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Give Zahn McClarnon an Emmy Already
Dark Winds’s strongest season to date is defined by his outstanding performance.
Her investigation into an Indigenous Mixtec mother and daughter being forcibly brought into the U.S. leads her to oil baron Tom Spenser (Bruce Greenwood, only slightly toning down the charming evil of his The Fall of the House of Usher performance), who might be somehow connected to Leaphorn and Chee’s case — and who might put Manuelito in danger her former co-workers can’t get her out of. (Other excellent needle drops this season: David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” and Bob Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.”) The series’ devotion to writing Native American characters of different backgrounds and ideologies is one of its greatest consistencies and something McClarnon has talked about being key to Dark Winds ’s production. And yet all of that nuance is nothing compared to the extreme interiority McClarnon brings to sixth episode “Ábidoo’niidęę (What He Had Been Told),” a form-breaking, Lynchian installment that unearths an aspect of Leaphorn’s past and makes explicit the series’ long-gestating considerations of what it means to act against whiteness, Catholicism, and other systems of oppression that have long attempted to erase Indigenous people.
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