Diksha Sundriyal
The third season of AMC’s ‘Dark Winds’ puts Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn through hell as he grapples with the guilt of betraying his oath as a police officer and betraying his wife’s faith in him. More than that, he is also struggling with the fact that law has started to catch up with him, as Agent Washington’s investigation has led her right to Leaphorn’s door. Still, in the midst of this personal storm, he has a murder to solve and, more importantly, a life to save. But in the sixth episode of the season, he fights for his own life when the monster that has been following him for a while finally comes face to face with him. SPOILERS AHEAD.
The Story of The Twins and the Yé’iitsoh
This season of ‘Dark Winds’ has the shadow of a monster named Yé’iitsoh looming over it. The name is mentioned in the first episode, and since then, the mysterious hooded figure starts to haunt Joe Leaphorn, who cannot figure out whether the monster is real or if it’s just in his head. With the monster being such an important motif in the story, the show finally acknowledges its story, which it enacts in the form of a play. This is where we find out about the Twins who battled and eventually slayed it.
The story begins with the Twins, called Monster Slayer and Born for Water, expressing their desire to go for a hunt. Their mother refuses to let them go because if they go out, they will attract the monster, the Yé’iitsoh, who will follow them to their house. Due to this, the Twins don’t go out, but as they find out about the Yé’iitsoh’s terror and how it has been destroying the world, they decide to do something about it. For help, they visit their father, the Sun, who gives them two weapons to fight the monster: the sunbeam and the lightning.
Powered by the weapons, the Twins set out to find and kill the monster. However, no matter how much they use their weapons, they are unable to even hurt it. Almost defeated by the nefarious entity, the duo decides to try something new. Instead of their weapons, they use the monster’s own weapon on him. This is when they finally break the skin and slay the monster. Their victory saves the world, and the Twins happily return home. However, the battle and the experience since they left the house have changed them so much that their mother can no longer recognize them. They call out for their mother, trying to convince her that they are her sons and she doesn’t need to be afraid anymore. But she cannot see beyond the aura they have now, and that makes them forever alien to her.
Joe Leaphorn’s Subconscious Leads Him to Solve a Decades-Old Murder
In search of George Bowlegs, Joe Leaphorn ends up in the desert, where he finds the boy and the Yé’iitsoh. He gives George the keys to his truck, but before he can do anything else, he is shot in the neck by a dart that renders him unconscious. He wakes up in the dream world, where his subconscious opens the door of a memory that had been closed to him a long time ago. He finds a trail of blood, and on following it, he finds the dead body of a priest. Then, he sees two boys at a distance. At first, he believes one of them to be George, but on closer look, it turns out that one boy is him at 12 years old, and the other is his cousin, Will. When he follows them through a door, he ends up in his childhood home, where he sits down to dinner with his family. He notes that things are off about the place, like the broken plates and the ants, but until he figures out what he is there for, he cannot leave.
At dinner, the conversation turns to his father telling Will and him to go to church. Young Joe is reluctant to go but has to listen to his father. At the church, Joe discovers that the priest whose dead body he saw is still alive. He is confused by this turn of events until the priest himself tells him that he is there to solve his murder. As more memories flood in, Joe remembers that the priest was a pedophile who abused Will and other boys. Joe himself witnessed this and tried to tell the elders about it, including his own father. However, no one seemed to believe him, and if they did, they didn’t do anything about it. So, young Joe decided to do something about it himself. He found his father’s gun with which he would kill the man.
When the priest crosses Joe’s path again, he arrests him, but the man in black robes reminds him that this is not what he is supposed to do. The cop is supposed to solve a murder, but Joe turns a deaf ear to his words and locks him in a cell, which is actually his own kitchen. This is when Agent Washington shows up. She tells Joe not to inflict his own form of justice on the priest as he did on BJ Vines. He needs to follow the law as a man of uniform, so she sends him back to solve the murder. Joe also sees Emma, who meets him inside an interrogation room where he has been cuffed to the table. She shows him the vegetables that the rabbits have destroyed because he didn’t fix the fence. When he asks her to give him the key to his cuffs, she retrieves it from inside a vegetable and eats it, showing that he will never be free of the constraints.
The Priest’s Murderer is Close to Home for Joe Leaphorn
Seeing that solving the priest’s murder is the only way to find his way out of this puzzle, Joe Leaphorn decides to put more thought into it. Given that he had already been prepared to shoot the man to death, he believes that he himself did it. But then, the priest reminds him that he was a twelve-year-old boy at the time and couldn’t have killed a full-grown man and gotten away with it. He also reminds the cop that his death was never confirmed; he was “missing, presumed dead.” No one knows what happened to him, but the priest claims that Joe knows in his heart. He just needs to accept it. Once Joe opens that door, he meets his father, who is covering up a grave. He confesses that it was he who killed the priest.
When Joe told his father what was happening to Will and the other kids, he tried to reach out to all kinds of police and federal agencies to have the priest arrested. But no one paid any heed to his concerns. In the end, when it became clear to him that no one was going to do anything and the priest would go on with his life while the kids of his community continued to suffer in silence, he dropped the false sense of justice provided by his uniform and killed the man himself. With the murder solved Joe finally comes to. He had been in and out of consciousness all this while as he gave Joe his gun to fight the monster. When he is more in control of himself, he faces the Yé’iitsoh himself while telling George to run for his life.
A fight ensues between him and the villain, as the former sustains some serious injuries. Still, when he starts shooting at the hooded figure, it starts to run away. While chasing him, Joe finds a rock with a bloody handprint on it, which makes him realize that it is not the mythical monster that he has been chasing. It is just a man. He seems relieved at the fact, maybe more so because he thought that the monster was chasing him for the bad things he had done. Now that he knows that his opponent is just another human, he finds himself on the same grounds to fight him. He radios Chee to let him know about the suspect and then falls unconscious, waiting for rescue to arrive.
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