Reservation Dogs recap: The show goes full Dazed And Confused
The FX gem flashes back to 1976, following the teenage kicks of the elders we've met over the last three seasons
TV Reviews Reservation Dogs
Honestly, I’m surprised it took Reservation Dogs this long to make a 1970s-set flashback episode, but I will just be happy to savor the fact that we got it. Breaking away from the tone and style of the show (though playing with form has long been a hallmark of this FX gem), “House Made Of Bongs” goes full on Dazed And Confused to give us a stoner-comedy episode that illuminates the youthful indiscretions of many of the elders we’ve met through the course of the show’s three seasons—including one we only met a few episodes ago.
Remember Maximus? The loner, doomsday/Star People prepper Bear ran into a few episodes back as he was making his way back from California? We’d seen some familiar faces in his makeshift residence, and in “House Made of Bongs” we get to see how close-knit of a friend group he had in his teenage years. That included not only Irene and Mabel but the likes of Brownie and Bucky. Oh yes, even Fixico!
As a conceit, seeing what these grandmothers and uncles and all around elder figures got up to when they were the age of Bear, Elora, Cheese, and Willie is kind of fabulous. And, like the “Deer Lady” episode two weeks back, it allows the show to further expand on the Reservation Dogs world and offer a much more robust vision of Native life over the decades.
The year, then, is 1976.
Maximus, a movie aficionado who walks through the school’s hallways with a camera in hand hoping to capture everything around him (he has film-school aspirations; he could be the “Indian Peckinpah,” he’s told), is a bit of an odd duck. Even when he’s hanging out with his friends Irene, Mabel, Bucky, and Brownie, there’s an alienated air about him. Not just that he’s closed off from the world but a sense that he feels like an observer of his own life. He’s a wallflower who seems all the more comfortable being behind the camera rather than front and center.
He’s also perfectly okay avoiding confrontation: It’s why he really doesn’t want to get drugs from his cousin (Fixico). There’s been a rift between them, and he’s in no rush to fix it. And no, don’t for a second believe it’s about Fixico and Mabel breaking up. Though maybe that’s part of it, sure.
Framed as a stoner comedy and eventually moving toward an afternoon-into-late-night outing where our high-school teens will soon find their own consciousness altered by some LSD, the episode careens toward an origin story for the Maximus Bear meets all those decades later. But really, the most fun aspects of the episode come courtesy of seeing Mato Wayuhi, for instance, bringing his uncanny Wes Studi-as-Bucky impersonation…or watching Nathan Alexis nail a version of Teenage Brownie that brims with possibility. It’s a wistful way of expanding the stories of these elders, showing us what they once were and what they once hoped to become: Young Maximus wants to be a filmmaker; young Bucky is obsessed with quantum physics; and even Fixico has already found his calling as a Medicine Man (much to his cousin Maximus’ chagrin).
We know, of course, that only some of these dreams come to pass. And some, in fact, are dashed. The episode, in a way, asks us to suture those images of, say, Mabel caring and being cared for by Elora to that wide-eyed teenager who inches ever closer to Maximus throughout their trippy afternoon.
But our eyes are constantly focused on Maximus. How did this promising would-be director end up as a recluse who believes in planting eggplants for “star people” (aka aliens)?
Well, we soon find out. As everyone around him is tripping, Maximus (our designated driver) tries to stay awake as he drives in the middle of the night. Which is hard to do considering the mind-melding trip he’s on (and that’s before factoring in Bucky’s musings on quantum chromodynamics and the very essence of being and becoming). And so, when everyone’s pretty much asleep in the car and he stops to better observe the lights he notices right outside, he has no other witnesses to what he sees: a spaceship and an alien.
Director Blackhorse Lowe plays this moment as a Spielbergian dream: We’re in Close Encounters Of The Third Kind territory, with an alien that looks like it’s straight out of a 1950s B-movie. “I’m your relative,” he tells Maximus. It’s a line that freezes him in place, both for what it potentially tells him about the nature of existence but also for how it plays with his own struggles around belonging. (His lack of family, we learn, is one of the reasons he begrudges Fixico’s own popularity; his cousin takes for granted everything Maximus doesn’t and can’t have.)
It’s a bittersweet moment wrapped in genre storytelling—especially once, in the blink of an eye, the alien and their spaceship disappears all before anyone in the car can see it. What Maximus gets are snickers. He couldn’t possibly have seen an alien. He’s just tripping!
Given what we know of Maximus all those decades later, and his absence in Okern, it’s clear this moment became a turning point, a splintering episode that forever changed his life and his relationship with those around him. And it’s a testament to Reservation Dogs that such a nostalgia-tinged lo-fi sci-fi spectacle was delivered in one of the funniest episodes of the season so far, one that nimbly riffed on stoner comedies all while asking big questions about the nature of the universe in between LSD trips. Basically, it was Reservation Dogs at its most inventive.
Stray observations
- “Don’t be a shitass” is just all around a good mantra to live by, no?
