The Ghosts of The Past Are Always With You On Dark Winds
AMC’s Indigenous Mystery Series Returns For A Brilliant Third Season
(Potential Best Show of the 2020s)
Even with the rise of the DVR and streaming, some things never change about TV: Sunday night remains as much an era for prestige TV today as it did when The Sopranos debuted in 1999. Some of the masterpieces of cable have been fighting it out against each other throughout my lifetime: Mad Men versus Dexter, The Good Wife versus Homeland, the final season of Dexter versus the final season of Breaking Bad (well, we know who won that battle)…it’s always been a feast on Sundays. And even now it can lead to crowded DVRs or difficult choices. Such has been the case for me as 2025 began.
Yellowjackets and The White Lotus debuted on the same night a month ago and it was a no-brainer for me which I was going to watch first. I could have gone back to The White Lotus but then I became aware of another show I’ve been waiting for a third season with more anticipation: the next installment in Dark Winds, the brilliant AMC mystery based on Tony Hillerman’s iconic Leaphorn and Chee novels. Considering that I’ve always preferred mysteries and series that have a cast that, let’s face it, wouldn’t go near the resorts in HBO’s drama even if they could afford it, I decided to go back to the era of the 1970s southwest as opposed to Thailand among the ultra-rich. Two episodes in I am still thrilled with the decision.
The last time we saw Joe Leaphorn (Zahn McLarnon) at the end of Season 2, he had just invoked ‘Indian justice’ on B.J. Vines, the millionaire industrialist who had been the force behind the murders of Season 2 as well as the circumstances of the death of Leaphorn’s son years earlier. That justice had involved abducting Vines from his home at gunpoint and leaving him hogtied in the desert to die. When it happened Leaphorn seemed free in a way we hadn’t seen him so far in the series.
But as Leaphorn knows all too well, nothing stays buried forever. Even before the new season begins he’s suffering from nightmares and hallucinations so potent that they are following him into the daylight. It’s becoming far more difficult for him to hide his burden from his wife (Deanna Alison) and extenuating circumstances may force his hand in the form of the FBI agent Sylvia Washington (a subtle Jenna Elfman). She claims she’s her to clear up some old cases but the first thing she asks Leaphorn about was what happened to BJ Vines. In their next conversation she says she’s upset about how it happened to him. Leaphorn says cynically: “White man justice.” Washington asks neutrally: “Is there any other kind?” It’s clear she knows about Leaphorn’s history with Vines and its clear this will come back to haunt him.
As it Leaphorn and his deputy Jim Chee (Kiowa Gordon) are dealing with what at first seems to be a missing persons case. One of them is the son of an old school rival of Jim’s Shorty Bowlegs. It’s clear that the last decade is not enough to erase the initial hostility between the two men but that becomes even more prevalent when one of the bows is found dead, stuffed in a drainpipe with an arrowhead in his mouth. The two teenagers have a connection to an archeological dig of an ancient people. One of them is Dr. Reynolds who tells him the arrowhead is knock-off, his assistant seems far more shook up by the death of one of the teenagers then her superior.
We know that something far darker beyond these two teenage boys is going on then is being told. The season opens, as Season 2 did, in media res with Joe clearly suffering from a bullet wound and lying on the ground, crawling for his radio. Somewhere around him is a man in jungle camouflage with a rifle and grenades strapped to him. This will happen in a week. We also know there’s a connection between this and a murder that took place at the start of last night’s episode where a Navajo attempted to suffocate a man with a plastic bag, drove his truck into a ditch and then used a bulldozer to bury the truck in the sand — even though he had finished killing the man.
Somehow we also know this will connect back to what is going on with Bernadette (Jessica Matten). At the end of Season 2, she left the sheriff’s department for the Border Patrol, determined to see if she could find her own path. At the start of her storyline last week, she encountered a mother and a child trying to cross the border which ended with her getting her gun taken. While they were being deported Bernadette suspected they were being trafficked but she was told to let it go. Clearly her boss didn’t know Bernadette the way the viewer does. She ended up tracking the van to Tom Spenser (the always reliable Bruce Greenwood) the head of a major oil drilling company and a major source of intel for the Border Patrol. This led her to being transferred to weigh station duty and naturally the first thing she found was a Spenser oil truck that seemed normal but had a driver who looked odd. She tried to call Joe, she ended up reaching Jim and…well, things got awkward. We next see her going on a ‘date’ with a colleague who’s been flirting with her. I think we know how this is going to go.
Those of you who are familiar with the novels of Hillerman (which I am not) will see the novel that this is based on and have an idea of what is coming next. Those of you who are not will no doubt enjoy the great pleasure of watching something that television would not have been capable of even five years ago: a brilliant drama in which all the stars, and most of the writers and directors are made up of indigenous people. To see them in a procedural that shows that the issues of half a century ago are being fought to this day will discourage some but encourage those who grew up never even dreaming of seeing a story like this being told. And for those of us who are fans of exceptional television Dark Winds provides everything you can hope for.
And for myself as a TV critic Dark Winds represents something more. I didn’t believe that the era of Peak TV ended when Better Call Saul did back in summer of 2022 but I did think it was the end of AMC as the purveyor of prestige television that had started with Mad Men in 2007. At that point they had all but given themselves over to The Walking Dead franchise and I truly believed Saul would be the last of the kind of series I’d loved for the past fifteen years.
But in the interim between the two halves of Saul’s final season, Dark Winds debuted. Since then AMC is still committed to the supernatural — more Walking Dead series are planned and they seem to be going all in on Anne Rice — but even that has shown room for greatness given the incredible critical and popular response to their reimagining of Interview With A Vampire. They’ve also aired some incredible limited series such as Monsieur Spade as well as the gone too soon Lucky Hank and Parish. If AMC is moving into a new phase of Peak TV as well, it is likely shows like Dark Winds will be considered the future. And I’m grateful for that.
Note: George R.R. Martin and Robert Redford are listed as executive producers on Dark Winds. In the season premiere they made surprised and delightful cameos as two old prisoners playing chess in a jail cell. Redford’s character said: “it’s your move. George, everyone’s waiting!” I guess even in 1970s New Mexico everyone’s still waiting for the next volume of Game of Thrones to come out.
My score: 5 stars.