Reservation Dogs Season 3

 2023, FX - 10 episodes
created by Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi

It's hard saying goodbye.

The great shows don't just build characters, they build communities. The greatest shows build characters, communities, families, entire realities that exist only within the time and moment of the show.

When you build such a reality for a show, you can do anything, anything at all within that show. You can tell any kind of story, so long as they make sense for the world.

Reservation Dogs started out as a comedy about a quartet of teen shit-asses who were causing trouble on their Oklahoma res. But the humour of the show was always tempered by a bitter pang of reality. Their thieving and scamming was all for making money for a trip out to California as tribute to their friend who committed suicide.  

They had elders who looked down on them, elders who looked the other way, friends they could call on for support, and a parallel quartet who wanted nothing more than to intercept their path at every turn. The cast sprawled out from there.

Nearly every character on the show has had the opportunity to step out of the periphery and into the spotlight, if only for a brief moment, over the three glorious yet all too brief seasons of this show.  That most players have a spotlight moment, or entire episodes, just highlights that this show isn't only about four kids, but an entire ecology, how they support and develop and grow despite the obstacles before (and behind) them. 

The young quartet of actors are our grounding point, though, even as others step forward. It always returns to them. D'Pharoah Woon-A-Tai (Bear), Devery Jacobs (Elora), Paulina Alexis (Willie Jack), and Lane Factor (Cheese), each started out the series as surprisingly strong, unknown performers, and leave the series as veritable forces of charisma that, in a just creative system, would find them each in a star-accelerating vehicle immediately.  The reality is every actor in this show, every member of its vast community (which seemed to incorporate every Native American or Indigenous Canadian of any acting prominence, from Graham Greene to Wes Study to Jana Schmeiding to Zahn McClarnan) is fantastic, and by the end of season 3 it's heartbreaking to say goodbye -- or "go on fucker" -- to this community we've been welcomed into.

The great shows valiantly try to provide closure and send you off feeling like it all had a point. The greatest shows end leaving you full in your heart, knowing you've been part of something special, but unable to avoid the selfish ache of wanting more time in its world.

Season 3 is the show at peak community, its apex of world building. It spends time weaving between generations, seeding  delicately and intentionally a different group of Res Dogs from 50 years ago, honouring the elders, and taking a detour back in time to see them when they were young.  The third episode of the season provides an origin for Deer Lady (Kaniehtiio Horn) rooted in Boarding/Residential School trauma that colonialist culture has barely even started to reckon with.

It's a show that has feasted on magical realism, employing it heavily for comedy (through William Knife-man, played by Dallas Goldtooth) but it's most effectively used in providing insight and promoting character growth.  The magical realism in most other stories is typically quirk or affectation, but here quirk is only a small part of it. It's cultural and spiritual, the meaning behind seeing spirits, the connectivity it brings to one's heritage, as well as connection points within a characters lineage unfolds the storytelling layers.  Bear is our central character who sees spirits, but he's not the only one. When his mom (Sarah Podemski) starts seeing a spirit too, it not only connects her to unresolved grief, and guilt, but brings her closer to her son, even as she decides she's moving away.

Each episode of Reservation Dogs this season stands on its own.  Like Atlanta, it's adopted the format of, effectively, mini-movies that tell a pretty full story in around 30 minutes.  But unlike Atlanta, and even unlike the previous two seasons, this final season connects itself more cohesively thematically, the threads of community and family are strongly woven throughout every episode.  It feels of a whole.

Connection to culture and people is at the heart of each story, even when those connections are painful -- connected to memories or history -- but all part of the fabric of a people who are stronger together.    There have been a few episodes dealing with the death of a member of family and community, and each of those episodes highlights how it's a point not just for mourning the spirit departed, but for connecting with the spirits that remain. That the series ends with the passing of another member of the community is the most appropriate way to show what Reservation Dogs has ultimately been celebrating for 28 beautiful episodes. It provides the community a reason to come together, gives the characters time to have moments with each other, it celebrates their connections with tears and laughter. It's sweet and bitter and brilliant.

It's hard saying goodbye.