Season Two finale (c–ksuckahs!):
As Deadwood readies for a celebration, George Hearst’s arrival in camp brings upheaval. Swearengen’s manipulations extract a counter-offer from Yankton.
Hearst comes to separate arrangements with Farnum and Swearengen.
Tolliver [PHOTO LEFT] seeks to improve his position with Hearst at Wolcott’s expense.
Tensions in Chinaman’s Alley boil over with violent results. Sunday at 9pm ET/PT.
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Best Lines From Episode 23:
Mose Manuel: “(unintelligible)”
Jane: “What is that, “Thank you” in whale talk?”
Jane: “Tell Doc he’s got a live one.”
Farnum: “May I suggest that, rather than you delivering your telegrams upstairs, interrupting the rest or secret depravities of well-armed guests, I could distribute them to these pidgeon holes to be collected by the guests at their leisure?”
Trixie: “Few choices as there are ours to make, others should stay the f–k out of the process.”
Al: “I won’t object. But it’s yours to keep them she-apes from disgracing me. ”
Trixie: “The pimp’s a whore’s familiar. So the sudden, strange or violent draws her to him. Not that I wouldn’t learn another way.”
Al: “What a type you must pass with. That you do not fear a beating for such an insult.”
Lee: “I am a civilized person.”
Al: “Then take your civilization the f–k out of here.”
Al, in delecto: “Did you dye your hair?”
Alma: “I know we are as much in the world in our pain as in our happiness.”
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MR WU, played by Keone Young:
If Al Swearengen is Deadwood’s unofficial mayor, Mister Wu holds the post on the Chinese part of town.
Wu has his fingers in every semi-legal pie, including the lucrative opium trade, and though his English is limited to the handful of expletives Al has taught him, the two seem to communicate well enough for business.
Among the services Wu offers is the timely and unquestioned disposal of bodies, courtesy of his ravenous pigs.
Who will end up paying a visit to Wu’s swine is an open question, however, especially as Deadwood’s Chinese population becomes a pawn in the power struggle over the town’s vice trade.
Filmography of actor Keone Young.
PHOTO ABOVE RIGHT:
Enterprise TV series
fan site.
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JOANIE STUBBS, played by Kim Dickens:
When the Bella Union arrived in Deadwood, it came with its own supply of high-caliber whores. These ladies have a savvy madame in Joanie Stubbs, a woman who knows her craft inside and out. Her business acumen isn’t limited to just prostitution either, as she’s able to assist Cy Tolliver with a variety of tasks around the Bella Union and serves as one of his confidantes.
But Joanie has become uncomfortable working for-and being the love object of-the mercurial and often-ruthless Cy Tolliver. When he forces her to execute a child thief, Joanie almost turns the gun on herself. “Kill me too, Cy, or let me go,” she says. “If you don’t kill me or let me go, I’m going to kill you.” With Tolliver’s grudging support and with some illicit financial help from the card dealer Eddie Sawyer, Joanie sets off to open her own whorehouse.
Born in Huntsville, AL to an antiques dealer mother and musician father, Kim Dickens was destined for a career in the arts. Her journey into acting began as a student at Nashville, TN’s Vanderbilt University, where she received a Bachelor of Arts and Science Degree. Upon graduation, Dickens headed to New York City in order to study at the prestigious Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute, then to graduate from The America Academy of Dramatic Arts.
While in New York, Dickens began landing supporting roles in theatre and independent films; her debut being 1995’s indie-comedy hit “Palookaville”, directed by Alan Taylor. From there, Dickens appeared as the female lead in Keifer Sutherland’s feature directorial debut, “Truth or Consequences, N.M”. She starred opposite Bruce Willis in the Harold Becker-directed thriller “Mercury Rising”; then showed up along side Ben Stiller and Bill Pullman as the mysterious and elusive suspect, Gloria, in the Jake Kasdan-helmed cult-hit comedy, “Zero Effect”. In 2000, she co-starred alongside Kevin Bacon and Elizabeth Shue as an ethical scientist who goes head-to-head with a villainous invisible man in the Paul Verhoeven summer blockbuster, “Hollow Man”. Further acclaim came to Dickens in the summer of 2001 when she played an up-and-coming rock singer spiraling out of control, before coming to terms with her traumatic past in director Allison Anders’ semi-autobiographical film, “Things Behind the Sun”. This performance garnered Dickens an Independent Spirit Award® nomination for best female lead.
