I think these two episodes, particularly coming back-to-back, are my favorite of Deadwood‘s third season. It’s sort of hard to imagine seeing them separately in their perfectly complementary explorations of two events that are simultaneously public and private: a funeral and a wedding.

Both events are lovely in their own way. In the first season, funerals were tiny affairs, held at the edge of town and poorly attended. Now, they’re events that bring the entire community together, that inspire Trixie to inspect Al’s entire stock of whores to make sure they’re respectable; that gets Jane in a bath even if it’s not enough for her to complain that the water “burned my snatch”; that it finally snaps Martha out of her brittleness and convinces her to invite the town in. And the wedding gets Trixie in a truly beautiful dress, her loveliness inspiring Jewel to come up with the money, we know not from where, to outfit her with jewelry for the occasion; to get Jane not just bathed, but in a dress and dancing in the streets; for Al and Sol to finally make their peace. “Ain’t you two a fucking picture?” Al comments from the rooftop where he observes both events, refusing to take direct part. “Whirling her around’s okay, Star, just don’t step on her fucking toes.”

Of course, the couple that really comes together in these episodes is Seth and Martha. When Martha asks Seth if it’s all right with him if she keeps teaching even after William’s death, he reacts with genuine passion for the first time, telling her, “I would, yes, I’d be delighted.” And that discussion of how Martha will approach her classroom provides a way for them to talk about losing the son who was Martha’s by birth and Seth’s by sense of honor. “I believe if I teach them with love and joy, I won’t make them afraid,” Martha explains her anxiety about wearing mourning in the classroom, despite her powerful need to have an outward symbol of her grief. “And I don’t want to lose him.” “You’ll never lose him,” Seth promises her. A moment later, he takes her hand. In that moment, he makes her his wife as he didn’t when he said his vows. And later, she finds the first sprout from William’s sunflower seeds, the promise he rescued from a broken vessel and brought to Deadwood to tie his father by blood and his father by marriage. The universe has proven confirmation of Seth’s comfort, tying them closer together.
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I think Marc Bernardin has some good points about why, even in an era full of excellent television shows, we arguably only have two science fiction or fantasy shows that operated at the same level of, say, The Sopranos throughout or through most of their runs: Battlestar Galactica and Lost (his choices, not mine). But I don’t really think this is the case:

GENRE IS THINKY. If you look at the average night of television, you’ll see that most drama shows are about doctors, lawyers or cops. Because people – from the audience all the way up to network heads – understand how those shows work. Because a patient will always roll into the ER, some schmuck will always go to court, and someone will always get murdered in “the Big City.”

But science fiction, particularly, is a genre of ideas – ideas that usually resist the reduction into the doctor-lawyer-cop mode. And all too often, when people don’t understand a thing they either don’t let it on the air – unless they monkey with it to such an extent that the ideas are gone and it’s a husk of what it could’ve been – or they don’t support it once it does get on the air. A show with no marketing or scheduling support is a show no one knows to watch, or when to watch it even if they wanted to.

All of the best shows of the Golden Age are deeply idea-based shows. The Wire as treatise on capitalism, bureaucracy, and education is almost too obvious to mention. The Sopranos is a meditation on the nature of evil — and the efficacy of therapy, to the point that the show’s ending mirrors the let-down of terminating. Breaking Bad is a similarly stark moral show, one that also touches on everything from health care reform to the War on Drugs. Deadwood is about the emergence of civil society from the quite literal muck. And not only are all of these ideas-based shows, they’re shows that directly comment on the predictability of genres like doctor-lawyer-cop shows. Levy gets called out by Omar. The cops who beat Bubbles don’t get redeemed by their good intentions and concern for victims. No medical professional is compassionate about Walter White’s cancer, but they are very willing to take his money.

And I think more to the point, this may be jumping the gun a bit. We’ll see how Game of Thrones goes, but in between that, its big order for American Gods, and its big Michael Chabon-written magicians-fight-the-Nazis show Hobgoblin, HBO is making heavy future investments in fantasy. It takes a lot of efforts, and a lot of misses, to produce the shows that define our new Golden Age. The halcyon years for genre may just arrive a few years later than the Golden Age for more general interest television.

A lot of the pleasure of the early episodes of Deadwood was the way the unsettled gender politics of the frontier meant that women both have the opportunity and are forced into roles beyond the ones they expect of themselves. There are all these glimpses of the country that we’re going to become in Deadwood, and so it’s tremendously powerful to see the way the community is distant from our own in a moment of tragedy.

