'Reservation Dogs': All Dogs Go to Heaven
**None of the kids die in the series finale**
Aho! Young warriors!1 Here we are at the end — an end that’s also something of a beginning, or maybe just the middle if you consider time as a boundary-less continuum — of FX’s criminally under-watched ‘Reservation Dogs’ (‘Rez Dogs’, if you’re nasty), which just finished its three-season run. Over 28 tight episodes, creator Sterlin Harjo and co. wove stories of Deer Lady homicide and snack truck theft, catfish orgies and alien encounters. But perhaps the more important story, if you can believe it, was a gentle tale of growing up and finding your place in a community forever under siege, fortified by some of the most real-feeling teen performances2 in recent memory.
Those kids up there — those characters — are my friends (l-r) Elora (Devery Jacobs), Willie Jack (Paulina Alexis), Bear (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai), and Cheese (Lane Factor). Elora’s a hardened-but-warm dreamer. Willie Jack is a wry tomboy trying to hide her grief. Bear fancies himself the alpha (while contending with visions of a long-dead Native warrior). Cheese is the youngest, smartest, and most aloof. As actors, they each bring something totally different to their scenes: a certain pronunciation so strange it has to be real, a muscle twitch that could only come from someone truly inhabiting the moment. You ever watch, like, a Disney Channel kid and think “ never in the 2000 year history of God’s green Earth has a human child behaved like this?” My Dogs are like the opposite of that.
Even in its first season, ‘Dogs’ would expand its scope well past these four teens — to a town full of wacky characters like Gary Farmer’s perpetually stoned bar-brawler, Brownie, or a supernaturally-attuned cop played by Zahn McClaron. But whatever stories it told, whatever its episodes looked like, it always came back to our Rez Dogs, and their friendship.
In fact, that was sort of the show’s superpower, its ability to make something that had nothing to do with the kids somehow resonate with their energy. You felt it especially in this third and final season, its most ambitious yet, which travels across time (and maybe space) to tether Elora, Willie Jack, Bear, and Cheese to everyone who came before. In episode #302 we meet Maximus (the legendary Graham Greene), a recluse who left the Okern reservation long ago and now spends his days tending to eggplants, and guarding his property. It’s revealed in the coming episodes that he once had his own crew, which included Brownie and Elora’s (now deceased) grandma Mabel, all pondering the same questions as ours: how do I balance ambition and tribal responsibility? How do I become an adult? Will we all stay friends?
At first these interludes annoyed me, precious real estate — with single-digit episodes left! — devoted to characters who were, umm, NOT THE TITLE OF THE SHOW. This is not the time to be indulgent, guys! (Do that in a final fourth season, like ‘Barry’ did3.) But then you, like, expand your mind a little and re-imagine who the ‘Rez Dogs’ really are. These four kids, right now? Or These Four Kids, ageless archetypes, born then dead then reborn again; a generations-spanning community in which they all play a small part.
James Poniewozik said it way better than I could in his NYT write-up:
“Elders, after all, are just kids who have lived long enough; the kids are just elders who haven’t, yet. As ‘Reservation Dogs’ depicts it, community makes possible a kind of time travel: Through those who come before you, you visit the deep past, and through those who come after, you live in times that your eyes will never see. As the elder Maximus (Graham Greene) says, ‘We are just echoes of things that came before.’”
I won’t spoil the actual finale. But maybe you can’t? ‘Rez Dogs’ was never a very plotty show, coasting more on what a few years ago we would have called a strong emotional identity but today we just call “vibes.” Like its FX-sibling, ‘Atlanta’, this was a show rarely content to do the same thing twice. It was a sitcom, sort of, but you couldn’t set your watch to it. An episode with all four titular Dogs might be followed by a standalone with just one of them, and then a flashback to characters we’d only known before then as elderly family members. This sort of formal schizophrenia would be annoying but for the fact that — whether the episode was a Coen-y heist or a dark fable or an homage to ‘Dazed and Confused’ — it always maintained that ‘Dogs’ feel. Wherever the show went… there it was.
(I won’t spoil the penultimate episode, either, even though I desperately want to. An absolute triumph of guest-casting that at first feels too obvious, then utterly inevitable — like it had to be this person, it was them since before the show even existed — coupled with Devery Jacobs’ finest outing as both a performer and writer. Watch it! Drop me a line.)
‘Rez Dogs’ ending is, thankfully, not a case of a show gone too soon. Harjo made the decision to close things out here, on his own terms. But I maintain that it could have built another six seasons — hell, another fifteen, think big — on the foundation it’s laid. Elora, Willie Jack, Bear, and Cheese will grow up. Maybe they’ll move out of Okern, or back; maybe they’ll have kids of their own, or take someone else’s under their wing. They’ll shift and change and assume new roles in a community that’s both tangible and intangible, eventually becoming the very elders who once taught them. Geriatric rez dogs. (The tag line for season 14 is obviously “Old Dogs; New Tricks”. Are you paying attention, FX??)
These are fantasies. But that I can see them so clearly, as clear as Bear saw William Knifeman, is a testament to the love and care with which this show — this world — was brought to life. And series finales? They’re just doors. See you on the other side, ‘Dogs’.
Some more ‘Rez Dogs’ finale reading if, like me, you want to marinate in it a little more before letting go:
“Assembling Okern,” by Roxana Hadidi for Vulture. Amazing, in-depth look at how the show’s various departments — from locations to art to set decoration — brought the town of Okern (and environs!) to life using personal touches. “The city/town is its own character” is, at this point, cheap TV commentary but, like… the town is its own character.
“‘Reservation Dogs’ was a miracle,” by Phillip Maciak for The New Republic. Was ‘Rez Dogs’ a sitcom? Was it an indie dramedy? Does it matter? As we face what sure feels like the end of the streaming bubble, it’s interesting to consider the factors that made this show what it was, and allowed it to survive.
“‘Reservation Dogs’ was a coming-of-all-ages masterpiece,” by James Poniewozik for Time. I quoted Poniewozik’s piece above but the rest is great, too, elaborating on season three’s recurring boarding school location and the devastations wrought by forced (re) education. “If you want to make a people forget who they are, you cut them off from who they were.”
A recent tweet of mine I honestly thought should have gone viral
That will be the last Native appropriation I do today!!
And Devery Jacobs who, like Ben McKenzie before her, was already well into her 20s when this show started
Edgar, that one’s for you