- Love catching the blatant placement of “St. Nicholas Training School” sign following the “Deer Lady” episode earlier this season, which took place at St Nicholas Indian Training School. A nice, winking throwback.
- I was intrigued by quantum chromodynamics and yet attempting to read about it reminded me why I am much better suited for the humanities. (We can’t all be STEM kids.)
- Okay, but futuristic stick ball actually sounds like a cool would-be blockbuster, no?
- “How beautiful to never search for who you are. Everything you need is here.” Just a lovely lovely line.
- I enjoyed living in the youthful world of the elders we’ve grown to love, but it made me think that maybe we should also get an episode where we flash-forward to what Bear and his crew look like decades from now.
33 Comments
This might have been the saddest episode of the show, and that’s saying something. It felt so heavy and poignant when we know where most of these people end up. Even the shots of the Sonic drive-in had a feeling of the cyclicality of it all, and gave a sense of being trapped.
The Sonic was a nice callback to Brownie’s first appearance
This show is so so good that is it criminal that the Emmys ignored it.
They gave a nomination to fucking WEDNESDAY.
It’s unbelievable isn’t it? The Emmy judges obviously don’t watch very many shows.
I love it. It brings back memories of growing up in my home town which had a number of reservations. Hell half the population is native. Including a lot of my family. I even got my status like a decade back, when they changed what % you need to be to be eligible. Even though I’m pretty damn white looking.Anyway, I’m really gonna miss it when it ends.
Great episode, even though no one ever said “I’m good” or “You had one job” that way in 1976. I was there. So I’m told.
Yeah, I was born in 1972, but those two phrases stuck out when I watched the episode. Also, while I enjoyed the inclusion of the Suicide song at the lake party, their debut album wasn’t released until December 1977.
Yeah, that kept throwing me out of things as well, every time they did it.
Is Irene the same lady that is Cheese’s faux grandma?
Irene is Cheese’s fake grandma (they rock the same hairstyle!); Mabel (who got between Maximus and Fixico) is Elora’s grandma/Cookie and Teeny’s mom.
Yup
This was the only character I couldn’t place, I totally didn’t remember that was Cheese’s fake grandma’s name.
Was that coach Big’s father?
That was my thought too, he had the voice and the mannerisms down cold.
He sounded and spoke just like Big!
Boooooooooring
The actor that played Young Brownie was amazing. He got the mannerisms down but he nailed the voice so much that I’m halfway thinking they dubbed in the modern day Brownie’s voice. Young Bucky was aces too.
I know I kept wondering if the voiced were dubbed also Hulu was having streaming issues when I was watching.
The young Brownie sounded EXACTLY like Gary Farmer, right down to the cadence. Either they dubbed him or that actor is an INCREDIBLE mimic.Every one of the young actors they cast looked and acted so close to their aged counterparts, the casting was mindblowing. Young Bucky looked and acted like a young Wes Studi, Young Maximus was a ringer for Graham Greene, and the Mabel actor looks so much like Devery Jacobs.Seriously probably the best example of casting for young versions of older characters that I’ve ever seen. The only one that threw me was Irene, I didn’t remember that was the name of Cheese’s “Grandma”. Although Qannah Chasinghorse definitely has the build and overall facial structure of Casey Camp-Horinek, I think Chasinghorse just maybe is more of a model than actor.
yeah who needs deaging (looks at Lucasfilm)
The way young Bucky and Brownie looked and sounded like their elder selves was amazing! Both Rez Dogs and Righteous Gemstones have done phenomenal jobs this year casting younger versions of their characters.
This cast is gorgeous.
My god the hair is glorious.
‘”I enjoyed living in the youthful world of the elders we’ve grown to love, but it made me think that maybe we should also get an episode where we flash-forward to what Bear and his crew look like decades from now.”’I literally thought the same thing and kind of figured that since this is the last season maybe we’ll get one.On a sidenote is anyone else disappointed that we don’t get to see what life is like at the other reservations we were shown on the map at the end of I think it was the last episode of last season? The explored that in subsequent seasons.
The actor who played young Brownie was very, very good. I was quite sad for Maximus.I’m just not a fan of slurries of weed humor and tripping jokes. I think they always take up way too much time and sacrifice the story.Having said that, I liked the world expansion and backstory. I’m not sure it makes me want a flash-forward, but I could see that working–the show is very adept.
Another amazing episode! This show is definitely going out on top. The book Bucky gave Maximus to read (I think the title was Mirrors Made of Millennia?), is that an actual book? I couldn’t find anything definite. The title sounds right on Bucky’s wavelength.
Are there other episodes of the show that the four main cast members don’t appear in? That is my only problem with this episode, other than how overwhemingly sad it is in establishing Maximum’s alienation & perhaps mental illness
I’m pretty sure they are absent entirely from the episode about the Moms/Aunties at the convention.
Bear and Cheese show up for a quick second during a phone call, but Elira and Willie Jack aren’t in it.
I have to think that, given the right set of opportunities, Maximus would have found a place in Hollywood: futuristic stickball would have been legible to United Artists.https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073631/