Dark Winds

The Weight of the Dust

I keep coming back to the lines on Zahn McClarnon’s face. In *Dark Winds*, AMC’s sturdy, slow-burning adaptation of Tony Hillerman’s Navajo police novels, McClarnon plays Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn with a stillness that borders on geological. He doesn't just inhabit the 1970s Southwest; he looks as though he's been carved directly out of the red rock of Monument Valley. Television loves a brooding detective, usually one nursing a whiskey habit in a neon-lit city, but Leaphorn is something entirely different. He carries his grief like an anvil in his chest, pulling the entire center of gravity of the show down to earth.



When the series first showed up in 2022, I had my doubts. We’ve seen the Western noir formula play out a dozen times, often using Native American culture as mere window dressing for a white protagonist's spiritual awakening. But creator Graham Roland, backed by an overwhelmingly Indigenous writers' room and cast, reorients the compass. This isn't a show about outsiders looking in. It's about a community policing itself, trapped between the heavy hand of the federal government and the ancient, sometimes terrifying forces of their own cosmology. (It’s a neat bit of passing the torch that Robert Redford, who tried for years to adapt these books with varying success, serves as executive producer and even dropped in for a quiet cameo in the show's third season.)

Early in the first season, the show tells you exactly how it works. Leaphorn is preparing to enter a grisly crime scene in an abandoned motel. A standard police procedural would give us a close-up of a gun being cocked, or a sharp line of dialogue. Instead, director Chris Eyre holds the camera steady as Leaphorn pauses by his truck. He reaches for a small pouch, extracts a pinch of white powder, and carefully dabs it at the corners of his eyes. It’s a Navajo protective measure against the darkness he’s about to step into. Eyre doesn't subtitle the moment or offer a clunky expositional voiceover to explain it to non-Native viewers. He just lets the ritual happen. The camera watches the tension in Leaphorn's shoulders ease slightly, the spiritual armor settling into place before the brass badge does.



That kind of physical storytelling is why McClarnon is the undisputed anchor here. After years of stealing scenes as an intimidating enforcer in *Fargo* or a goofy reservation cop in *Reservation Dogs*, he finally has a canvas big enough for his specific brand of quiet. *Vulture* got it exactly right when they noted his ability to "subvert our assumptions about law-enforcement characters through tone and physicality." Watch the way he traces a blood trail in the dirt. He doesn't march; he glides, his weight shifting carefully, his eyes reading the ground like text. It's a deeply internalized performance. By the time the show reaches its hallucinatory third season, where Leaphorn's psyche violently fractures, McClarnon has built such a reservoir of stoicism that watching him break feels genuinely alarming.

That doesn't make the show flawless. I don't really know the overarching mystery plots always serve the characters as well as they should. Sometimes, especially in the second and fourth seasons, the reliance on FBI conspiracies and sneering corporate villains feels grafted on from a much more conventional network thriller. The narrative machinery clanks loudest when it asks us to care about stolen money or human trafficking rings, simply because the procedural requirements of the genre demand a neatly wrapped puzzle. You can almost feel the writers chafing against the whodunit structure, eager to get back to the character work.



But whenever the plot threatens to become tedious, the supporting cast pulls it back from the brink. Kiowa Gordon’s Jim Chee provides a crucial, slightly cynical counterweight to Leaphorn’s weary authority. Gordon plays Chee with a smirk that never quite reaches his eyes — a young man caught between his FBI ambitions and the pull of the reservation. And Jessica Matten’s Bernadette Manuelito gives the show its bruised knuckles; she brings a sharp, physical competence to a role that could easily have devolved into a standard sidekick.

*Dark Winds* is a show about what happens when the past refuses to stay buried, both culturally and personally. It doesn't always hit a perfect stride, but it does something rarer. It makes you feel the heat of the desert, the isolation of the dirt roads, and the heavy, lingering cost of trying to maintain order in a world built on stolen ground. I don't know if a traditional mystery show can ever fully capture the vastness of that idea, but I'm glad they're out in the dust, trying.