“If the girl talks, this whole thing unravels.” That’s the word from steely Los Angeles criminal kingpin Dominic McNair (Bosch‘s Titus Welliver). The girl in question? 16-year-old Billie Tsosie (Isabel DeRoy-Olson), a runaway from an Indian boarding school, whose disappearance sets into motion the intense fourth season of AMC’s Dark Winds.
Good and evil duke it out in the acclaimed crime thriller set in the 1970s at New Mexico’s Navajo Reservation. Trying to save Billie (and they’ll have to act fast): Navajo Tribal Police (NTP) Lt. Joe Leaphorn (Zahn McClarnon) and deputies Jim Chee (Kiowa Gordon) and Bernadette “Bern” Manuelito (Jessica Matten). Hunting the teen to keep her quiet: chilling hitwoman Irene Vaggan (Franka Potente), who’s hired by McNair.
Billie is on the run alongside her cousin Albert (William Hope); both he and his brother Leroy are criminals working for McNair, only Leroy owes the kingpin a debt. As Billie and Albert sit at a favorite local diner near the reservation, Vaggan barges in, and Billie finds herself caught in the middle of a lethal gunfight.
The hired gun racks up bodies with the cool composure of a psychopath, but as the NTP investigation continues, it turns out there’s one person she won’t kill.
“She has an obsession with Joe Leaphorn,” says Potente, citing her character’s girlhood fixation with an Apache chief idealized in popular Western novels she read as a child in Nazi Germany. “She believes he is her ideal man, and she cannot harm him,” Potente says. “Irene becomes Joe’s psycho stalker… and everyone’s nightmare.”
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This complicated case is the last thing Joe needs. As the season begins, he’s still hoping that by spending time in a sweat lodge and hunting alone in the mountains, he can earn the return of his beloved wife Emma (Deanna Allison), who left him partly because of his inability to get in touch with Navajo culture.
“He’s trying to dial himself back into the traditions that are important for living a balanced and whole life on the reservation,” explains showrunner John Wirth.
This season, adds McClarnon, “Joe will continue to walk a fine line — representing and protecting his people. He’s at a crossroad in his life, so he goes looking for ‘Hózhó,’ the Navajo concept of finding balance, beauty, and personal harmony.”
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Personal harmony also remains elusive for Jim and Bern, whose bond grows hotter. Bern’s back after last season’s traumatic stint with the border police. Jim wants her on the force again, and she finally agrees, knowing how much Joe, who’s like a second father, wants her at his side.
The clash between cultures also plays out in Jim and Bern’s relationship. “Jim wants more responsibility,” says Gordon. “He [feels] this is finally his time to show what he’s capable of. But then he’s sensing that nobody else feels the same.”
The “crux of the issue,” says Wirth, “is that Bern is very connected to her Navajo-ness. Jim and Bern obviously love each other, but it’s complicated.”
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That’s because, unlike his colleagues, Jim was mostly raised in L.A. with his mom, thanks to the Indian Relocations Act that recruited Native Americans to leave their reservations and assimilate in urban centers. Jim took that path, went to a prestigious university, and joined the FBI, but after switching to the NTP, he is still struggling to belong to the rez culture. As Joe tells Bern, “Jim’s a good cop, but you can’t separate spirituality from upholding the law here.”
It all comes to a head once the search for Billie lands the team in L.A. and Jim quickly “feels a shroud come over him as soon as he steps foot in the city,” says Gordon. Jim is still dealing with the aftereffects of his mother’s death. As McClarnon, who directed Episode 2, says, “We’ll delve into the Navajo culture’s ‘ghost sickness’ with Jim, an illness caused by contact with a spirit of the dead.”
Meanwhile, Joe’s hope for a reconciliation with his beloved Emma — who’s now a nurse at L.A.’s Indian Medical Center— remains very much alive, even as violence plagues his search for the girl. “Joe wants his wife back,” McClarnon says. Will he manage that while also saving the day and staying out of the clutches of the crazily adoring Irene Vaggan? No one ever said getting some “Hózhó” would be easy.
Dark Winds, Season Premiere Sunday, Feb. 15, 9/8c, AMC
