“Welcome To Fucking Deadwood.”

Deadwood is the culmination of decades of work within the Western. It plays on conventions, speaks with a resolutely modern voice, and re-imagines the Wild West as something current and important. High Noon, Leone, Peckinpah and others made the violent world of Deadwood possible. Deadwood, in turn, has not only solidified the viability of the Western, but informed how the genre will transition into an entirely new medium.

Postcard of Deadwood, SD in 1876
From the Legends of America website

Deadwood was cancelled in its third season. Its final episode, “Tell Him Something Pretty” seems at first to be a casualty of this. It leaves the story hanging in mid-air, with George Hearst leaving town having suffered a small defeat, but sure to return with even more power and influence over the fate of Deadwood. Trixie, in revenge for the murder of her friend Whitney Ellsworth, shoots George Hearst, who survives. Before Hearst leaves the camp, he demands that the woman who shot him be killed, and that her body be presented as proof.

In order to protect Trixie, someone whom he cares for greatly, Al Swearengen has another of his prostitutes killed in her place. We see a previously all powerful man reduced to killing one of his own for the exiting George Hearst and mopping up the blood, knowing that there will be more spilled upon his return. It manages to work as a downbeat, appropriate closer to the show, in spite of the circumstances surrounding it.

Deadwood is a town of whores, thieves, murderers, and cocksuckers. Many cocksuckers. A multifarious, melodious, medley of cocksuckers, and so many utterances of the word “cocksucker” through snarled face and jawbone, that you are destined to use it as a catch-all compliment, insult, and rumination on the hostility of life for at least six months after viewing the series.

Deadwood is entrancing in its dirt and muck, in its death and bleak hope. Its vision of the Modern Western is definitive. Its brutality is unmatched, its sweet and desperate heart extracting every last bit of gold dust from the tragedy and beauty of the genre, the location, and this immensely volatile period of history.

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