Photo: Lauren Smith/Paramount+
When 1923 last aired a hundred million years ago, in February 2023, it was a bona fide soap (albeit with violent tendencies). An epic love story between an American big game hunter and a British countess was upended by the strangling mores of class and tradition. A young family was torn apart by the law, while an ancient family withered under the weight of debt. It was a show about miscarriages and secret weddings; it more or less put Harrison Ford’s character in a coma, for heaven’s sake.
“The Killing Season” gets off to a grimmer start. In the first half of the season-two premiere, we meet a shattered prostitute that mining tycoon Donald Whitfield keeps on a leash in his closet. (Truly, what is the point of this belabored storyline?) Soon after, we’re presented with a graphic bunkhouse rape scene. Then, the U.S. marshal Kent tramples a small child with a horse not in service of the plot, but because it works as a punchline in his argument with Father Renaud, who is still pursuing Teonna Rainwater through the mountains. (Who appointed this monster to the service?) It’s a stream of misery punctuated by glimpses of the American landscape. I’m sure I will wake up Monday morning to find out 1923 was the most watched series on television, but will anyone be able to say they enjoyed it?
There were a few mercies scattered throughout the episode. First, let us thank Taylor Sheridan for offering up a meaty “Previously on 1923” sequence because I had forgotten much of where we left off. This isn’t a ding on the series but a reality of how the soap wheel turns.
More significantly, Teonna Rainwater, who was relentlessly tortured in season one before taking murderous revenge, finally catches a break. Renaud and Kent have tracked her into Oklahoma, where Runs His Horse believes he can hide his Crow daughter among the Comanche. This has calamitous results for the local tribe, who are harassed despite the fact that they aren’t harboring Teonna, nor have they ever harbored Teonna, nor have they ever heard of Teonna. It turns out Runs His Horse has accidentally steered his lovestruck teen and her paramour Pete, now played by Jeremy Gauna, into the safe arms of an Indian-friendly Texas ranching operation instead of the Great Plains. (The death of Cole Brings Plenty, who originally played Pete, was marked by an “In Memoriam” montage at the top of the episode.)
This wrong turn gives our trio of fugitives space to consider where they’ve come from and what comes next. “There was a time when everything was crafted from the earth, and everyone knew how to do it,” Runs His Horse tells his daughter about life before white men moved West. The evolution of a barter economy made existence easier at the expense of learning the skills of survival, like how to make bows and arrows for hunting. This, he says, is how the U.S. government entrapped the Indians. If Indians could still do for themselves as they historically had, the government would be redundant. As a tidy fable designed to instill in Teonna the value of self-reliance, it works beautifully, but as an actual explanation for how the tribes came to be forced onto reservations, it’s specious. Disease. Violence. Expulsion. Ethnic cleansing. The loss of Native American culture is a consequence of land loss, not the cause of it.
Still, there’s something hopeful in Runs His Horse’s account, which suggests that the old way of life is still out there, waiting to be recovered. He gives his daughter permission to marry Pete and, kinda by accident, permission to have sex with him before the ceremony. Pete’s reaction to finding Teonna undressing before him can best be described as momentarily stupefied. This is the bliss Native Americans can find for themselves when they fashion a way to live beyond the white man’s West.
Teonna will soon be joined in Texas by Spencer Dutton, who is working as a stoker on a steamer bound for Galveston. When we meet up with him, he’s more than halfway across the Atlantic and a world away from his wife. His only acquaintance is a fellow boilerman — a young Italian guy heading to the New World to escape fighting in Mussolini’s wars. The first time we meet Luca, Spencer is correcting him on how to feed coal into the burner, though he’s seemingly been performing the task just fine since they left port. The second time we meet Luca, Spencer rescues him from being raped while the deckhands in nearby bunks are either sleeping soundly or just pretending to. And the third time we meet him, Spencer convinces Luca not to plunge himself overboard.
It’s unclear why Luca would be contemplating suicide now that his nightmare is over. (A ship’s officer shoots the rapist on the spot, then has Spencer clean up the scene as punishment for his vigilantism.) Perhaps this isn’t Luca’s first time staring down at the water — just the first time anyone has noticed. “People aren’t defined by what happens to them,” Spencer tells him, prophetically if vaguely. They are defined by what they do. Spencer is a hero. That’s what he does. And his new amico? He’s a hustler. Upon learning Spencer doesn’t have the cash to make it from Texas to Montana, where his family needs him, he decides to moonlight as a boxing promoter and bookie, arranging bouts for the Lion Hunter and taking wagers.