I knew William Bullock’s death was coming, but that spoiler (as validated by science!) actually made the run-up to that horrifying moment when the horse got loose, doubly tragic. The formal tenderness of Seth asking William, “Are you sometimes permitted coffee?” the tentativeness of their negotiation towards their first real conversation, shows what might have been between them. There could have been a world where Seth really felt like William was his son, where that affection was the basis for something solid and lasting between Seth and Martha. William is, as I suppose most doomed fictional children are, a little too good to be true. “Mr. Bullock’s been missing Father,” he tells his mother on the morning of his death, engaged in an act of kindness. “He talked to me about it this morning. If Pop liked a sunflower, I figured Mr. Bullock might as well.” But that doesn’t mean his loss doesn’t feel any more wrenching when it comes.
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One of the things about living on a frontier is that everyone’s hustling to survive and there isn’t an enormous amount of time for everyone to sit around the Gem and talk about their feelings, even if the Gem was the kind of establishment where you felt inclined to be vulnerable in more than the conventional ways. But it’s extremely satisfying in this pair of episodes to watch three characters snap themselves out of bad circumstances.

First is A.W. Merrick, who has had his presses wrecked and his hopes for a romance with the new schoolmarm dashed after running afoul of Commissioner Jarry and the Hearst interests. Al comes to pay a visit through a connecting door he was previously unaware of, though as A.W. explains “Several of your patrons in different stages of undress have illuminated me” of its existence. “I’m in despair,” A.W. explains to his neighbor. “The physical damage may be repairable, but the psychic wound may be permanent.” But Al gives him a smack and some good advice: “The world ends when you’re dead. Until then, you’ve got more punishment in store. Stand it like a man and give some back.” A show like The Wire might have deepened the despair, but Deadwood believes that there’s still goodness in the world. When A.W. exerts himself, befriending his new office-mate, the Russian telegraph operator, they’re rewarded with one of the most joyful scenes of the recent golden age of television, Tom Nuttall’s bicycle ride:

Then there’s Jane, who is in a dangerously bad way, telling Charlie, who finds her with bloodied lips, that “I woke up on the dirt in the fucking graveyard, questioning dusk or dawn.” Charlie tries to bring her back to herself by finding a way for her to do for others since she won’t do for herself, suggesting she visit the bereaved Joanie Stubbs because “Seeing as you know about losing friends, you might be a good person to go on and talk to her,” but he tells Bill’s grave that he doesn’t have much confidence in her recovery. Still, when Jane bestirs herself to visit Joanie’s mausoleum of a whorehouse, there does seem to be a spark. When Joanie offers Jane a drink, Jane initially explains that “Yes, but my opening position is no,” before explaining that her preference in booze is “That it ain’t been previously swallowed. Bourbon, if you got it.” And if Joanie gets Jane wanting to drink in a moderate way, Jane gets Joanie talking about the terrible fate that’s befallen her.

Joanie’s been the most beaten-down character in the show practically since its beginning. So there’s something particularly powerful about seeing her bestir herself for the first time since the murders. Cy can’t figure out that Joanie is looking for new patterns, asking her, “What the fuck did you come here for if not to be protected?” And when Joanie smashes her bourbon bottle against Wolcott’s head and tells him to get out of establishment or she’ll kill him, I actually cheered. Maybe Joanie wouldn’t have been able to ward off Wolcott if Charlie Utter hadn’t softened him up for her, but I’m so glad that she saves herself. I understand why Alma’s dithering about Ellsworth’s (totally adorable, btw) proposal; I understand why Martha speaks to Seth in code. But in the case of these terrible murders, backed by powerful institutions, it’s wonderful to see Joanie get her own justice when the law can’t, or won’t, protect her.

A.W. Merrick’s been a cheerful if somewhat marginal figure in our story up until this point. And so the journalist in me was delighted to see A.W. stand up for himself in matters of business and the heart, and to call out Cy Tolliver for interfering with him. First, Commissioner Jarry shows up in A.W.’s office, thinking he can boss the jovial newsman around with a mere “Great respect for the fourth estate. Here’s a statement to be printed.” But A.W. may back down to Al Swearengen in matters of phrasing, but he is no fool about the nature of his community, especially when he sees how meaningless that statement on property rights is. He is, after all, an investor in Deadwood himself. “What will exactly will or won’t qualify or mitigate the presumption of ownership eludes me,” he warns Jarry. “Without an accompanying explanation this statement may work an unsettling effect.” When Jarry tries to bully him, A.W. sticks to his guns and rather than puts out the paper, prints the notice, and sticks around to interpret it.

