S1, E1: Deadwood

Johnny Burns looks up moments after taking a punch from Al Swearengen. "He's got a lot on his mind, Johnny" is what Dan Dority, another of Al's employees, told him by way of explanation as to why he had to take the hit.

[Returning to this episode now, months later, after having watched the whole series, Seasons One through Three. The summary below is pretty cursory, as I had remembered. The first scene of the series shows Bullock in Montana, hanging a criminal while warding off a band of drunks who want to execute frontier justice themselves. He says to them something like--you can't call the law in and then take it back just because you've had a few drinks and are enjoying people's sympathy. Bullock hangs the man, gets one of the men in the rabble to vouch to pass on the dead man's last request to the dead man's sister, and then rides off with his partner Sol Star, who throughout the episode is backing him, rifle in hand.

I think the next characters we meet are Calamity Jane, Wild Bill Hickok, and Charlie Utter. They're on a wagon train that's hit a traffic jam on its way to Deadwood. We learn pretty quickly the dynamic between the three of them. They are both solicitous of Wild Bill, who is lying down with a headache. Charlie Utter gets on Jane's nerves--Bill says something to Charlie about it, and Charlie says he wishes he knew what he'd done to get on that woman's bad side.

Then we meet Al. He is tending bar, pouring drinks for Ellsworth, who says to Al--I don't trust you further than I can throw you, but I like the way you lie! Al then rushes off to deal with a gunshot. It's Trixie. She has shot a customer who was beating on her. She is bloody from the beating, but the customer is dead, although he takes a surprisingly long time to die, something that fascinates the Doc, who wants to examine the man further. Al has Trixie sent to his office, where he catches up with her. She sees the beating coming. "Do what you're gonna do," she says after some minimal interrogation. He throws her to the ground, grabs her arm and steps on her neck. "What's it going to be, Trixie?" he says, looking, I guess, for some sign of submission. And he gets it--"I'll behave," she says, before he lets her go. But she shows signs--not right that moment, but a few scenes later--of having more resistance left in her. We see her ask Jewel, the disabled woman many refer to as "the gimp," to get her another gun.

We meet a few other characters. We meet Farnum as he checks Bill and Charlie into his hotel. We see Bullock and Star agreeing to rent a tent for their hardware store from Dan Doherty. For $20 a day they can have a tent--if they want to construct a building--well, that will be another matter for another episode. We see them on opening night, selling their stuff. Bullock is the muscle behind their operation, providing a tough edge to ward off people who might fuck with it. We see Wild Bill and Charlie find Tom Nuttall's place, and Charlie makes an arrangement with Tom to have Wild Bill gamble there exclusively. Or at least that's what I heard them say, I thought. I may have walked out of the room during that scene.]

The good-looking woman character [Alma Garrett] made her first appearance. She is the love interest of the New York dude [Brom Garrett] we see foolishly paying $20,000 for a claim of land, when the sale had been brokered by Al for merely $14,000. We see Al has his hand in everything--when he punches an employee (see photo above) it's because a piece of news has gotten out on the casino floor downstairs. "How many people do you think know about it by now?!" he rants. "That means they aren't drinking, they aren't gambling. They aren't chasing tail. I've gotta do something about that!!"

[The seller of the $20,000 claim is named Tim Driscoll, and his upselling of the claim infuriates Al--he had wanted some of the New York man's money, but he hadn't wanted ALL of it--this additional advantage-taking of the man will lead to quicker word back to New York and the alerting, there, of Al's nemeses the Pinkertons. Driscoll acted out-of-pocket, and before the episode is over Al will have him killed for it.]