2003 found Dickens busy on both the big screen and small, starting with a prime role in Showtime’s mini series “Out of Order”, opposite Eric Stoltz, Felicity Huffman, and William H. Macy. Next, was a small yet well received role in the Academy Award® nominated “The House of Sand and Fog“. Currently, Dickens is playing the role of Joanie Stubbs, the Madame of the Bella Union, in HBO’s “Deadwood”, created by David Milch (NYPD Blue). The role reunites her with Milch after being cast as FBI agent Sarah Day in his critically lauded CBS Crime Drama “Big Apple”.
Other credits include, Alfonso Cuaron’s “Great Expectations”, Arne Glimcher’s “The White River Kid” with Antonio Banderas, and Sam Raimi’s “The Gift” with Cate Blanchett. Dickens will next be seen playing a heroin addict in the soon-to-be released feature “Goodnight, Joseph Parker” with Debi Mazar and Paul Sorvino.
Dickens lives in both Los Angeles and New York City.
I can’t wait for this show to start, and I’m really annoyed that it has to ever end.
c–ksuckahs!
What a type you must pass with. That you do not fear a beating for such an insult
I rewatched a bit of House of Sand & Fog last night … neat to see Kim Dickens in that movie. I recall that Ron Eldard said they had to cut out a big scene with him and Kim, who played his wife. Wonder if the DVD has that scene.
Hey, that upcoming mini-series with Paul Newman et al. looks lame. Hope I’m wrong.
Hey, that upcoming mini-series with Paul Newman et al. looks lame. Hope I’m wrong.
I have a feeling it will be okay. How bad can it be with that cast?
Didn’t they make the same movie about ten years ago, with Jessica Tandy? Newman as an irascible, lovable old eccentric with an uptight son? I don’t want to see that again.
Wolcott: what was he writing before he died? Did Sy really have a letter?
Sy: Can Doc save him? Will he die?
Seth’s wife: what was she digging at?
Al: why did he kill the SF co*ksucker, when Hearst seemed to offer to send him elsewhere?
EB: what will he do now that he has no Hotel?
Chief: when will Al stop talking to his head?
Seth: what does he get out of the deal?
Alma: what is in the letter from the governess? And what did Alma have to do with her first husband’s death.
I have to watch it at 9PM again because the sun was too bright. And my brother called in the middle of it. To chat! (Can you imagine. Well, he doesn’t know about my secret obsession.)
Wolcott: what was he writing before he died? Did Sy really have a letter?
— I didn’t see Wolcott die / didn’t know. Will try to catch it at 9PM. I don’t think Sy really has a letter.
Sy: Can Doc save him? Will he die?
— Depends how many demands Booth Powers has.
Seth’s wife: what was she digging at?
— The seeds that little William had planted?
Al: why did he kill the SF co*ksucker, when Hearst seemed to offer to send him elsewhere?
— Making sure SF is not a problem. Has control of Wu. I think … I couldn’t see what Wu pulled off his head at the end and held up to Al.
EB: what will he do now that he has no Hotel?
— Start talking to himself maybe?
Chief: when will Al stop talking to his head?
— When he has Tolliver’s head instead.
Seth: what does he get out of the deal?
— What deal. Oh dear … more I missed.
Alma: what is in the letter from the governess? And what did Alma have to do with her first husband’s death.
— What letter? Oh dear. Alma is innocent! You been talkin’ to her father again?
Wolcott: what was he writing before he died? Did Sy really have a letter?
— suicide note? & not that I remember
Sy: Can Doc save him? Will he die?
— let the fuckin’ cocksuckuh bleed out!
Seth’s wife: what was she digging at?
— gold under their house?
Al: why did he kill the SF co*ksucker, when Hearst seemed to offer to send him elsewhere?
— Hearst hinted that he’s found it’s better that somebody prove they “deserves” a “concession”.
EB: what will he do now that he has no Hotel?