And when Cy Tolliver, snakelike as always, has A.W.’s press smashed (“Got any sledgehammers?” asks his goon. “Always,” Cy replies, very nearly twirling his moustache.), A.W. confronts him, declaring “We differ, Mr. Tolliver, on the function of the press.” Cy may think he’s being smooth when he mock-queries “Ain’t the lesson for you in this, Merrick, that with fucked-up machinery the press can’t function.” But I don’t think we’ve seen the last of A.W. Maybe it’s that he’s energized by the presence in town of the new schoolmarm (“How I revere your, your profession,” is the new best dorky compliment a guy can give.) or maybe it’s just that he’s found an issue that galvanizes him. But it’s nice to see the president of the Ambulators get his chance to be a hero.
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I’m behind on my Deadwood watching, but rather than leave you bereft on a Thursday, I wanted to think a bit about how the show fits into a framework Amanda Marcotte lays out in a provocative, and I think largely convincing, essay arguing that the defining feature of our current golden age of television is an examination of uneasy and untenable ideas about masculinity.

There’s no question that many of the great shows have put men squarely in the center of the frame, and featured women making critical, brittle decisions around them and in relation to them. Carmela Soprano and Skyler White are fascinating tragic figures, women, and most importantly wives, who have contemplated betraying their husbands, shedding that mantle of matrimony and becoming independent, morally integrated people, but who ultimately declined to act. The most arresting image of this season of Breaking Bad, for me at least, has been the sight of Skyler flipping coins at the Four Corners to determine if she should leave her increasingly monstrous husband and, resisting her own fate, pushing the coin back to New Mexico every time. Examining how men embrace, or run from, or reform their own masculinity is a first-order question for feminists in part because it determines what women have to react to, the space left for us to form our own identities, the things we will inevitably have to deal with and resolve as we continue our quest for equality.

But Deadwood shows us a world where the men at the center of the frame — and the show has a less rigid main character than the other shows on Amanda’s list — spend a lot of time tailoring their expressions of masculinity to the presence of women, and women struggle with the opportunities to redefine themselves that, if not exactly expansive, are broader on the frontier than they were at home. I’m not done with the show, and obviously there are falls to come. But watching Alma Garrett kick her drug addiction, put off her widow’s mourning, make love to Seth Bullock, plot revenge with Whitney Ellworth, and curse E.B. Farnum, claiming the territory of masculine crudeness and dark thinking for her own, is glorious. Trixie may be my favorite female character in the age of prestige television, vulnerable and striving, cautious of liberation, aware that there is always a price to be paid and suspicious of Sol Star, a man who wants to subvert the economy of desire. And Calamity Jane is Brienne of Tarth, more wedded to conceptions of honor than anyone around her, even if she can’t live up to her astronomically high standards.

Unlike all of the other television shows that define the golden era, programs in which the rules of business and of life are fixed, sometimes constricting to the point of physical and psychic death, Deadwood is about the creation of those rules in gender, and law, and business, the moments when we succeed and fail to make our own revolutions. It’s critical that we contemplate our cages, both the ones we’ve made ourselves and the ones designated for us. But the stories about what we do or don’t do in the moments when everything could be different are just as powerful.

There’s something heartbreaking about watching Seth and Martha try to figure out how to make a life together, building it on the foundations of honor and not much else. “Certain things I said yesterday, I regret,” Seth tells her the morning after her arrival in town in the midst of his slugout with Al Swearengen over whether his affair with Alma is distracting him from his duties as sheriff. “I’ll be grateful if you’ll not rely on them. Representations I’ve made of letters I’ve written. I didn’t.” Martha, who was quick to play along with his deception, even as it bewildered her, tells him with painful composure: “I hold my deepest gratitude, Mr. Bullock, for what will let us live as we are now.” Later, they have a veiled discussion about whether or not to have sex before they begin their day after Seth fell asleep before they could go to bed the night before. “I would enjoy to converse in the stillness at the end of the day like that,” Martha says. Anna Gunn is just so tremendous in this role, and there’s something remarkably compelling and vulnerable about watching her in this profoundly alien situation, torn between duty and sexual excitement. I think we’ve all thought through arranged marriages, but a situation like this, a marriage of convenience tinged with the forbidden—Seth, after all, has married his brother’s wife—feels just as alien and distant. “Tonight, after dinner, I will have two cups of coffee, and I will not fall asleep,” Seth promises her. Duty, but not entirely an unpleasant one.

