2x12 Boy the Earth Talks To

If there's a thesis to Deadwood, it seems to be this -- civilization is messy. History, and television, both aspire to be clean, not in the sense of lewdness or curse words (another concern that Deadwood ignores), but in the sense of straightforward progressions with clear, well-delineated beginnings and endings. History books have to condense the endless complications of human progress down to something that high school students can regurgitate. Television hews toward arcs and narrative progressions, where stories start and finish neatly within an episode or a season. We tell ourselves a story about how our lives, how our nation, how our civilization came to be, and it's often one that fits neatly within certain clear-cut boundaries we set for our thinking. Television typically tries to mirror this tack, to chop big ideas into digestible chunks.

But Deadwood isn't interested in either side of this dichotomy. "The Boy the Earth Talks To" is a season finale, and in that regard, it has some requisite big moments, and pays off certain narrative threads that have been put forward since the first episode. But it's also part of the semi-improvisational bent of the show, where despite the episode's place as a capstone on a season, it includes endings, like Wolcott's departure, Wu taking out Lee, or Alma and Elsworth's marriage, but also beginnings, like Hearst's arrival in Deadwood,the start of the Elsworths' new life together, and middles for that matter, like the budding friendship between Jane and Joanie, or the continuing travails of Farnum's hotel, or Al's continued efforts to ensure the survival of the camp with him at the top of the food chain.

That idea comes through in the episode's final sequences, which dance across the camp as a cacophony of events are juxtaposed, and become dappled and intertwined with one another. The anchor, is the wedding of between Alma and Elsworth, and it too is not without its tumult. The wedding itself is not exactly joyful, Both Alma and Elsworth struggle through the ceremony as the ceremonial nature of their marriage starts to weigh on them in the face of the enormity of their commitment. But it represents, to episode one's title, a lie agreed upon, one meant to be better for everyone. It is the culmination of their kinder natures taken to an extreme for the benefit of others, and in that, it is joyous. But that wedding is intercut with two other developments. There is the unsightly (soundly?) thump of Mr. Hearst's hammer as he knocks down a wall in Farnum's hotel, and it is the sign that things end and change, that the stability in the camp is about to face a force which threatens to remake it in its own image. By contrast, there is a scene of Martha Bullock seeing the first green shoots of the sunflowers that William planted, the last gasps of their old lives, emerging from the dirt in her garden, a sign that there is also renewal and rebirth and mementos of what has passed.

Once more, the camp is brought together at the Elsworths' wedding reception. And a different show might have ended it there, perhaps with a montage of the major characters looking contemplative with a soothing tune to lay on the emotion. Instead, we have this site of joy interspersed and punctuated with moments that complicate it, that show even when the town is enmeshed in a celebration that seems to consume it wholesale, Deadwood is an organism that is constantly growing, constantly moving, constantly changing. It is, in a word, messy.

So amid the dancing and merriment, life and death still happens unabated. Cy confronts Andy and takes a dagger to the gut for his troubles. Mose tries to follow Doc Cochran's exercises and in the background behind him, Wolcott hangs himself having been rebuked for his grisly deeds by Hearst. Merrick struggles with his camera while being groped by one of Al's locals. Doc Cochran dances sweetly with Jewel. Wu and Swearengen's hatchetmen return having done their duty. Charlie Utter comes back to town and reunites with Jane and Joanie. Bullock shares a meaningful look with the new bride. This ending is not a simple one. It is one steeped in the unfinished, unsteady forces that grip people, cities, and whole civilizations all at once, and posits that the stories we tell about them ought to be as equally wild and complex as they unravel.

Heart is a man with focus and as Al puts it, concentration. He eschews diversions and distractions, whether it be which Chinese man supervises his operation or who's working where. He is someone who lives to knock down walls, to only seek the color, and leave all the rest of it to others. Al, by contrast, is someone constantly immersing himself in finding out where all those frayed ends lead, to seeing where each play in the playbook might lead him, and ever ready to change course when the terrain requires it. He is a man made for this mess, for the rocky process between wilderness and civilization. And yet as he stands on his balcony, gazing at the revelry below but not participating in it, he seems like Moses, a man who gives his life over to finding the promised land, but destined, perhaps, not to enter it himself.

At the end of the episode, he chats with "The Chief," his only true companion, and bellows at Bullock to go home. When Seth does, he shares that look with Alma. "I believe it's to your fucking right," deadpans Al. This wedding is meant to be one of those events that makes things cleaner, neater. It's meant to wash away the impropriety of the child's conception, to make a clear line between Seth and Alma, each of them now ensconced in their marriages, never the twain shall meet. But this too, seems destined to be messier than they intend, and this camp, like the people in it, will keep moving, and living, and dying apace in ways that don't fit neatly into boxes, seasons, or the flattering histories we construct for ourselves about how we stopped being heathens and started a civilization.