— he’s being kept on as manager.
Chief: when will Al stop talking to his head?
— which one? 🙂
Seth: what does he get out of the deal?
— devil he knows
Alma: what is in the letter from the governess? And what did Alma have to do with her first husband’s death.
— The letter that the Pinkerton bitch was going to send east, before Al paid her off. and Alma had nothing to do with her husband’s death.
talked to her dead husband during that weird pre-wedding sequence, and she seemed to take some responsibility for his death. I need to hear it again.
I have to listen again too, but if I were her, I’d feel a bit of guilt simply because she married him for his money, to rescue her father from his debts, and here she is going on living, having a child, marrying a decent man whom she also does not love…. ah, maybe that’s it. She’s marrying a man she doesn’t love, and she mentions there’s a man she does love.
I think she was one of the reasons they went west (his family disapproved of her) so she feels guilt for his eventually getting killed.
I think there were some “maybes” in that conversation. “Maybe I’m to blame, maybe you’re to blame”
As much as I dislike Alma she shares no blame for Brom’s death. She even urged Brom to go west when she guessed things were going bad with the claim.
Her guilt would probably be a certain sense of relief she felt when he died. It gave her freedom she never experienced before. Her “talk” with him was because he “couldn’t tell anyone”.
I got the sense Brom needed to prove to daddy he was his own man and striking it rich with a gold claim would be one way to do that. I recall they both looked on it as a sort of adventure–what bored rich New Yorkers did back in the day. Probably a fad that ended badly for many rich, bored males trying to prove something to their daddies.
Wu symbolically cut off his queue and threw it aside, as a declaration to Al that he was now an American.
How did this go exactly? While addressing Hearst, he says something like: “Please allow me a moment, for I have intestinal distress that requires me to focus, lest I … ????
“..fail to suppress the expression(?)” eruption? effusion? just guessing now.
Al and Wu: It seemed like a rite of honor. Wu did something with his pigtail/long hair. Will he open a restaurant in the next season? Was that a railroad being built in the middle of the road?
That was Woolcott hanging and swinging from the rafter?
I bet the actor who plays him shows up again in a different guise next season.
Seth wants to do the honorable thing. Few marriages had to do with love and romance anyway, back then.It seems a good solution, Martha remaining to teach. They’ll be useful, respectable people. They’ll eventually have a child together, who will grow up with Alma’s. Soap opera speculation.
Alma needs a marriage to give her baby a father and to be respectable; Ellsworth is an unknown quantity. As her husband, he can protect her against nefarious claims and accusations from her former in-laws. But I don’t know either what he gets out of it. Well, she IS rich.
I’m going to miss it.
Heh, my husband said the same thing. Who will he come back as? Joanie’s long lost brother? Brom’s? Eddie after taking up the South <s>Beach</s> Dakota Diet while he was on the run from Cy? Strikethrough doesn’t work. Damn.
I think Ellsworth gets the family that he lost, as well as a more comfortable lifestyle (as long as there are no f’ing lavender gloves!)
“… to focus, so that I may supress its expression.”
Or something like that.
I thought the school-teacher lady whose son died was Bulloch’s wife, but apparently not. Was the kid Bulloch’s son? And what did Bulloch say to her at the very end of last week’s episode? I’ve seen it three times and I still can’t decipher it.
boy was the son of his brother. Seth married her upon the brother’s death.
Last episode he asked her not to leave without giving it some time.
EB: man, what is wrong with that cat? He’s starting to act like the old preacher, but without the gran mal seizures. He’s utterly, barking mad. Or am I missing something? (And I hate to say this, because I’m sure William Sanderson is a great guy and all, but every character I’ve seen him play on TV and in movies has really grossed me out. EB worst of all.)
Wollcott: I don’t think he killed himself, I’ve a gut feeling that Hearst had him “suicided.” Nothing for Tolliver to hold over him now. (Assuming Cy lives, which I think he will.)
Ellsworth: what a stand-up guy. Love him. Alma’s gonna do him wrong, just watch.
Oh, and my favorite: Trixie. I just love her to pieces. I loved it when she made the first deposit at the new bank, and I think Alma was filling out the deposit slip (Or was it Saul?), and she was giving her name, and said, “Trixie… (long pause, waiting for her to give a last name) the Whore.”
