‘Dark Winds’ Stars on the Joy of Getting Weird in Episode 3

[This story contains spoilers from Dark Winds through season four, episode three, “Ahááldláádígíí” (That Which Has Been Torn Apart).]

“Is Zahn coming out to play?”

Franka Potente asks the question in the tone of a child ringing their best friend’s doorbell, as she describes the joyful experimentation that characterized her time on the Dark Winds set. But add a dose of malevolence to that metaphor, and you have an inkling of the unpredictable chaos that her character Irene Vaggan has injected into the Navajo reservation in this season’s third episode, which aired Sunday.

This week, the Navajo Tribal Police are trying to keep runaway teenager Billie (Isabel DeRoy-Olson) safe as Potente’s deadly assassin continues to pursue her. But after they find Billie and put her into protective custody, the desperate teen makes their job even more difficult when she takes matters into her own hands and hops on a bus to Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, Bernadette (Jessica Matten) and Chee’s (Kiowa Gordon) new relationship is tested as Bernadette admits that she and Joe Leaphorn (Zahn McClarnon) have both been keeping Chee in the dark about Leaphorn’s plan to retire.

At the same time, Chee is enduring some unexpected — and disturbing — symptoms after episode two, when he entered the hogan where Billie’s cousin Albert died. (Episode two, by the way, was McClarnon’s directorial debut. The experience went so well, the star says he plans to direct another episode in season five.) 

And finally, after a game of cat-and-mouse, in the closing scene, Leaphorn has a face-to-face encounter with Vaggan. Literally: She kisses him at gunpoint. We’re still shuddering.

To sort through all these irksome developments, THR sat down with McClarnon, Gordon, Matten, Potente and showrunner John Wirth. Read on below for a breakdown of episode three’s key moments.

What Is Going on With Chee?

Last week, at the end of episode two, Chee, Bernadette and Leaphorn ended up at the home of Billie and Albert’s grandfather, where they discover a hole in the north side of the building, indicating someone has died inside. (In Navajo culture, this is traditionally done so that the deceased person’s spirit can leave. It’s known as a “death hogan,” which is taboo to enter.)

Although Bernadette urges caution, Chee takes it upon himself to go inside and investigate. There, he finds Albert’s body, covered by a blanket. But something immediately seems to be wrong with him, as he has a flashback in which he sees another body, then he seems woozy and gets a nosebleed. 

“Chee goes in full-bore, just very bull-headed about it,” explains Gordon. “He said, ‘It’s just part of the job, you just gotta do it.’ He didn’t want to have the love of his life get her hands dirty, or for Leaphorn to have to go through that after all the stuff he’s been dealing with as well, so he’s like, ‘Well, I’ll take it on the chin for everybody, I’ll take one for the team.’”

He adds of his character, “I’m still a little skeptical of the culture, superstitions. I feel like I can just write it off: If I don’t believe in this, it won’t happen. But nope, it’s real.”

In this week’s episode, Chee continues to experience apparent side effects from going into the death hogan — including a gnarly looking scratch on his side and a bloody tooth that he pulls out after his argument with Bernadette — and it’s not clear what exactly is happening to him, but he still tries to brush it off.

Showrunner Wirth says he was excited to bring some focus on Chee this season. “There is no Dark Winds without the Jim Chee character,” he says. “[Gordon] brings this thing to that character which is so embraceable, and he’s just the perfect flavor to offset some of the things that are going on in the series.”

Wirth notes that season three largely centered on Leaphorn battling his inner demons and Bernadette’s move to the Border Patrol. “Chee was sort of left to run between those two stories, and he was good connective tissue between those stories and those two characters, but we didn’t really delve into his life. I wanted to do a story where we got to delve deeper into: Who is Jim Chee? How did he get back [to the reservation] and what is the story of his life? He had grown up off the reservation from his early teen years, so more than half his life he’s been off the reservation, and now he comes back.

“He was perfectly positioned to be susceptible to something like ghost sickness, which he doesn’t even believe is real, and Navajo people are very serious about those kinds of things.”

Gordon teases, “It’s a wild, wild ride this season … we can just get into Chee’s psyche a bit and the things that brought him to where he is now, what he’s got to get back to.”

Bernadette’s White Lie

In the season premiere, Leaphorn told Bernadette that he is planning to retire, and that he wants her to succeed him as lieutenant. Then in episode two, she asked Leaphorn to share his plans with Chee, who suspects something’s up. But Leaphorn told her he wanted to wait, because he’s not ready for everyone to know. This made Bernadette uneasy, but she couldn’t convince him change his mind.

This week, Chee and Bernadette have a relationship milestone as they both say, “I love you,” and Chee reiterates his invitation to move in together. Then, when he brings up his own theory that Leaphorn is planning to retire, Bernadette lies and says she doesn’t think he is.

“Everybody in the world of the show knew that Leaphorn was contemplating retiring. What nobody knew was what was going to happen when he left,” says Wirth. “He had to make a decision: Who do I choose to succeed me? Both Chee and Bern felt like, ‘It would be me.’ And then we find they’re in a relationship, so when somebody says, ‘I have a secret I’m going to tell you. Don’t tell anybody,’ then you go home to your spouse, and the spouse says, ‘Hey, do you have a secret I should know about?’ [You reply] ‘No, I don’t.’”