While Martha and Seth are profoundly controlled, Trixie and Sol are beyond the boiling point. I really have to say that Paula Malcomson’s embodiment of Trixie is one of the finest sustained television performances I’ve ever seen as an actress, and I hope that appearing in The Hunger games does nothing but wonderful things for her. She is magnificent, and maybe never moreso than in these episodes, where she’s taking steps towards furthering her relationship with Sol and her education, though not without profound ambivalence. “I wonder, would you teach me how to do accounts?” she asks Sol. “I’ll pay you, or you can take it out in cunt.” Her resistance to the idea that Sol could want her for himself, and even if she does, her reluctance to let him, is fascinating and nuanced. There’s a certain amount of clarity about only being wanted for one thing, and a terror of being wanted for something ephemeral that can’t be assigned a clear erotic geography. It does help that she’s making this decision against the backdrop of Al’s impending kidney stone operation, which is impressively gruesome. Ian McShane’s acting out of his agony is so fearsome that I felt actual physical discomfort watching it. And as Trixie explains to Jane while they’re out for a drink, “Far is it goes, he also brought the cripple from that orphanage. Don’t buy that bullshit about the 9-cent trick.” We can understand why Trixie cries in Sol’s arms that “I can’t stay. But it’d be smart to stay and fuckin’ learn to calculate interest.” This is not some simple choice between Al and Sol, between prostitution and non-sex work, between a man who beats her and a man who treasures her. There are merits to both lives.

And there’s the beginning of something between Alma and Whitney Ellsworth, her growing more confident, he advising her. “I’d like to buy Mr. Farnum’s hotel,” she tells him with malicious glee on their way back from the claim, “To renovate and make it my residence…[there are no other options] that would offer the finer pleasures of putting Mr. Farnum in the thoroughfare.” And while Ellsworth gets the impulse, he tells her”I guess most of us are lucky to be too broke to act on those kinds of ideas.” While he checks her more reckless impulses, he isn’t afraid to run off Hearst’s stalking horse, Mr. Wolcott (who feels like a false note to me, too much of a cartoon villain) or to suggest to Alma that she go head to head with E.B. when he’s trying, yet again, to get her to walk away from her claim even if not to sell it to him.

But the partnership that isn’t working particularly well for me is Joanie and Maddie. Some of it is clearly that it’s tied up with Wolcott, who feels to me like a stock Law & Order villain of some noxious variety. But I think it’s also that with Maddie in the picture, Joanie’s move to open her own business just seems to put her in the shadow of yet another powerful partner; I’d almost be more interested in her depressed with Cy than with a spark that seems continuously to be put under a bushel. When Wolcott tells her “A tiny corner of operation for such an amusing mind. I promise as I sojourn here to bring you stories from the world of men,” I feel a certain amount of regret that we’re not seeing Joanie out on the streets, mixing it up with Charlie Utter, and building a life.

As an organizations nerd, I’ve felt a certain amount of impatience over the last few episodes of Deadwood as Al Swearengen’s machinations have kept the law at large at a distance from the careful little government he’s building in the camp. But I will admit that I’ve been glad to have the breathing room to see the emotional relationships on the show develop. And boy were these two episodes rollercoaster rides of emotion, to quote the honorable Tracy Jordan.

It’s totally fascinating to see the odd and specific and unexpected gender dynamics of Al objecting to Seth Bullock’s affair with Alma Garrett not because he objects on moral grounds like E.B. Farnum, who snarks that “While little Sofia is off with her tutor, Mrs. Garrett consults with Mr. Bullock,” but because he thinks that it’s distracting the sheriff from his duties. And he has a point. Seth’s having time making veiled conversations with Alma — “Is that my worth?” she asks him at one point. “That’s the amount on deposit,” he tells her. “Your worth is considerably more.” — before falling into bed with her, and he’s short-tempered and ineffectual in dealing with crime, much less establishing himself as an alternate power center in town. That said, Al’s preferred means of rectifying the problem, fighting with Seth until both of them pitch themselves over the balcony, is not a particularly convincing piece of community organizing.

And even worse than the physical aftermath is watching Alma and Martha realize that they’re not the only women in Seth’s life. Especially in a season of Breaking Bad where Anna Gunn’s increasingly taking center stage as Skyler, it’s fascinating to see her in a similarly repressed role, just 120-odd years earlier. Whether it’s her clipped address to Seth as Mr. Bullock, or the look on her face when A.W. Merrick tells her, “The readers of the Black Hills Journal would be interested in your journey and your first impressions of the camp,” only to have Doc note that “You don’t have to give ‘em all,” she’s a marvel. And while Alma and Seth are both naive to think that he’d ever walk away from his responsibilities, it’s still some beautifully vulnerable acting by all the parties involved.

