hunting. Traumatic backstory: check!) But Red Feather’s sick of running, and he and his men will stay and fight, even though Abish tells them they’re hopelessly outnumbered.
The numbers game is less important when you’re Isaac Reed. After spending most of the episode successfully treating Devin’s badly infected leg wound and worrying about nearby wolves, Isaac nearly dies at the hands of a different animal entirely. Virgil and his bounty hunters have finally caught up with their quarry.
The hunters riddle the cabin with bullets; Isaac shields the bodies of the two kids, Devin and Two Moons, with his own to ensure their safety. The moment he realizes the gunmen are reloading their weapons, he comes on out and John Wicks the lot of them. But it’s too late: Virgil has already made off with Sara, whom he caught while she was out alone gathering medicinal herbs for Devin. Despite himself, Isaac knows his heart is on the line here, so he’ll no doubt put his life on the line too in order to save her.
You might think, at this particular point in time, that it’s a bit troubling to watch a show in which freedom and the rule of law fall beneath the fist of a blowhard with weird hair whose followers believe he was chosen by God to punish the unbelievers. And you’d be right! It’s no fun watching sensitive, open-minded Captain Dellinger lie there dead with a bullet hole where his eye used to be. It’s especially no fun when it’s accompanied by his own voice-over, in which he expresses hope that Americans will always find themselves too moved and inspired by the beauty of the West and the “great spirit of love” that animates it to become truly evil. Whoopsie daisy!
At any rate, our heroes are currently facing very long odds of survival. Bridger, Abish, Red Feather, and Winter Bird are all on the Mormons’ hitlist. (The Mormons are depicted as Polite American ISIS on this show, which is pretty gutsy as well as pretty funny.) Isaac will have to track Sara down and kill all the remaining bounty hunters to ensure not only her safety, nor his own, but those of the two children, who will likely perish if he doesn’t come back alive. And Jacob — remember him — is just out there in the middle of nowhere, rotting at the scalp and Jesus Christ posing in the river even as his beloved Abish rides right past him completely unaware. Some of these characters will not make it to the end of the series. I’d go so far as to say most won’t. There’s a conflagration coming, and if there’s one thing American Primeval has consistently delivered, besides great Shea Whigham dialogue of course, it’s conflagrations.
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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