Reservation Dogs recap: Bear meets Deer Lady in a masterful episode
A strange encounter in a diner sets up a transcendent half hour of television
TV Reviews Reservation Dogs
Folk tales burrow themselves into our consciousness. Like drifting dreams or stray memories, they become part of us, part of the way we understand the world around us. They’re stories we need to make sense of our lives. But they can also be, as “Deer Lady,” the third episode of this latest season of Reservation Dogs, reminds us, stories made up of lives that lack some semblance of sense.
If you were hoping to find out where Bear’s been or how he’s going to make it home after being stranded on his way to Okern from California, you may not find the answer in the first few moments of this episode. In fact, genre-wise, writer Sterlin Harjo and director Danis Goulet locate us squarely outside of the playful storytelling that so characterizes this Peabody Award-winning series. Instead, we’re plopped right into a thriller/horror tale. A nameless woman is driving across a desolate landscape. She’s stopped to head into a public restroom where she…uh, is cleaning out an animal horn of some sort—all while flashing images take us to a darkened forest that’s as foreboding as it is disorienting. Is she remembering bits of her past? Of her dreams? Of her fears? Of all of the above?
She arrives at that most American of spaces: the diner. In true Twin Peaks style, she’s there to have some pie. Cherry, yes. But also apple. Not just slices, though. She wants two full pies. The better to reminisce, which is what she’s doing as she calmly takes in the surroundings of this empty diner. Empty, that is, until Bear shows up, clearly still looking for a way to charge his phone and let his mom know not to worry. This meeting, between this laconic though not wholly (or not only) intimidating woman and Bear feels weighted with decades (if not centuries) of whispered tales about a hoofed woman men young and old should fear. Oh yeah, did we mention this wayward strange woman has hoofs for feet and makes a point of showing them to Bear, whom she recognizes and seemingly knows of?
Bear is rightly afraid. He’s heard of the Deer Woman (or Deer Lady, in this case, per the episode’s title) before. He feared she was just the kind of tale that was passed down as a way to encourage the uncles to behave: She’s known for killing men whose wrongs need to be righted. Her reputation clearly precedes her. But rather than (merely) sketching out her mythic connection with Bear in such folk terms, Reservation Dogs ties her story up with the cruel violence that afflicted Native children in residential and “training” schools through the 19th and 20th centuries. For that’s where the flashbacks that structure “Deer Lady” take us: Her origin story lies in the violence done to her as a young girl who arrived at St. Nicholas Indian Training School and, along with others, was punished to unlearn her own culture.
A young boy helped her cope with the cruelty all around her. Before he himself was taken in the middle of the night by one of the many “wolves” that helped make such an operation run smoothly, wherein Native kids were stripped of their hair, their traditions, and their sense of culture, he left her with one piece of inalienable wisdom: “Remember they can’t stop you from smiling!”
It was only after she clearly lost him to those wolves that she opted to run away in the middle of the night. It’s there where she came face to face with a deer who offered to help, with violent consequences for at least one nun involved.
Such backstory tinges her meeting with Bear with fright—especially when she offers to drive him home. She only has one stop to make. The more we learn about her time in the school (and particularly of the one young man who helped bring Native kids into the care of those ruthless nuns), the more we also begin to worry about what it is she’s going to do with the man who opens the door when she knocks.
She’s come for vengeance, and vengeance she delivers. This one wolf may have lived a full life but that didn’t keep him from dying at the hands (the horns?) of the Deer Lady who, true to her word, delivers Bear back to Okern. What Bear will take from this encounter (seeing someone come back to the car with blood all over her coat and hands must change a man, no?) is yet to be seen. But he’s now armed, at least, with a lesson he needed instilled in him: He should keep smiling, for no one can take that away from him. It feels as much a lesson for Bear as a thesis statement for Reservation Dogs, which remains an astounding piece of television quilted with such care from the kind of vast storytelling well we have all been deprived of for far too long.
Stray observations
- If you’re wondering what book Deer Lady was reading, look no further. She was engrossed in Joe Brainard’s memoir-in-snippets I Remember. The 1975 text broke new ground for its simple (though not simplistic) approach to memory: The entire book is a compilation of errant memories that together create not just the length of life but seemingly the enormity of all lived experience. (“I remember smiling at bad news. [I still do sometimes.] I can’t help it. It just comes.” “I remember the way a baby’s hand has of folding itself around your finger, as though forever.”) That focus on the minimal, on the small, feels of a piece with Reservation Dogs, which finds the transcendent in the mundane.
- I keep trying to decide if the cherry pie looked better than the apple one, or whether I’d have been just as smart as Deer Lady to not even have to decide and opt to have both.