In addition to abiding by Leaphorn’s request, Matten explains, “She’s doing this to protect him, in her mind, to be considerate of his feelings, knowing that could demasculize him in a time period where masculinity was a big thing. On the flip side, internally she’s dealing with so much PTSD that she’s trying to bottle up [after she had to kill in self-defense last season]. You know when you’re on the brink emotionally, and you just know this will potentially create another argument or fight — she’s protecting herself and the relationship.”

She adds, “Bernadette would never intentionally lie. She’s doing it to protect. She is a cop at the end of the day, and that is built within her DNA. In her view, this is all about protection of the home.”

Later in the episode, when they’re keeping watch over Billie, Bernadette comes clean and tells Chee about Leaphorn’s plan. Chee doesn’t take it well, and storms off before having the surreal experience where he pulls out a tooth. The next morning, he confronts Leaphorn about being dishonest despite everything Chee has done for him. (In the process, he reveals that he knew all along Leaphorn was behind B.J. Vines’ murder. Is there anyone on the reservation who doesn’t know?)

Gordon jokes of Chee’s reaction, “He just got really butt-hurt that nobody consulted him on any of this,” then adds more seriously: “After the season one with me being undercover FBI and how [Bernadette and Leaphorn] took it, I’m like, ‘We never want that to happen again. We should all be transparent with each other.’ And for them to kind of go behind my back with all of this, it just crushes Chee’s heart. It’s like, ‘I thought I found my people and they would never do this to me,’ but they do, and I think that’s what really sets him off to go confront Leaphorn after Bernadette comes clean.”

Adds Wirth, “It created some really good drama, and the trick was to keep everybody faithful, even if they weren’t telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth all the time. It was a challenge, but I’m happy with the way it worked out.”

Where Did That Creepy Kiss Come From?

Throughout the season, Vaggan has been keeping tabs on Joe Leaphorn just as much as she has on Albert and Billie. In this episode, though, it becomes clear that her interest in Joe goes way beyond just wanting to find her marks. She breaks into Joe’s house, where she longingly inhales his clothing, finds mail from Emma (Deanna Allison) at her L.A. address, and steals a photo of Joe and Emma together. This is a woman with no boundaries.

Potente says playing Vaggan was a fun opportunity to tap into a mindset that people don’t normally indulge in their regular lives. “A villain lives a lot in the ‘what if?’ areas, all the thoughts that we don’t think through. As a mother, all the dark thoughts, the catastrophizing thoughts that we have daily. Or at least I do, maybe not everyone does,” she concedes with a laugh.  

“We don’t get comfortable in all the gory, horrific circumstances — in times like this, I should say we’re forced to — but the villain’s brain is not anything a normal person is comfortable living in on the daily. And to make that the center of your day and not think about, ‘What do other people think?’ you just try to push it further and further,” she adds. “You don’t try to think, ‘How can I be scarier?’ You think, ‘How can I get under his skin even more?’

“You want to do it in a way that is coming from a place of love. You know? So you glaze it, in a way, like if you gift someone a heart that you just ripped out, but you glaze it in chocolate.” Here, she slips into character — pretending to hold just such a chocolate-covered heart and taking a ravenous bite — then laughs. “It’s all the weird stuff. It’s like if someone said, ‘It’s OK to be weird. Go. Whatever that means to you.’ It’s very, very playful.”

McClarnon adds that Potente’s inventiveness made her a pleasure to work with, despite their characters’ antagonistic relationship. “Franka brings ideas to the set,” he says. “And it was a joy to watch her implement some of these ideas, because they catch you by surprise. You don’t know what she’s going to do.”

He references the episode’s pivotal final scene, when Vaggan corners Leaphorn at gunpoint and reveals her belief that they’re spiritually connected before planting a kiss on his lips. McClarnon notes that the kiss wasn’t in the script. “I didn’t know she was going to do that,” he says with a laugh. “She brings ideas, and to work with actors like that is very much an enjoyable experience.”

“But I will say, it says something about the partner that you’re in the scene with,” Potente adds. “I have to feel that there is that space, that I can go there. I can go that extra bit. Some people don’t leave that space, quite the opposite. They will take it from you, even. It’s just like playing. It’s like when you were a kid and you ring the doorbell and ask, ‘Is Zahn coming out to play?’ It’s like that. And then you go play in the mud!”

What’s Next?

AMC and the Dark Winds team have been teasing since before the premiere that part of this season will unfold in Los Angeles. Now that Billie has gone there in search of Albert’s brother, Leroy, that time may have finally arrived.  

And we certainly haven’t seen the last of Vaggan. As she says after she kisses Joe: “I will not say goodbye. I will say, until we see each other again.”

***

Dark Winds airs on AMC and streams on AMC+, with new episodes airing weekly on Sundays. In case you missed it, you can find THR’s recap from episode one here. Check back for more insights from the show’s team as the season progresses.