I’ve mentioned Taylor Sheridan’s 1923 before. The end of this, his second prequel to Yellowstone, just aired (or streamed?), and, by all that is holy, I can’t say enough about it.
I could not believe it when I found out this was going to be the last episode of the series. “There’s no way Sheridan can tie up all those story lines in a single hour,” is what I thought. Of course, the last episode is a little over two hours and manages perfectly to bring all the story threads to their gut-wrenching conclusions.
Sheridan’s dialogue is almost always good, but every line in the last 2 hour episode is good enough to have been written by the Bard himself. When Cora asks Jacob what Alexandra is like, his response, “Imagine a shooting star could talk. She’s like that.” She is indeed, always with an articulate, sardonic quip even in the direst of circumstances when she frequently responds to her strong, silent husband’s reply of, “I don’t know what that means,” with, “It’s an insult, a quite devastating one, I assure you.”
Sheridan is not only adept at dialog. Just as he did in the opening episode of 1883, he also excels in long stretches with no dialog at all. The long scene where Alexandra survives being stranded in car stuck in the middle of nowhere in a snow drift, by setting a small fire inside the car, using anything at hand, reminded me of Jack London’s famous story To Build a Fire. You don’t need any words to be gripped by the desperate ingenuity of the character as she braves the cold to agonizingly strip a corpse of what she needs for her little fire.
This whole mini-series has been fantastic, and I fell desperately in love with Alexandra just as much as Spencer did. Sheridan is known for action and male heroes, but his female characters are all fascinating even as they are totally realistic. Also Sheridan is not afraid to kill off characters that we have fallen in love with, but never just to juice the plot. I’ve felt moved but never manipulated by a character death in a Sheridan drama.
Sheridan does not shy away from depicting evil and brutality, and the Indian School scenes from early on in the series are necessary to motivate the brutal climax of that thread in the story. Likewise the casual, sometimes explicit, pornographic sadism of the villain, is necessary to highlight the redemption of the somewhat less villainous character Banner who explains, “There are takers in this world and there are the took. I’m a bad man. I only did what I did to not be one of the took, but I don’t find joy in cruelty. I don’t use and dispose of people who did nothing to me,” as he realizes he must save his family from the utterly evil villain he has collaborated with.
Sheridan is absolutely brilliant, and this episode shows him at the height of his skill. Do yourself a favor and watch 1923. Like Shakespeare, it’s brilliant, brutal, and magnificent.
Musings of a Restless Mind 