Dark Winds: Monster Slayer

June 13, 2022 8:58 AM - Season 1, Episode 1

Navajo Tribal Police officers Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee investigate the deaths of on older man and a young woman in a motel room. The FBI are more interested in a bank robbery where the robbers escape in a helicopter headed toward the Navajo nation.

Dark Winds Is Great Television From a Questionable Source

‘Dark Winds’: A Pulpy Mystery That Makes Native Characters the Stars of Their Own Story

posted by Quonab (7 comments total)

I really enjoyed the Tony Hillerman books in high school, but then I got to college (in New Mexico) and realized that maybe a white guy speaking in native voices wasn't the greatest thing, and quit reading them. This show has an all-native writing room, but the characters are recognizably the same characters as in the books. I had some complicated feelings watching the show, but overall I enjoyed it. I'm interested in seeing where it goes.
posted by Quonab at 9:15 AM on June 13, 2022 [4 favorites]

This looks interesting, but the trailer and the Esquire article makes it seem like they got Jimmy Chee and Leaphorn mixed up:

Lieutenant Leaphorn arrives onto the scene, applying traditional markings to his face to protect himself from any residual black magic before he scopes out the hotel room, discovering the dead bodies of both the elder and the young girl.

All of this happens in the first ten minutes, and it’s a lot to take in. Eventually Chee joins the fun, adorned in an over-the-top seventies style blue suit, driving a shiny El Camino and blazing by a Navajo family whose car is broken down with no help in sight.

Leaphorn, in the books, does not believe in magic or witches. Jim Chee would never wear a suit or drive a flash car.
posted by oneirodynia at 12:12 PM on June 13, 2022 [3 favorites]

>> "Leaphorn, in the books, does not believe in magic or witches. Jim Chee would never wear a suit or drive a flash car."


I'll say. This, and other startling changes, may be the writers and showrunner's way of making it clear this is not Hillerman. At most, it's Hillerman-adjacent. But it's their show, and it's pretty entertaining, and this child of the East Coast enjoys seeing landscape he's only imagined.
posted by mojohand at 1:14 PM on June 13, 2022 [1 favorite]

I was primed to like this show, as I've enjoyed Zahn McClarnon in Fargo and Longmire, but the music kinda put me off. Ominous horror-flick synth crap, IMHO.

McClarnon is good for the role, as was Noah Emmerich as an FBI agent. I'll keep watching, but I feel like I've been spoiled by Better Call Saul and Fargo...
posted by Agave at 9:29 PM on June 13, 2022 [1 favorite]

I love Zahn McClarnon a lot and liked the first incarnation of the book adaptations with Wes Studi, even though I know there were problems. I did wonder as I was watching it if they didn't make some of the changes to the characters as a way to shift from Hillerman and make it more their own thing. Loved the interpretation scene with the nurse and the pregnant woman.
posted by kitten kaboodle at 9:36 PM on June 20, 2022

I want to like this show but... episode 4 was so cheesy, just really poorly written. There's a very rich white man who apparently lives in a house without a front door because all sorts of people just wander in and he says rich white guy stuff to them. There's a romance brewing between two characters who ... won't tell each other their clan? One thing that's made clear in the books is how important familial and community ties are, and how careful people are not to date other people with the same maternal or paternal clan. No one introduces themselves with their clan in this show which seems like a huge oversight.
posted by oneirodynia at 9:39 PM on July 5, 2022

(Some info about Navajo clans and introductions here.)
posted by oneirodynia at 9:41 PM on July 5, 2022 [1 favorite]