It’s a sign of how little time we’ll spend on this boat that none of the opponents get names. The first fight is between the Lion Hunter and the Giant, who Spencer dispatches with a quick blow to the nuts. The second is between the Lion Hunter and the war vet, who Spencer bites bloody. It’s a grisly affair, but by the end of the night, he’s got the money he needs to make it to Bozeman, a promise that I had basically completely given up on and, in my heart, still believe is unlikely. The world is made up of men who make things and men who take them, says the enterprising Italian, in an echo of Runs His Horse’s assessment. But Spencer, so far, represents what feels like a third fate. Men who respond to the world more than they guide it. Men who scrape by.
I’m significantly more confident that Alexandra Dutton will successfully complete her pilgrimage to the Yellowstone ranch and the hard-scrabble life she thinks she’s ready for. Though she wastes some time in self-pity at her family estate after last season’s brutal separation from Spencer, she eventually convinces old friend Jennifer to hawk the family jewels for money to buy passage to America. She can’t wait around in Sussex for Spencer to rescue her because she doesn’t have that kind of time. Surprise! She doesn’t even have nine months before she gives birth to this baby who may (or may not) be the grandfather of John Dutton III (a.k.a. Kevin Costner).
And when she does make it to Montana, Alex will fit in well amongst the Dutton women — once she’s habituated to the cold, that is. The ranch consistently turns out matriarchs who are plucky and resolute in the ways Alex has demonstrated. And while there is admittedly something daffy and naive about the way she calls out, “I’m off in the next adventure,” as she prepares to board a ship to New York alone, on a third-class ticket, while also pregnant, it’s also easy to imagine her making friends among the “thieves and beggars” Jennifer warns her about. Since we’ve known her, Alex has bent the world to her will more than any other character on 1923.
For most of season one, Montana was the series’ most dynamic theater, but right now, it’s winter in the Mountain West. The trees are bare. The roads are snowed over. The pace of life is glacial for the Duttons, who have sold off most of their herd to save their ranch from this year’s tax bill only to already be worrying about next year’s. Donald Whitfield might be the man who owns the lien, but the real bogeyman here is the federal government. The common enemy of the rancher and the Indian — a whole institution full of men who take.
Jacob rides a horse into the city overnight for the miscegenation trial of Yellowstone foreman Zane and his wife, which has yet to get underway when the episode ends. If anything, the trial feels like an excuse to get Jacob out of the house so that Cara can be alone on the range. The 1923 series premiere opened with her shooting a trespasser — a flash-forward to a battle that would come around later in season one. The first episode of season two ends with something of a callback. A mountain lion has been prowling the ranch, and he’s fixing to attack Jack’s wife, poor Lizzie, who has been lured outside by the sunshine reflecting off the snow. A whiff of spring to come.
In Bozeman, life goes on. Streets get shoveled. Trials get scheduled. Winter is nothing but a season. But on the ranch, it’s a threat. Everything is a threat. Cara shoots the beast through the closed window, which is to say, she shoots him from inside the house. The Duttons have lost their cattle and their ranch hands. Though Cara continues to write letters to Spencer, she could be forgiven for thinking that they’ve lost their long-absent lion hunter, too. This lodge is what’s left.
The first season of 1923 was a form of meditation. Meandering plotlines set against awesome vistas. Taciturn men whose guttural consonants hit the ear like an ASMR shopping haul. By contrast, Spencer crossing the ocean in the space of an hour feels downright hurried. This series is seven episodes from its finale, and if it keeps it up, there might even be time for a satisfying end.
But it’s hard to see what that might look like from here. Those of us who watched Yellowstone to the last already know the fate of the ranch and the family who superintended it. There’s a sense in which the 1923 story feels like it ended with it. What difference does it make if Spencer Dutton returns home in time to see his Aunt Cara or if his nephew Jack Dutton steps up to steward the ranch? Who cares if Spencer and Alex’s child is reared by wealthy relatives in Sussex or a dysfunctional, dynastic cowboy clan in the great wide West? How can it really matter which rich white man wins any particular land war, when we know how many more there are to come?