Then there’s Jane’s return to town via what she refers to as “a rigging contraption of my own devising against repeated accidental falls that has temporarily malfunctioned.” It is an utterly glorious comedic moment, and the whole thing illustrates why Jane and Doc may be one of my all-time favorite male-female friendships on television. He can call her an “entangled inebriate” and talks her not just out of her militant insistence that everyone in town should “Keep your fucking distance. Remain on your side of the street. Do not interfere with me in any way.” And he can get her to take off her shirt, an act of extreme vulnerability for a woman who can see being courted by a Finnish man who thinks she’s another man as a joke. Doc may be the only person she’s comfortable being a woman with.

I’m impressed that in this first season of Deadwood, the show’s managed to dedicate an emotionally significant moment or storyline to every character we’ve seen on-screen. In particular, I appreciated the way these last two episodes made Jewel a person, rather than a vehicle for the expression of Trixie’s nurturing nature or Al’s private inner goodness.

There are an amazing number of shots of the muck that constitutes Deadwood’s streets in this first season. People have it splashed on their nice dresses, are beaten to the point of brain damage in it, and jump into it after being threatened with their lives. Jewel may be the only person to fall in it, calmly get up, and keep going. There’s a serenity to her. “I came here on my own Doc,” she tells the physician, who is reluctant to listen to her ideas for a corrective brace. “I got something I want to show you.” “That boy was goddamn able-bodied before he got his leg shot-up,” Doc warns her, but he is excited in spite of himself, even prying the broom out of her fingers when the brace arrives as she jokes “You’ll have to remove it from my clutches.” The season ends with the two of them dancing, Jewel telling the Doc to think of himself as graceful as a woodland creature.

And that isn’t the only role Doc plays in the conclusion of this stage in Deadwood’s development. There’s something poignant about the divine sanctification of one Civil War veteran’s mercy killing in answer to another veteran’s prayers. Jewel’s book breaks something in the doctor as the reverend enters the final stage of his illness, leaving him crying in his office “What conceivable godly use is this protracted suffering to you? What conceivable use was the screaming of those men? Did you need to hear them to know your omnipotence?” Al, for once, is the answer to someone’s prayers.

And even as Al commits another murder in his own interest, he also finally establishes legitimate law in Deadwood. After a long battle, Seth Bullock succumbs to the role of sheriff, in part because of his own impatience with the man who does take the role, and in part because he’s also succumbed to Alma’s charms. The latter event takes place upon the arrival of Alma’s scum-like father in town. The man starts out by telling his daughter “I always thought it was going to end like this, button. A rooming house in a mining camp in Indian territory, you caring for a Norwegian foundling and operating a bonanza gold claim.” Then, he tries to pimp her out to Seth even though he’s married, telling him “I’ve learned that no matter what people say or how civil they may seem, their passions rule.” And finally, he reveals to Alma that he’s racked up massive debts on the credit that her marriage opened up to him, threatening her with perpetual domination. Seth responds by removing a number of his teeth, taking Alma to bed, and putting his badge back on for the first time. “I know where it goes,” he tells Al. And he knows how to conduct a proper hanging, too. Seth may not have ended up with the role he wanted, but he’s found a home he wants to protect.

When you’re building a new society from the muck and outside of established law, it turns out you don’t just need to make rules and appoint officials: you have to establish some norms as well. And it turns out in a world where women are a scarce commodity, where a Chinese settler plays a key role in a certain kind of trade, some of the rules are going to suspended, even as some characters cling to outmoded conceptions of honor.

In these couple of episodes my favorite interactions were those between respectable men and the whores who have caught their attention. Sol’s set apart from the rest of the camp by his Jewishness, though not necessarily in an aggressive way. “Centuries of fucking inbreeding attune him to the necessities of the times,” Al declares, embracing a positive stereotype to praise Sol and Seth. “You did a fucking good job here.” So perhaps that’s what draws him to Trixie, insisting in an earlier episode that she be allowed to visit the store whenever she pleases in the face of E.B. Farnum’s snobbery, and finally stating his intentions to Seth and then seeking her out. “I don’t want what I can’t have, Mr. Starr,” Trixie demurs, having recently experienced the stress of rising above what she believes is her station in helping Alma. “If I did come, I’d buy an ax, a hammer, and a saw.” But Sol isn’t letting her go that easy. “All fully stocked,” he promises her, ceding the conversation but not the campaign. “And we never ask the purpose of a customer’s purchase.”
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