Episode One – Deadwood – Part Two

“I may have fucked my life up flatter than hammered shit...”

OK, lots of ground to cover with this post, so I'm going to condense as best I can.

Special thanks to everyone who has given me tips on how to wrangle these websites. I don't know if I've gotten any better at it, but I guess they are starting to come together.

Like I said last week, we're going to cut to Al Swearengen, who is probably most people's favourite character in the series. Al is a quintessential frontier force: he's a civilizer. He's rough and rude and violent, and almost certainly a terrible person, but underneath it all is a love for stability and for structure. Al, as we will see, is a man of contradictions. As with the other characters, this can be seen in his costume: when we meet him, he's in a suit, and he's often seen in either a coat or waistcoat or both. But that's just an illusion. Eventually, we'll see Al pull the waistcoat over his long underwear, the same pair he sleeps in. His veneer of civilization draped over the bare minimum. He's also a contradiction when it comes to violence: we'll see him act the peacemaker but order and commit murders. We'll see him express genuine affection for someone he has brutalized.

If I were to hazard a guess, I would say that the reason Al is so popular is because he is, in a broad sense, all of humanity compressed into one little character. And of course played to a preeminence by the brilliant Ian McShane.

Ian McShane as Al Swearengen

When we meet Al, he's chatting with Ellesworth, who is one of the local prospectors. Ellesworth has hit it big, and he speaks lines to Al which, when I heard them, hooked me on the show beyond anything else:

“I may have fucked my life up flatter than hammered shit, but I stand here before you today beholden to no human cocksucker and working a paying fucking gold claim.”

Again we see Milch and the rest of the show's team laying everything on the line. “This,” they say, “is what our show is all about. People who are wrecked and know it, but who have come to this wild place and made something of themselves.” Ellesworth then spends his new fortune on whiskey and gambling and the attentions of prostitutes. Maybe Al doesn't have a monopoly on representing humanity here.

A little subplot begins involving one of the prostitutes – another one of our leads – a woman named Trixie, and a gun. Unsurprisingly, some of the clients of the Gem are not too kind to their companions, and this particular client was beating on her. She had previously told him to stop, and now she stops him for good with a bullet to the brain. Straight through the brain. He dies, but not right away: he clings to life and sputters out his last words, confused about his surroundings. Trixie gives up her gun to Al, but not before he contrives to have the word spread that the man killed himself. Later on, we'll see how Al deals with Trixie's insubordination.

Two more of our growing cast are part of this scene as well: Johnny, who is another of Al's lackeys, a kind, somewhat dim-witted man; and Doc Cochran, a Civil War veteran with a serious drinking problem and the standard level of class for an illegal gold-rush town -- played by "hey it's that guy"/Grima Wormtongue Brad Dourif. The Doctor puts a probe through the dying man's brain and muses how he wished he knew how the man lived so long, but sets it aside by joking about how it won't matter to Mr. Wu's pigs – the porcine fate of many corpses in Deadwood whose fate Al and those close to him wish uninvestigated. When we later meet Mr. Wu and his pigs, he and the doctor calmly throw the body in to their enclosure; they certainly don't offer any ceremony.

Brad Dourif as Doc Cochran.

Wild Bill, seeking whiskey, has come with Charlie Udder into the camp. He checks into the Grand Central Hotel, run by yet another series regular, E.B. Farnum. Farnum, we'll find, is famous for three things: sweaty palms, slavish dedication to Al Swearengen, and self-aggrandizement. As soon as Hickok checks in, Farnum slinks to his master and lets Al know that the famous gunfighter has arrived.

We see a few more quick scenes which drive home what we already know: Al can be in turns vicious and tender; Starr and Bullock are a natural team; Bullock prefers to settle matters with cold words, backed up by the threat of violence, but Starr is a natural defuser of tensions. Notably, Bullock is still in black and white; Starr wears grey.

