Dark Winds Season 2 Ending Explained

Warning! This article contains spoilers for Dark winds Season 2!While Dark winds The end of season 2 was knotty and complicated, the bleak thriller series eventually shed some light on the conspiracy behind the explosion that killed Joe Leaphorn’s son years before. Based on these Leaphorn and Chi Novels by author Tony Hillerman, Dark winds is a neo-noir show that focuses on two Navajo police officers. The elder Joe Leaphorn lost his son years before the series began while the younger Jim Chee started as an undercover FBI agent working as Leaphorn’s deputy in the tribal police. Dark winds Season 2 adapted Hillerman’s 1980 novel Men of darkness.

Set in Navajo country during the 1970s, Dark winds Season 2 tells the dark story of the people behind the death of Joe’s son. The time that Dark winds It occurred in the sense that its anti-heroes could not rely on modern technology in their investigations, resulting in a grittier, more grounded kind of police procedural. Leaphorn spent much of Dark winds Season 2 follows the trail of Colton Wolf, a bomber who killed terminal cancer patient Emerson outside a hospital. The bombing was made to look like an accidental gas leak, which caught Joe’s attention since his son had died in a similar, apparently “incendiary” explosion.

Did Joe Leaphorn Kill Vines in Dark Winds Season 2?

Joe left vines to die

Although Colton Wolff was the one who bombed the hospital and killed Emerson, he is not the real villain of Dark winds Season 2. The bomb-making assassin followed the orders of a rich benefactor, who remained nameless until the last episodes. Eventually, the shadowy figure was revealed to be local businessman BJ Vines who owned the drilling site where Joe’s son had died years earlier. Vines engineered all of the season’s events to enrich himself, including the explosion that killed Joe’s son. However, since Wolf committed all the crimes involved, it was impossible to pin this on Vines.

in Dark winds Season 2’s finale, Joe realized that “White justice” would let Wines go free thanks to his wealth and connections. When he discovered that the wealthy oil baron had been released on bail despite his crime, Joe kidnapped Wines, took him out into the desert and drove him away.

Wayne apparently froze to death in the night, but Joe didn’t technically kill him. This was a dark mirror of the way Vines ordered Colton to bomb his drilling site, leading to the death of Joe’s son. Although Vines could not be charged with murder, Joe got justice outside the biased, corrupt legal system.

Dark Wind Season 2’s Colton Mother Twist Explained

Colton’s search for his mother is over

throughout Dark winds Season 2, Colton Wolf hired many private investigators to find his estranged mother and killed each of them when they failed. how so It was a big surprise when the finale revealed that Colton killed his mother when he was just a child, shortly after she killed his father and older sister.

Since his last words were his mother’s name, it is safe to assume that the unhinged Colton did not realize that he had murdered his mother in self-defense and, as such, was looking for her in a doomed attempt to fix his life. of crime. and return to some semblance of childhood innocence. Blocking out traumatic events is a psychological coping mechanism, so it’s not hard to rationalize it.

BJ Vines hired Colton Wolf in Dark Winds

The audience did not see this twist coming

In a twist ending that is hard to recover from, Dark winds Season 2’s finale revealed that Wolf wasn’t acting alone or motivated by madness. instead, It was the aforementioned BJ Vines who hired him to bomb the drilling site, assassinate the dying Emerson, and later kill Emerson’s son.

As the owner of the drilling site, Vines discovered that there was unused uranium under the site and paid Colton to bomb it so that its value would decrease, and he could buy the site for a steal. In the process, Vines indirectly killed many workers including Joe’s son. When Emerson felt guilty about this, Vines re-hired Colton to kill him.

Why did Colton kill Emerson and his sons?

He was hired to kill them

Emerson used to work with Vines. When he received a terminal cancer diagnosis, he decided to come clean about the bombing. His son stole a lock box with the geographical survey that revealed the site’s uranium, so Vines hired Colton to assassinate them both. Colton succeeded in killing Emerson and one of his sons, but kept the lockbox containing the survey.

The lock box also contained a belt buckle owned by Joe’s son and, when Joe caught Colton, he pieced together the connection between the bombings. In an endless stream of the best Western movies, Vines confronted Colton before Leaphorn confronted Vines.

Why Vines Killed Colton Wolf (Not Joe)

Vines had to tie up loose ends

For many Dark winds season 2, It seemed as if Leaphorn would inevitably end up killing Colton. However, Colton is instead shot dead by BJ Vines to tie up the loose ends.

In a particularly cruel twist, Vines hands the criminal enough money to start a new life before sending him on his way, thus lulling Colton into a false sense of security. Once Colton’s back was turned, Vines shot him dead. This was the moment when Colton, while lying down, said his mother’s name. Vines seemingly ensured his success, with the only living link between himself and the bombers now dead.

The meaning behind Joe turning the belt buckle into a feather

It is a symbol of acceptance

While Leaphorn knew that the law would not help him, he was still able to remove Vines himself. so, Leaphorn kidnapped the oil magnate and left him for dead, ensuring that justice was served.

This indirectly led Bernadette Manuelito to leave the tribal police and pursue a career in the Border Patrol as she accepted Vines skipped town and therefore evaded justice. While Leaphnorn didn’t tell Manuelito about the villain’s true fate, he did leave her with a parting gift. The gift of a metal pen was of major symbolic importance to both characters.

Joe melted his late son’s belt buckle and fashioned it into a metal pen as a gift for Bernadette. This indicated that Joe was finally at peace with his son’s death and was able to move on, and it also showed that Joe saw himself as something of a father figure to the younger, more naive Bernadette. By letting go of the belt buckle after killing Vines, Joe assumed that his son was not coming back.

By giving the pen to Bernadette, the antihero of Dark winds Season 2 proved that he can still be a surrogate parent despite the trials he faced during his difficult life.

How the end of the Dark Winds Season 2 was received

The end was a split one

Although Dark winds Season 2 as a whole was well received by fans and critics (it has a 100% on review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes), The events of the season finale itself are divisive. This is partly because they deviate from the book from which the story is inspired. There was also a sense that Colton being killed so early in the finale was a bit of a letdown.

The consensus among fans and critics alike is that the season 2 end of Dark winds Was a satisfying conclusion despite that. in The Reddit thread Discuss the events of the finale, Many fans agreed that the episode actually “Felt like a series finale.” Speculation was that because the show was in production right before the writers and actors strikes that setting up the season 2 finale as a series finale was done in case the show couldn’t come back for a third season. Dark winds It was renewed for a season 3 though.

For some fans, whether Vines could potentially survive his time in the desert is a question that lingers ahead of season 3. According to executive producer Chris Eyre, the decision to leave Vines alive in the desert wasn’t originally in the script (via TV line). Instead, the idea was that he should be shot. Actor Zahn McClarnon is the one who pushed for his character to leave vines to the elements. He explained:

Zahn was so brilliant in saying, ‘Well, Leaphorn wouldn’t do that.’ He couldn’t pull the trigger. So Zahn saved us from himself, or at least he saved me from myself. It was written that Lephorn took revenge, but he is the moral compass of the story – the uncle, the father, the grandfather you want, and it was so right that he did not go for it.

So, the audience has the actors as much as the writers to thank for the compelling ending Dark winds Season 2 and the lingering questions about what’s next.