Reservation Dogs: the most heartbreaking, life-affirming TV you’ll ever see
Last year, Reservation Dogs ended its second run with what felt like the perfect series finale. Ostensibly a show about a band of young Indigenous Americans struggling through various levels of delinquency within the confines of their reservation in small-town Oklahoma, the series grew ever looser and sadder as the episodes passed. By the end of season two, the characters had finally made it to California, crying as they embraced in the Pacific.
Most shows would be content to leave it there. But today, three months after it wrapped its US broadcast, a third (and, according to creator Sterlin Harjo, definitively conclusive) season of Reservation Dogs has landed on Disney +. If you were worried the series might have nothing left to say, relax. Reservation Dogs has always been unafraid to show its heart, but these final episodes leave nothing on the table. They are weirder, deeper and far more discursive than the show has ever been.
If season two was about the Dogs leaving Oklahoma, season three is about them returning. Some do this directly, on a bus. Bear, meanwhile – played with maximum adolescent charisma by D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai – takes his sweet time, embarking on a meandering road trip dotted with oddballs. During this clutch of episodes, Reservation Dogs produces what feels like its standout episode; a flashbackheavy story about the cruelty of Native American boarding schools, in which Indigenous young people found themselves being forced to assimilate under the heavy threat of punishment.
That would seem to be the most “important” episode (in deliberate quotations) of the batch, a pit stop to highlight an ugly moment in history that a wider audience might be unfamiliar with. But this issues-driven agenda has never really been what Reservation Dogs is about. Harjo and his writers have always been more subtle than that, and this approach is borne out in the remaining episodes.
As a demonstration of exactly how discursive the final season is, we don’t have a traditional episode set in Oklahoma until almost halfway through, and even then it can’t sit still. The very next episode is another flashback, set in 1976, offering us a view of the reservation’s elders when they were the same age as the Dogs, and just as wayward and frustrated.
It is often the case that television shows lose their way when they become distracted from their initial premise. This isn’t the case with Reservation Dogs, however. Wherever the show decides to take us – to the past, to the wilderness, even to the spirit plane – we follow, because it’s all done with the laser-focused intention of showing us exactly who these people are.
It’s a tactic that pays off in spades, because the final three episodes of the season are some of the most gorgeous ever to grace a television screen. Without spoiling too much, the Dogs are forced to grow up, assuming some of the roles of their elders, and all the baggage and pain that goes along with it. A character long mentioned but never seen is revealed (and played with a beautifully ineloquent bottleneck of emotions by an actual movie star). In one scene in the final episode, the value of community is explained using a packet of crisps and some energy drinks as props and it’s one of the most heartbreaking, life-affirming things I have ever seen.
This is the true power of Reservation Dogs. When your friends tell you that it’s one of the greatest shows on television, when they point at all the awards it has won and the outpouring of critical adoration it has inspired, this sort of moment is what they are talking about. As important as it has been in terms of representation, on and off the screen, the thing I’m going to miss most about Reservation Dogs is its ability to mine a wealth of understated emotion from the mundane. At its best, the show was a demonstration of high art. If you haven’t watched it yet, and statistically speaking you probably haven’t, I urge you to try. You will remember it for ever.
This series ends with an echo of the second season’s climax. The Dogs once again embrace after a life-changing event, reassured by the moment but facing a huge and uncertain future. It takes a good show to land a perfect series finale. Reservation Dogs is that rarest of things: a show that did it twice.
• Reservation Dogs is on Disney+ now.