Yet another new character is introduced: Bram Garret. Bram is a rich man from Back East; well, his father is rich. Bram is here to make something of himself with daddy's money, and find a paying gold claim. He is kitted up with new fancy clothes and equipment, and he's becomes “friends” with Al Swearengen and Dan Dorrity to achieve this end. Which is to say that Al is running a scheme on him. The scheme is simple: a man called Tim Driscoll offers to sell a worthless piece of land to Bram, and gold is placed on the land where Bram will find it, to inflate the price. Al brokers the deal, and Driscoll gets thirty percent. Farnum, however, tries to help, and almost sours the deal. He makes a counter-offer, trying to get Bram to offer more money. Luckily, Bram has the money, and does, but Al is clearly unimpressed with this act of initiative on the part of his lackeys.

This scene is cross-cut with another scene of haggling and self-destruction. Hickok and Udder find themselves in Tom Nuttall's Number Ten Saloon. Seems that nobody can fail to recognize Wild Bill, and soon Charlie is making a deal with Tom that if Bill drinks and gambles exclusively at the Number Ten, then Tom will pay a flat rate: some to Charlie and some to Bill. Seems that Charlie is saving up a nest egg for his friend; Bill, on the other hand. seems content to drink and gamble himself to death.

Our next new character for this episode is Alma Garret, Bram's wife, played by the crush of every Canadian my age who likes women, Molly Parker. The first few times we see her, she's drinking a golden tincture from a bottle: laudanum, one of many panaceas of the 19^th Century. When Bram enters the room to tell her of his “success” in the negotiations, he sees her drinking it, and exclaims “Banish all headaches!” Clearly, they haven't been intimate for some time. The Garrets are pure fiction, with no precise historical analogues. I'll get to that in more detail later on.

Molly Parker as Alma Garret.

Upset with Driscoll's scheme, Al tells Dan that Driscoll needs to die. This is after Al talks Tim down from his thirty percent to twenty dollars in cash, some time with a prostitute, and to clear some of the debt he owes to the Gem. Poor Driscoll cannot catch a break, and soon he will catch Dan's knife, and be another gift to the hungry pigs.

In the hardware tent, Starr and Bullock have done a fair night's trade, and are hiring a night watchman, a man called Smith, whom we will get to know later. Smith is kind, but odd, and his friendliness is undertoned with sadness: “The Lord is our final solace, but it's a comfort having friends,” he says with a smile. “I know that from past experience.” Ouch. Their conversation is interrupted by a man on horseback who tells them that he saw a wagon of people cut down and murdered on the road to Spearfish. Smith identifies them as a group headed back to Minnesota; Jane met them earlier in the episode.

Bullock takes the rider to the Number Ten, where Hickok is playing poker. We get a glimpse of Hickok's problem-solving technique, and it's unsurprisingly like Bullock's: he uses stern words, backed up by the threat of violence, with an eye to defusing a situation. One gets the impression, though, that Hickok wants the violence even more than Bullock does. Like without it, he's missing something in his life. Again, not subtle, this show. Jack McCall, who you may know from history as the man who shot Wild Bill Hickok, is losing to him in poker... or not. He pulls a third eight and cracks “I mistakenly outdraw the greatest gunfighter in the world.” Hickok is, of course, unimpressed.

Hickok and Bullock stand together.

Bullock is trying to convince the rider to take him back out to where the wagon was, and the party slaughtered, because something Smith said suggested that there might be one child still alive. Starr solves this problem by recounting what the rider has already told them at full volume. This gets the room riled up, but most essentially, it gets the attention of Bill Hickok. Hickok and Bullock become quickly aligned: terse men of violence, both previously lawmen. They agree to ride out with a small group, including A.W. Merrick, the publisher and editor of, and sole contributor to the Deadwood Pioneer. Merrick has previously made himself known by pontificating on the future of the town: that the gold and settlement in the territory will force the US government to ignore the Laramie treaty and come in, bringing the full weight of civilization into this wild space.

I figure it's just the writers being clever and telling people who don't know the history exactly what's going to happen next.

Well, like Merrick, I appear to have run on. I do think I've finally introduced all the major players, though. There's not a lot left to the episode, but I'll stop before you all get bored, and next time I can wrap up and still have some words to do analysis.

Until next time!