Will Trixie and Saul tie the knot next season?
Maybe, but first Al needs to die, or somehow lose his hold over Trixie.
I donno if Al needs to die or lose his hold over Trixie.
Al might want a piece of the bank, and that might mean getting cozy with the Jew. Swegin just might go along with Saul and Trixie getting hitched if it’s in his interest (does he ever do anything which isn’t in his interest?).
If they follow history, I think Saul ends up falling for a Chinese whore called the “China Doll” or somesuch. Soap potential there.
I don’t see Saul marrying Trixie. Dunno why. I like them as a couple (a helluva lot more than Seth & Alma) but I think Trixie isn’t meant to be happy long term. None of them are for that matter.
Such is life.
Don’t agree about Wolcott. The note (suicide) he was writing and the rope in the forefront of the screen when he was writing it was a, um…dead giveaway. That, and the little sob after Hearst fired him. A mentally ill man lost with nothing to live for. Wolcott definitely offed himself. And to make a splashy point, he did it at the Chez Ami.
Wolcott was always hanging out at the Chez Ami. Now he’s really hanging out there.
Side bitch: Brad Dourif (Doc Cochran) gets a nomination for an Emmy last year and in the last episode he doesn’t say one fucking word. Hardly used at all this season. WTF? Next season, this man better get some juicy storylines or I’m fucking bailing.*
*Probably not–making idle threats about trivial stuff is sort of a hobby.<g>
SF Chronicle:
Call it Monday mourning. “Deadwood” ended last night and the only thing one can blurt out at a moment like this is all too obvious to anyone who has seen the show:
“You — suckers! Why only 12 episodes?”
Television’s most profane — and easily one of its most magnificent — offerings is over, and what a satisfying, orgiastic little run it was. Twelve episodes, three months and thousands upon thousands of f-bombs, or so it seemed. Only “Deadwood” could drag you through the mud of evil men, bad women and offensive language and make you feel glad about paying for the pleasure.
Trixie
You can hear Winfield musician Barry Patton a lot more than you can see him in the season finale tonight of HBO’s acclaimed “Deadwood” (8 p.m. on cable Channel 15).
“They told us it would be 16 minutes of music and about 30 seconds of fame,” said Patton, considered one of the best bones players in the world.
Actually, it’s closer to about two seconds of face time as the camera pans across each musician individually near the end of the show.
But in television terms, that’s an eternity of close-up for someone in the background.
Patton is the final musician showcased, and he’s sittin’ and grinnin’ and playing bones with both hands.
“I call them cowboy castanets,” said Patton, 45, a fixture at Winfield’s Walnut Valley Bluegrass Festival.
“Most players are one-handed. There are probably only 10 people in the world who play two-handed like I do. One hand does lead and one does rhythm,” he said.
His instruments of choice are made of cow ribs.
“Real bones have a unique sound. Wooden ones all sound alike,” he said.
Patton was among half a dozen musicians hired to play for a wedding scene in the “Deadwood” season finale. As the scene opens, you don’t see the musicians but you can hear them — particularly the rhythmic clacking of the bones.
“I was afraid that the audience might not hear us very well. Sometimes when they mix the dialogue and music, the music is too low,” he said.
Patton, who has played a celebrity trail ride in California every year for the past 18 years, said he was in the right place at the right time to get the “Deadwood” offer.
“Producer David Milch wanted some old-timey music and heard about us on the trail ride. He liked the sound and hired us. It was the first music played in any of the ‘Deadwood’ episodes,” Patton said.
“Milch said he liked what it did for the show and will bring us back for episodes next season.”
Among the musicians Patton plays with are his uncle, fiddler Byron Berline from Guthrie, Okla.
Patton learned to play bones at age 13 from Cecil Hyatt, a buddy of his grandfather.
“I kept playin’ and improvin’ and first thing you know, Ol’ Mike Oatman is callin’ and wanting to put me on the radio,” Patton said of Wichita’s late, legendary KFDI country radio personality.
Patton also plays banjo and guitar for fun but doesn’t claim to play them professionally.