Wild Bill Hickok all but has a target on his back, what with his reputation as being such a great gunfighter. Everybody wants a piece of him, and I'm just curious how soon he's going to die. We see Charlie Utter complaining to a barman--by the name of Nuttall--about him, and making a deal with Nuttall where the two of them (Utter and Hickok) get to get paid for showing up at his establishment. Utter says Hickok has become a lousy poker player--impatient and unwilling to ever fold. Also, there is a journalist character, played by the guy who played the principal in Ferris Beuller's Day Off. [That character's name is Merrick, played by actor Jeffrey Jones, and he has a monologue helping set the story at its place in history--about how the government's treaty with the Sioux is being overturned, and so Americans will be able to settle, and soon, will be annexed into the American government--his tone is celebratory.]

Midway through the episode, we see a man show up into town and try to tell a story--to Bullock and Star, initially--about seeing a family massacred on the road into town. (This is the piece of news that inflames Swearengen as it might inhibit his customers.) Hickok overhears the commotion about the man's story--which he is being a bit cagey about--and leads the group in convincing the man to take a party to the place where the incident happened. [This is what leads Al into the fury mentioned above--although his punching Johnny Burns also becomes ... I'm sure it happens more than once during the series. Johnny's crime is having allowed a man to walk into the bar and pass news of the incident onto anyone other than Al himself.

So then ... Al goes downstairs and announces--a $50 bounty on the head of any dirt-worshipping Indians starting the next day. But for right now, a round on the house! And pussy half-price for the next 15 minutes! What a good announcement, Johnny says to Al, who then turns and saysto Johnny that for a family to die on the road into town, his money would be on Persimmon Phil and not one of the "hoople heads" as having done the deed.

We see Trixie having a conversation and a drink with Ellsworth. Both of them saw their stations in life change quite a bit during the three seasons. But Ellsworth's manner changed more. I had forgotten just how much of a dirty old man he appeared to be at first, before he started behaving himself in the company of Mrs. Garrett.

Then there is the search party, led by Wild Bill and also including Bullock, Starr, Merrick, and the mysterious man who showed up to let people know what he'd seen on the road--something he and some of his mates were, it turned out in the end, responsible for. We know this because after they all got back, he tried to outdraw Bullock and Wild Bill and got shot by the both of them, rather than simply stick around and face any more further questions. The scene of the search party coming upon the dead bodies is very vivid--the carcasses are being torn away at by a pack of wolves, who reluctantly cede the space to the men with torches. And then Bullock finds a small child, evidently asleep--the little girl, the little doll. Sort of a mascot for the series, she ends up being. I forgot that Bullock was the first to pick her up. He is a sort of surrogate dad to her.

Calamity Jane wanders into the gym that night and when she hears about where her friends Wild Bill and Charlie are, she determines to go out on her own to find them, memorably saying, "I don't drink at a place where I'm the only one with balls!" She meets them on the road and is the second to hold th little girl, and when they give her to the Doc, she is maniacal in her insistence that she be part of the caretaking, pulling a gun on the Doc for no good reason.

Brom Garrett gets ready to assay his gold claim--he will be meeting with Dan Dority ... as he prepares for his meeting, getting all dressed, he clears his throat to try to wake his wife, who we see is pretending to sleep. She is unmoved. Dority makes his own last-minute preparations for the day ahead, taking care of a last-minute errand--the murder of Tim Driscoll. The two men meet in the throughfare right after the death of the mysterious man at the hands of Hickok and Bullock. Alma Garrett watches from her window, then takes some narcotics to soothe her nerves.

Al moves back to his bed and then hears a knock at the door. It's Trixie. She walks over to his side of the bed and places the gun she obtained from Jewel on the side table--an apparent surrender of some kind to Al. At the same time I guess it's a stubborn show of force. Then she swings back around to enter the bed on the other side, and she places her head on Al's chest. Al, for his part, looks stoically and sadly into the distance (or toward the wall on the other side of the room). He has a surprisingly understated performance in Episode One. I remember understanding him as a villain--I suppose this was partly because of his violence toward Trixie, in part because of his naked concern for the bottom line. And it will be in part because of his attitude toward this girl in Episode Two. But in this first episode he is a somewhat uninteresting entrepreneur, not so different from Tom Nuttall. I think it's his arguments with Bullock over the subsequent episodes that bring the best out of him.