As I write this review, wildfires brought on by climate change are ravaging Los Angeles. The climate change denier whom a plurality of voters selected to be their president, and who as best I can tell is completely insane, is threatening to bring back American expansionism by conquering Canada and Mexico and Greenland as his conservative Christian backers cheer him on. In this final episode of American Primeval, a fanatical Brigham Young rants about his God purifying the world from wickedness as his Mormons, fresh off a genocidal attack on the Shoshone, solidify their claim on Utah by burning Fort Bridger to the ground. You hear Young’s words over the flames. It feels familiar, is what I’m saying. People will always use fires they themselves started as a smokescreen for their murderous ambition, I guess.
In that sense, at least, the finale makes for grim viewing. The ignominious fate of Jim Bridger, last seen trudging out of the stronghold he built from the ground up as it burns around him with satchels full of Mormon blood money slung over his back, is a pointed barb at sellouts who take the money and run, leaving the problems they’ve enabled to others to take care of. The idea that the American Zion is built on the corpses of hundreds of thousands of Native Americans, too, is rendered pretty much literally.
But beyond that, there’s a patness to the tragedies that befall our characters in this episode that undermines the seriousness of the enterprise. Heroes, villains, and those in between — everyone who dies does so in pretty much exactly the dramatically appropriate or ironic way you’d expect.
Take the Abish and Jacob side story, for instance. Abish joins the Shoshone in fending off the Mormon marauders, wearing war paint applied to her face by Red Feather himself. Jacob joins the Mormons in massacring the Shoshone, who in his madness (I guess?) they persuade him killed his party, even though he already knows Mormons were involved. Any guesses as to who winds up killing Abish? Got it in one, did you? Yeah, me too. After kissing the woman he’s just killed, a devastated Jacob shoots himself to death. It’s like “The Gift of the Magi” but with bullets.
The battle is full of that stuff. The most prominent Mormon, Wolsey, is killed by the most prominent Shoshone, Red Feather, though he of course delivers a mortal wound in the fight. He lives long enough for him and his young son to die in each other’s arms. It’s very poetic — perhaps too much so.
And when it keeps being done across the board, it’s definitely too much so. Sara kills Virgil, the lead bounty hunter, herself, with an assist from Isaac. This turns Lucas (Andrew P. Logan), Virgil’s kindly younger brother who’d repeatedly tried to help Sara (and defend Jacob before that), into a vengeance-seeking hardass. Isaac returns and kills Lucas with his bear hands, though he of course sustains a mortal wound in the fight. He lives long enough to die by Sara’s side. Does this sound at all familiar to you?
So there’s your story: Brigham Young and his militia leader Wild Bill Hickman are sitting pretty with all their enemies slaughtered, Sara and the kids head on to California to eke out whatever life they can, Bridger wanders off to god knows where, and everyone else of import — Abish, Jacob, Wolsey, Red Feather, Winter Bird, Virgil, Lucas, and Isaac — has been killed in a screenwriterly fashion. That last bit is regrettable. (If I were Explosions in the Sky, I don’t think I’d have worked “This Land Is Your Land” into the score, either.)
The lively acting of Betty Gilpin and Shea Whigham, two of the small screen’s very best, helps a lot, though. Taylor Kitsch’s Isaac is a shopworn type of guy, but Kitsch lends him a sensitivity that burns like a candle behind his dark eyes. (He did something similar in the underrated second season of True Detective as a closeted cop.)
The real star, though, may be Peter Berg’s camera, which lingers lovingly on every landscape, every playful interaction between the children, every teary-eyed profession of affection between Sara and Isaac. The use of fire and arson as a repeated motif works in large part because the bright orange flames feel appropriately alien to this wooded, wooden world. Even during moments of murder, Berg is apt to pull back for a wide shot that frames the living, the dead, and the environment in memorable tableaux. Images like these are what deliver the show’s message: Our enemies are in power, but we survive however we can, and find beauty in the people and the world around us, in hopes that a better one than what they’ve made for us is still possible.
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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