Reservation Dogs (2.1-2.2) Episode Recaps: Rollerblades and Jean Shorts

Trauma is often intertwined with place. Sometimes, so deeply that the only solution seems to be leaving. To do your best to push that trauma deeper inside of yourself. To swallow it and try like hell to outrun it.

That is where we are in the opening episodes of the second season of Reservation Dogs. (The first two episodes, along with the whole first season, are streaming on Hulu). At least with one of its central characters, Elora (Devery Jacobs). The first season ended with her leaving Bear (D’Pharoah Woon-A-Tai) behind to go to California with Jackie (Elva Guerra). The entirety of the first season built to that moment. At each turn, the Reservation Dogs were saving money (or trying to make it) for their California dream. To get off the reservation and out of Oklahoma forever. Instead, Bear watched it all crumble before him as Cheese (Lane Factor) and Willie Jack (Paulina Alexis) decided to stay and Elora left without him. The first two episodes of the second season start to pick up the pieces.

Each character has a different response deepening their own journeys while starting to diverge their paths from each other. Willie Jack is convinced everything that went bad happened because of a curse she tried to put on Jackie. She’s convinced that if she undoes that curse, things will get better. Bear thinks Willie Jack is interested in “kid shit.” Even with that notion, he follows her around for the majority of the first episode. He doesn’t speak much. Woon-A-Tai plays this well as Bear tries to straddle being a supportive friend and trying to repair himself. Eventually, he resolves he needs to grow up. The first step to that is getting a job. That is how he spends the second episode. One of the most common threads through these first two episodes is the confrontation of the past: Willie Jack talks to Daniel’s picture in her home. Bucky and Uncle Brownie hash out old disputes (literally) through prayer. Bear atones for stealing Miles’ delivery truck (from the show’s pilot episode). These confrontations are not always negative, but they are necessary. They are also a reminder to each character: you cannot outrun the past. You can try, but you will find that it always catches up with you. It didn’t take long for it to catch up with Elora.

Just about everything that could go wrong on her journey out west does go wrong. In the weirdest and shockingly mundane ways too. When their car breaks down, Elora and Jackie start hitchhiking. They get picked up by Victor, the talkative traveling salesman. Talkative is an understatement, actually. The entire scene starts to play out like a fever dream. Victor – who seemed to be wearing an ill-fitting suit on top of everything else – starts singing along to his radio, imploring the girls to sing a song they have clearly never heard. But nothing can stop him. He just keeps going. He talks about the art that he sells, including Monet and Picasso, waiting a beat and telling the girls, “those are famous painters,” like he was revealing secret information. As he abruptly takes them down a dirt road to nowhere though, Elora and Jackie know something suspicious is happening. When he doesn’t stop or explain himself, Jackie kicks him in the head, and Elora frantically stabs him in the arm to get both of them out of the car (without their belongings). Even in the midst of this chaotic and tense scene, we get one of the best jokes between the two episodes: as Victor tears away from them, he screams, “YOU BACKSTABBERS!”

Most road movies inspire that feeling of the open road. The expansiveness. The endless horizon. The setting sun-stained architecture and landscape. Not Elora and Jackie’s journey. No, their journey is much closer to a nightmarish iteration of Homer’s odyssey. Rather than spending time on the road, their story is told through the vignettes of the people they encounter. Victor is the first. Next are the gun-toting confederates who chase them through wheat fields with shotguns. Finally, it is Anna (played by the terrific Megan Mullally), the woman who finds them asleep on her property and invites them inside for dinner and an uncomfortably specific prayer wishing harm (but not serious harm) on her ex-husband. Each of these characters marks off another part of their journey but at no point do they appear closer to their destination just their own personal breaking points.

What sometimes feels like a miracle in this show is how it manages to capitalize on the mundane. It is part of what make the world crafted in Reservation Dogs feel lived in. Creating place is easy. Four walls and ceiling and you got a room, right? How do you change the feeling that someone gets when they enter that room? You add furniture, you paint the walls, you change the smell. Materially, the room hasn’t changed. It’s still the same four walls and a roof, but it is not the same place anymore. No, it’s been lived in. Translating that to television is a behemoth of a task. Not many shows do it well. They become prescriptive or even didactic. They start talking past characters and directly to the audience. It is not a bad thing. It is often how audiences begin to relate to the characters they are watching. Reservation Dogs avoids that almost entirely. It does this by having a fully realized world. Because it’s the world of Sterlin Harjo (the show’s creator), Tommy Pico, Sydney Freeland, and the rest of the writing staff. It is the world of the show’s stars from the incomparable Gary Farmer (Uncle Brownie) to the newcomer Lane Factor (Cheese). It takes its smallest moments – from the head nods between Elora and the hot boxing strangers at the gas station to a neighbor cutting hair on their front porch - that may go unnoticed in other shows, and weaves them into the very fabric of Reservation Dogs. That’s what made this show so special in its inaugural season and it has returned two-fold in the beginning episodes of its second season.