‘Reservation Dogs’ Gets Breezy and Reminds Us Why We’ll Miss It
This post contains spoilers for “Friday,” this week’s episode of Reservation Dogs, now streaming on Hulu.
And on the fourth episode, Reservation Dogs rested.
Season Three began with the kids still in Los Angeles, and while most of them wound up back in Okern by the end of the premiere, Bear still had two more powerful encounters with Very Special Guest Stars before he could join them. So it’s taken nearly a third of the way into this final season to have everyone together back on the rez, getting up to mischief. And after the intense tragedy and horror of “Deer Lady,” “Friday” leans back, puts its feet up, and tries to relax with something much lighter.
When a show is as much of a chameleon as this one, it’s hard to refer to any episode as a typical one. You could just as easily cite something like the farewell to Elora’s grandmother last season as the quintessential Reservation Dogs installment, or Willie Jack’s visit to prison, or… you get the idea. Though the series changes shape often, it has many shapes it returns to, season after season. “Friday” is a fine example of one of the most familiar of those, with the gang just hanging out at the clinic for the whole episode, waiting once again for their real lives to start.
In this case, they theoretically have reason to be there all day, as Bev is administering their punishment for running away to L.A. (*). (Jackie somehow gets roped in, even though she wasn’t on the trip, because she is now almost as much a part of this crew as the one with White Steve and the others.) But even that’s not very strictly enforced. Willie Jack and Cheese, for instance, make a go of trying to scrub sexually explicit graffiti off the clinic wall, but that’s mainly an excuse for Cheese to remember that he never got the eyeglasses that were prescribed for him a while back. Bear, meanwhile, ends up sweeping the floors with Jackie, but his main focus is trying to impress her with stories about the Deer Lady. (He denies this when Bev calls him out about the flirting, but for all of Bear Smallhill’s strengths, subtlety is not among them.)
(*) Unless I missed one in previous weeks, Bev offers us the first “shitass” of the season, but referring to the kids as “a bunch of no-thought-ass-having shitasses.” I admire both the restraint of waiting that long to drop the show’s favorite curse word, and the creativity of Bev’s specific phrasing. Bravo to all involved.
Big picture-wise, not much happens, though we do get a pixelated picture of a naked Big lying on an exam table. (He and Bev will later hilariously gross out Elora with their own flirting.) The main development is that Elora is still making plans to leave the reservation, possibly to go to school. And, thanks to Aunt Teenie’s advice in the premiere, she’s finally ready to look for her father (whose first name, she’s dismayed to learn, is Rick).
Willie Jack has the most low-key day of them all, palling around with Fixico, the old man who hawks his folk medicine outside the clinic. At one point, Fixico bluntly says he doesn’t expect to be around much longer: “I’m going soon. Off to that happy hunting ground.” If and when Elora leaves, it won’t be nearly so dramatic as that. But even in an episode where the group is back on their home turf, there is a sense of fragility: that this silly, peaceful round of detention may be one of the last times all four (or five, if we’re counting Jackie) are together like this. When Elora asks Cheese how he feels about his new glasses, he admits, “I have mixed feelings about my feelings.” It’s not hard to similarly have mixed feelings about an episode like “Friday,” which on the one hand is lovely in its simplicity, and on the other hand only makes the feeling of our own impending loss of the series feel more acute. If Reservation Dogs can still be this good in such a light, plotless half-hour, how can it possibly be going away so soon?