Sandra Hale Schulman
Special to ICT
The disappearance of a teenage Navajo girl from her boarding school anchors the new season of “Dark Winds,” with the first of eight, hour-long episodes premiering Sunday, Feb. 15.
The gripping fourth season, set in 1973, focuses on the search for the missing girl that takes detectives from the safety of Navajo Nation to the gritty — but kinda groovy — hoods of 1970s Los Angeles in a race against the clock to save her from an obsessive killer.
Executive produced by the late Robert Redford and George R.R. Martin, “Dark Winds” stars Zahn McClarnon as Lt. Joe Leaphorn, Kiowa Gordon (“The Red Road”) as Jim Chee, Jessica Matten (“Rez Ball”) as Navajo Sgt. Bernadette Manuelito, and Deanna Allison (“Accused”) as Emma Leaphorn.
Actress Isabel DeRoy-Olson (“Fancy Dance”) plays the Navajo girl, Billie Tsosie, who goes missing from a boarding school near the Navajo reservation. Franka Potente (“Run Lola Run”) is Irene Vaggan, a German sniper with a secret agenda.
Other notable guest stars include Chaske Spencer (“The Twilight Saga”) as Sonny, a sleazy recruiter for a Los Angeles crime ring who lures young Native American men into lives of crime, and A. Martinez (“Longmire”) who returns as Scarborough Police Department Acting Chief Gordo Sena.
This season all the characters are in search of something — home, family they lost, spiritual connection, self-worth, and in a bizarre twist, even the Third Reich.
How did McClarnon use his three-season backstory to propel his character in the new season?
“There’s universals,” McClarnon told ICT in a joint interview with Potente. “It’s human beings and we’re just seeing it through a different cultural lens. That’s all. Joe is struggling with possibly losing his wife, and it has to do with Joe’s struggle with dealing with what he goes through at work and straddling that fine line between his culture and between being a cop, and losing his son.”
“Obviously, these things affect human beings, relationships change. And so this season, I think Joe is wrestling with retiring because his job has caused so many issues in his marriage. He’s in search of a way to mend those things.”
Leaphorn hunkers down at his desert home, gardening, building an adobe sweat lodge, and staring longingly at his half-empty closet and a photo of him and Emma.
“He relies on his ceremonies as well as what the Diné people call Hozho, which is a balance, finding that balance, finding a piece of mind, finding your place in the universe. So Joe is exploring that through this season and we’ll see what happens in the end if he actually is able to obtain Hozho or not,” he said.
“I think that’s a thing that we all struggle with as human beings,” he said. “We’re always looking for that balance and that piece of mind. I know I am, as a human being, and I’m sure you are, too, as well.”
As for Potente, she is a newcomer, so she has to define her reason for her actions pretty quickly.
“I was given a couple of chunks to use,” Potente told ICT. “One was the information that Irene Vaggan was raised by just her grandfather, Gunther, [played by famed German actor Udo Kier who died in November], and her father, two Nazis in Nazi Germany. She was void of love. There was no love of family in that sense. She was basically trained to be a sniper, awaiting a Fourth Reich and another global war, and so she’s very self-sufficient. She’s a killer-for-hire.”
Potente’s character grew up in Germany with a romanticized view of Native Americans from books, and those ingredients come together when she crosses Leaphorn’s path. Then everything changes for her. She discovers he’s alone and becomes obsessed with him; he seems to be the answer to her quest for a family, as impossible and twisted as it seems.
“I just kept it all in mind but made very simple choices in the beginning and then that’s the great thing about TV, right? We’re given so much time, it’s really a journey and as actors we don’t know the next script,” Potente said. “I took a lot of the details that inform her journey also from my interactions with Joe in the scenes to become more and more enthralled with Leaphorn.”
The series takes a wild turn as the detectives trail Tsosie to Los Angeles in 1973 with its cool cars, seedy Hollywood motels, funky nightclubs, and lots of bell bottoms.
Will they find Tsosie in time? Will Joe get Emma, now working as a nurse in LA, back? Can Chee and Manuelitio’s relationship survive working together?
The stories will continue. Before the new season even aired it was announced that “Dark Winds: Season 5” will begin filming in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in March. It is set to debut in 2027.
“Thank you to Kristin Dolan, Dan McDermott, and all of AMC Networks for continuing to support and believe in Dark Winds,” McClarnon said. “It’s such a privilege to embody the character of Joe Leaphorn, and I’m excited to return to Santa Fe with this amazing cast and crew to craft another thrilling season of the show that means so much to all of us.”
Season 4 kicks off Sunday, Feb. 15, at 9 p.m. ET/6 p.m. PT, on AMC and AMC+, with new episodes airing weekly on Sundays.