“Lots of others are better,” he said.
Now, Patton is a respected studio musician from California to Nashville who has played with a number of symphonies and has appeared frequently on cable music shows.
He’s also a teacher, passing on his knowledge to a new generation.
“Bones were a dying art when I was learning. But kids today are rediscovering them. They think they’re new. Drum players, particularly, are picking up on them, because they are a percussion instrument,” he said.
Patton designs and sells them to new players. Starter wooden bones are around $25 a set (two pieces). Actual cow ribs are about $50 a set.
“Bones were popular during the Civil War so with all the re-enactors around now, there’s a new interest in them for authenticity,” he said.
“It’s just amazing how popular they’re getting. I’ve probably sold a thousand pairs in the past 10 years.”
Wichita Eagle
… Especially in the 12-episode second season, as creator David Milch (“NYPD Blue”) has turned the story from scene setting into a taut examination of civilization in its formative stages, it has become one of the greats, right up there with “The Wire” and “The Sopranos” of recent vintage.
Like both of those series, it takes a standard genre — cops for “The Wire,” organized crime for “Sopranos” — and puts all its cliches to a truth test. The result looks, smells and tastes like nothing you’ve ever seen, but also, ingeniously, is familiar enough to carry you through the edgy parts.
It’s probably closest, though, in spirit and ambition to a less-well-known HBO series, the brutal prison drama “Oz.” But by making its crucible of humanity — its testing ground for epic brutality and petty meanness, for looking into, as its chief villain likes to say, “our natures” — a Western town instead of a maximum-security prison, it seems a lot more accessible.
High praise
“Deadwood” may not be the cultural sensation “Sopranos” is — it’s been averaging about 6 million viewers per week in the several airings it gets on HBO and HBO2 — but it is already renewed for next year and has drawn much notice, most recently from the Peabody Awards. The awards, which aim to recognize the best of the electronic media, made “Deadwood” their only U.S. fictional series honored this year, citing the way it “twists the conventions of the western into an excruciating knot of history and imagined events.”
Deadwood, in what would become South Dakota, is the nexus for gold strikes in the Black Hills. The discoveries bring fortune seekers and their followers in businesses both reputable and otherwise. The saloon keeper Al Swearengen is the town’s darkest and most powerful force, a man of almost pure evil in the first season (and also a fellow given to mulling over human nature and finding it wanting).
But the town, which still calls itself a “camp,” recognizes that to protect its own interests it’s got to get organized. With help from a suddenly but uneasily politic Swearengen, it elects a sheriff, the violently righteous hardware man Seth Bullock, and a mayor, ineffectual hotelier E.B. Farnum. And, led by the unlikely alliance of Swearengen and Bullock, it spends much of Season 2 playing the Dakota and Montana Territories against each other for the town’s bejeweled hand in annexation.
Also stirring things up, trying to buy up discount mining claims while hiding his own tortured psyche, is a diabolical agent of the mining magnate George Hearst.
In Sunday’s finale, Hearst’s arrival in town and the wealthy Alma Garret’s planned marriage of necessity act as catalysts for the reactions that have been developing all season. Milch and company elegantly wrap up this season’s main stories, but they also open new wounds and leave several big questions for the next season.
If you don’t have HBO and know of “Deadwood,” you probably know it for its profanity, a reputation that’s both wholly deserved and a bit unfair. More than a streak, this show curses a blue swath, with lines of dialogue sometimes containing more curse words than regular ones. One enterprising Web site took to counting the F-words, calculating the show’s “FPM” rate and finding a high of 121 of them per 50-minute episode in the season’s sixth installment.
Series creator Milch claims profanity was a fact of frontier life, a way of asserting your virility without drawing a weapon. And a viewer can buy that up to a point, but there’s also a point where all the swearing simply becomes its own reason for being.
It’s hard for some viewers to take, to be sure, but for others, it’s as much a part of the setting as the scenes so densely populated with extras you forget you’re watching a TV show, the sets that don’t just have a fore and background but a seeming seven separate layers of activity.
This show goes for richness in every realm. There’s humor in the darkest moments and the most ominous characters, including the Dakotas’ chosen emissary. There’s a careful interweaving of the stories so that, as in society itself, every character’s fate is dependent in some way on every other’s.