- Let us give Kaniehtiio Horn her flowers because “Deer Lady” would not sing without the hypnotic cipher of a performance she delivers.
- The choice to make English become garbled gibberish when taken back to Deer Lady’s memories is, in keeping with the show’s cosmology, such a simple and yet effective way to alienate not its Native characters and their lived experiences but do so for the alienating world around them.
- What a gut punch of final image (“Koda Littlebird, Killed by Human Wolves”).
24 Comments
No. Ground zero… if I’m wrong, tell me….. look at you, blowing shit up
Excited for this episode. The Deer Lady episodes have been my favorites of each of the previous seasons. No character I think better exemplifies the show’s magic realism
It is Criminal! that Hulu does not advertise this show more and that it does not win more awards. Rez Dogs is fantastic, funny, heartfelt, and original and some of the best TV in years. I hope these three seasons end up being shipped to schools and libraries for free and on disk so Native students have access to it.
There have been quite a few promos run during Justified: City Primeval.
That’s a great idea.
I see ads all the time for it during Justified and also popping up when I surf the net (big shock they follow me everywhere).This show is great, but Hulu’s ads are just a momentum killer. I hate that. If they had better content or a mid tier option price wise, but paying 14.99 for essentially two good shows is stupid.
I have such a thing for the Deer Lady. I’m not sure what to make of that. This show’s ability to go from laugh out loud funny to truly heartfelt is unmatched. I know there’s a lot of comedies of recent years that have straddled that line (The Bear, Barry, etc.) but Reservation Dogs is like nothing else.
I’m very sad it’s ending, but I’m glad they’re stopping on their own terms.
Deer Lady kinda does it for me. I think its worth the risk of getting stabbed.
You should watch Letterkenny, then. Kaniehtiio Horn is a recurring character and she’s awesome there, too.
YES TANIS IS AWESOME
This was such a simple yet gutting episode.I really want to know what the song playing toward the end was. The mournful, indie rock one with female vocals. Tunefind doesn’t seem to have it yet.
There, There by Mali Obomsawin and Magdalena Abrego.
Thank you! I guess it was newly premiered on the show. Very cool.
It’s kinda weird that this recap doesn’t mention the times Deer Lady’s shown up before in the series. Kaniehtiio Horn does such a great job with her, it’s always a treat when she shows up.One of my favorite throwaway lines in the entire show is when Willie Jack casually mentions her uncle was married to Deer Lady for three years.
Deer Lady mentions at the funeral one of the first times we see her that she was friends with (I think) Big’s grandmother? I wonder if they were at the boarding school together. I love how mysterious and fascinating she is, moreso the more we find out about her. Were they digging a grave for her young friend, knowing they were going to kill him that night? How fucked up and disturbing (whether they were or not)
Horn is really excellent, just the right amount of mysterious and unsettling without going over the top. I loved how Bear asked twice if she was going to kill him but stayed with her anyway. Like, he trusted her because of their connection and her outwardly calm demeanor, but there’s enough menace to her (and her legend) that he never be quiiiiite sure.
Did anyone else notice that as she left the house near the end of the episode, as she stepped down from the porch you can hear the sharp clicks of her hooves as she comes down each step, but as she walked back to her truck, just as she began to smile, her gait changes as if her deer legs/hooves were reverting back to human legs/feet?
I’ve watched it a few times now and her entrance to the house clearly showed the hooves as she walked up to steps to the porch… but the focus as she leaves is on her face.
I can’t quite tell if, after having completed this cathartic task, she’s now free of whatever deal was made with the mystical deer in the woods.
Damn, I love this show.
What an incredible episode of a consistently incredible show. Equal parts heartbreaking and terrifying. The way the nuns/ ‘caretakers’ voices were distorted gibberish was an amazing creative choice and haunting!Adding a layer of unintentional? irony, the subtitles Hulu decided to use for the episode translated the word Bear said to Deer Lady as he got out of the truck (a farewell or thank you- I’m not sure in which language) to “adieu”. Colonialism, folks. It’s everywhere.
And every time someone says ’sgo (i.e., “let’s go”), the captioning says sko.
It seemed like the nuns and the human wolves at the “school” were deliberately systematically killing the boys. But … why? (I suppose “just because they — the adults — were evil” is a good enough explanation.)
Unmarked Graves at Residential Schools in Canada: What to Know – The New York Times (nytimes.com)
I love this show, and I love Deer Lady, and while I wasn’t seeking or expecting for her to have an origin story, this was a powerful one. The horrors of these institutions will never fully be told.
Friends,Could anyone help me find the song that plays at 24:14 – 26:08 in this episode? S3 E3 Deer Lady.It plays right after Deer Lady kills the human wolf while Her and Bear are driving in her truck. Hit me hard and speaks to me. Would sure love to find it.