SPOILER ALERT: This column contains spoilers from “Dig,” the series finale of FX’s “Reservation Dogs,” now streaming on Hulu.
Death has always loomed over “Reservation Dogs,” the coming-of-age comedy that concludes its run on FX this week. When the show began, its teenage protagonists were still actively mourning their friend Daniel (Dalton Cramer), who died by suicide a year prior. Over three seasons, the show emphasized its namesake foursome were not alone in their grief. Elora Danan (K. Devery Jacobs) doesn’t remember much about her late mother, but her mother’s friends do; when Elora’s grandmother Mabel (Geraldine Keams) passes away, her final hours bring the entire small, Native town of Okern, Oklahoma into their home. Some of the series’ most memorable characters, like warrior William Knifeman (Dallas Goldtooth), are themselves no longer living — they’re spirits who return to counsel those left behind.
So of all the major life events that could serve as a fitting conclusion, “Reservation Dogs” naturally opts not for a wedding or birth, but a funeral. “Dig” sees Okern, including but not limited to the Rez Dogs, say goodbye to Old Man Fixico (Richard Ray Whitman), the medicine man who’d just recently agreed to mentor Willie Jack (Paulina Alexis) in his ways. But “Reservation Dogs” didn’t present Fixico solely through Willie Jack’s eyes. In the midseason flashback “House Made of Bongs,” the show paid homage to “Dazed and Confused” with a glimpse of today’s elders, including Fixico, in their carefree youth. Even as “Reservation Dogs” approached the end of the journey it laid out for Elora, Willie Jack, Bear (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai) and Cheese (Lane Factor), the series zoomed out to underscore that everyone finds themselves at a similar crossroads, with the innocence of youth blurring into the burdens of adulthood.
Showrunner Sterlin Harjo, who co-wrote and directed “Dig,” makes this theme into a closing argument. “Reservation Dogs” has never been didactic, preferring downbeat jokes to sober drama. (“Statistically, if I reach the age of 75, I’ll probably see everyone’s dick in the community,” the funeral director observes in a show of gallows-adjacent humor.) But “Dig” takes a final chance to straight-up say what “Reservation Dogs” has long left its characters to demonstrate. Early in the episode, Willie Jack visits a local prison to tell Hokti (Lily Gladstone, star of the upcoming “Killers of the Flower Moon”), her aunt and Daniel’s mother, about Fixico’s death. Hokti responds, at some spirits’ urging, with a monologue about the importance of communal ties.
“I know it feels like Fixico’s gone,” she begins. “And in a way, he is. But he’s also not gone at the same time.” For a visual aid, Hokti uses a bag of Flamin’ Flamers — the same junk food the Rez Dogs stole a truckful of in the series’ pilot. Every chip from the bag, she explains, is a memory of Fixico his friends and loved ones carry with them. “That’s how community works,” she concludes. “It’s sprawling. It spreads. What do you think they came for when they tried to get rid of us? Our community. You break that, you break the individual.”
Arriving when it does, this speech acts more like a grace note than a lecture. Connecting individual experience to collective struggle is difficult to do without losing specificity. After several years, though, we’ve seen the Rez Dogs’ community firsthand; it’s not a buzzword, but a whole web of relationships — some intimate, some casual, all adding up to more than the sum of their parts. Fixico’s farewell gathers everyone from gum-smacking receptionist Bev (Jana Schmieding) to local dirtbag Kenny Boy (Kirk Fox) in one place, just as figures like Elora and Rita (Sarah Podemski), Bear’s mother, prepare to leave Okern for opportunities elsewhere.
“Reservation Dogs” never floats big-picture solutions for structural issues like attempted genocide, entrenched poverty and disinvestment, because it’s not a show that deals in the big picture. Only in the final season did it directly depict the horrors that loom in all its characters’ familial pasts, following a young Deer Lady (Georgeanne Growingthunder) through her violent, isolating experience at a boarding school for Native youth; even then, the emphasis is on the subjective and surreal, moving from historical reality to Deer Lady’s transformation into a figure of legend. “Dig” makes the case that the division between grand statement and small scale is a false choice to begin with. To watch the Reservation Dogs just hang out is to watch them deal with the legacy they’ve been left. It’d be a cheesy ode to friendship if the stakes didn’t feel so high, or if one of the final shots of the series weren’t lighthorseman Big (Zahn McClarnon) trying and failing to zip his fly with one hand after a roll in the hay with Bev.
The actual final shot leaves the Reservation Dogs to enjoy their last moments together before Elora goes off to college, and instead ends with a much older quartet of friends. One, Maximus (Graham Greene), spent years estranged from his brother-cousin Fixico, cycling between mental hospitals and the run-down trailer where Bear first encounters him. The Rez Dogs take it upon themselves to “break him out” — read: accompany him as he walks out the front door in a hilariously botched heist, finally squeezing in a compulsory Tarantino riff — to be there for Fixico at the end, just as Elora and Willie Jack promised they’d do for each other. It’s important, “Reservation Dogs” argues, to bear witness: to your friends, to your elders, to those who come after you. In the face of the inevitable, taking it all in is both the least and most you can do. Fixico’s funeral is a moving display of emotion, but it’s his friends sitting in satisfied silence that sends “Reservation Dogs” off in style.
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