And there’s actual dirt on the faces of its players, even the “good guys,” a palpable feeling of needing a bath. When Calamity Jane (Robin Weigert) took her bath last episode, it didn’t play as titillation but as humanization of this woman who’d been, since the death, last season, of her partner Wild Bill Hickock, a raging, darkly comic drunk. Even as she used vulgarities entering the water, it was a touching scene of baptism, of rebirth.
Language, cast soar
What’s most striking about the language, though, is the wild contrasts Milch and his crew — who include a very high count of five female writers (out of nine) — draw. A sentence loaded with curses is also constructed in a kind of elaborate Victorian English, journeying from the gutter to the rooftops and back again.
You can hear echoes of some of the deliberately stilted phrasing Milch would have Andy Sipowicz deliver on “NYPD Blue,” but the formality seems more natural in a 19th Century setting.
The cast is near-perfect. Much has been written about Ian McShane’s forceful performance as Swearengen, and it’s only deepened this year with the new demands on the character.
But credit the lesser players too. You can pick any of them in this densely populated story, but credit Powers Boothe’s combustible Cy Tolliver, the more upscale rival for Swearengen’s trade and for backstage control of the town; Molly Parker’s Alma Garret, the former opium addict turned into the town’s richest woman and the lover of the married sheriff; and especially Garret Dillahunt as Francis Wolcott, Hearst’s man, so well-groomed and intelligent for a Jack the Ripper type. (Dillahunt, incidentally, played Hickock’s killer in Season 1.) …
… More from the Chicago Tribune
Tivo’d the last episode & didn’t get to watch it til last night. So, of course, I stayed away from this thread until I’d seen it.
Only 3 little things to say.
1st) Alma. how come so many people around here dislike her? I think she’s fabulous. I love her openness & warmth & her odd freedom, her willingness to take what comes & her courage about it, meeting life on its own terms & making up her own mind. Her relationship with Trixie is heaven! Real cross-class friendship. I mean, how humanly super (and ironic,savvy, rebellious in an understated way to have Trixie as Maid of Honor. Good for you, Alma! Heartbreaking, the nake look she gave Bullock. But I predict she’ll get to love her husband & even, that she’ll maybe reject Bullock next year. Hmmm.
All the little touches I liked this time have to do with Alma. Including Swearingen’s gesture with the Pinkerton’s letter. He had no further need of it. The issue was settled, truly a dead letter, & what a wedding gift.
Disappointing on the whole. I felt a lot of fatigue in the writing & directing and too much reaching for effects, whereas in the past it was all surprising and natural.
Still the best stuff around, though. I’ll miss it.
I think you’re right on the mark about Joanie’s reaction to Tolliver’s stabbing.
My guess about Alma is that the show will intensify the emotional and moral ambivalence. Yes, her new husband is a good man, and she’ll come to respect and admire him as much as Bullock does his wife. And yet as much as they both may try to build new lives and families for themselves, they may not be able to let what happened between the two of them simply slide into the past. There may be quite a few more looks exchanged.
Further, once Alma’s bank becomes an economic force, she may be pulled into all the political wheelings and dealings. At some point, will she have to deal directly with the Swearingen-Bullock alliance? That could be interesting.
Maybe things are getting a bit forced. What Deadwood needs (and deserves), and what it probably doesn’t have (since few TV series have one), is some overall narrative shape. Or perhaps Milch does have some overall sense of how he wants all the story lines to play out. If so, that would make Deadwood a real innovation–the first TV series to have the narrative coherence of a novel. But I suspect that, as with most TV, it begins with a premise, a place, a set of characters, an atmosphere, and then it just moves ahead, writers working on it from season to season, without much sense of where they are really going or what they finally want to accomplish.
There is a sort of spine though. History, which apparently Milch spent time on, rooting around in the documents. And, as somebody mentioned somewhere up above, Bullocks partner didn’t marry Trixie, in “real life” but ended up with a Chinese mistress.
Your notion of the Alma-Bullock constellations sounds right. Logical. And if there’s more to come with her, the bank, Swearingen and all the rest, that’ll be juicy.