Wow, those last two episodes were brutal. It was a good but, sad ending.
I thought they handled the Indian attack really well. There was a legitimate reason for it. Their families had been brutalized and that triggered the attack.
Much different than the old Westerns that only showed the raids without any context.
Because of some generational weirdness (I’m the youngest son of a youngest son of a man who had children late) I’m in my 50s but my grandfather was born in 1882. The show made me think of things. He came from the part of the world where those immigrants came from. His family came here when he was 2. We will never know why but they decided to stay in New Jersey and not head out west. It feels weird that someone I knew and remembered talking to as a child came from this exact era. Seems like so long ago but at the same time it really wasn’t.
Agree, and that is why I liked this better than Yellowstone. It was brutal and people died, even main characters. In Yellowstone they keep on surviving total BS, it become a soap opera and Kevin Costner love affair show. Yellowstone should have ended at season 3.
I agree, at least one of the main characters should have bought the farm at the end of S3.
Preferably Beth. My goodness, she’s AWFUL. I mean, they all are to one degree or another but there’s very little that’s redeemable about her.
I only got through the first season of Yellowstone and Beth is the only reason I could watch it. Kevin Costner is just such a snoozefest. I’ll take no redeeming qualities over boredom (cite: Succession) any day but couldn’t make it through another season of Yellowstone. We did enjoy 1883 and were pleasantly surprised the Native Americans didn’t have a magical cure for Elsa… she had too many redeeming qualities (Mary Sue?) but we were able to stick it for Sam Elliot and even Faith Hill/Tim McGraw were decent as well as the German leader guy whose name escapes me.
Edited to add: in another thread, 1883 was described as a “non-romantic” Lonesome Dove. Lonesome Dove (book & tv series) is another favorite of mine and can’t think of anything romanticized in Lonesome Dove. You want brutal deaths of your heroes (check) Raped, scalped, hung and otherwise brutalized people whether by other whites, Native Americans or the Mexican army (Check). Even the Comanches seemed like actual Comanches and not perfect English speaking natives…something I found really lazy in the 1883 series.
I can see that as being problematical–we do not have any contemporary recordings of how the average 19th century indigenous people spoke English and it’s cringey to use that “Me Tonto, you Lone Ranger ugh” movie Indian dialect because even if it WERE accurate (and I seriously doubt it is), it makes all the indigenous characters sound stupid. So for the purposes of artistic license I can assume some babelfish handwavium solution to how an indigenous person speaks cultured English. Or I just figure he spent a few years at one of those residential schools as a child then escaped back to his family when he was old enough.
And Beth is cartoonishly crass. She’s improving as of last season and they give her a fair amount of motivation for her behavior but I just find her distasteful. It’s a personal thing, that kind of sloppy flailing emotional misbehavior doesn’t set well with me.