I just had an impromptu Deadwood marathon, watching the whole thing over the the three day weekend. DAMN that was a fantastic show.
There have been a lot of questions about Deadwood around here, especially about the extraordinary amount, degree and nature of the profanity.
But what no one seems to wonder about is the extraordinary amount, degree and nature of all the MURDER on that show. Yes, it’s a show, it’s not real, but it’s supposedly tried to present the period and the people realistically. From that perspective, you have to ask about the murder, which seemed to happen almost as frequently, casually, and without any consequences as the profanity did! Yet there were odd exceptions to that , the underlying rules of which I havent’ been able to figure out.
Not to mention the laws! What, murder wasn’t murder in “territories”??? Murder is about as “common-law” as it gets, hardly needs codifying.
So, any takers?
Also, even after seeing it all twice, I’m still kind of confused about the politics. Actually a lot confused, since I can’t even formulate an intelligent question. But if anyone feels like they have a solid grasp of the political side of the story, please share.
They were unaccountable strangers illegally squating in Indian territory. That rare and brief sort of environment was one of the main themes explored on the show. You go from Al personally knifing an incompetent road agent to him having to parse legal documents with Adams by the time they’re being annexed.
Murder is murder but that doesn’t mean a lot when nobody has the muscle to prosecute you for it. That lawlessness works great for men like Swearengen for letting him literally getting away with murder, but at the same time he supports annexation because without it his holdings and those of everybody else can be swept away with a pen stroke, plus being an actual town opens the door to real wealth: railroads, commercial real estate, etc… Presumably once Deadwood joins the Dakota Territory (which they’re not at the beginning- it’s a boom town of squatters on Sioux territory) even Swearengen, who has made a fortune already, will grow a bit more respectable and turn to more respectable crime: political machinery, civic improvement rackets, basically cowboy Boss Tweed stuff. (Important to remember that while Seth Bullock, Al Swearengen, and several others in the show were real people, any resemblance twixt the real and fictional versions is largely coincidental.)
And neither law & order or annexation or muscle can stand up to Hearst, who doesn’t give a damn about respectability and can buy any law or muscle that he needs, thus he basically becomes the hurricane the others just have to outlast.
The murder really turned me off the show at first because I thought it was ridiculous. No society could function when the possibility of horrific violent death was so near all the time.
It took me a while to realize that that is what the show is about: how the social contract emerges out of the Hobbsian chaos that precedes it, about the inescapable paradox that total freedom for all results in freedom for none. Deadwood, as it starts, is unsustainable. It has to develop structure–morality–to survive. The fact that a chaotic evil character–in the form of Al Swearengen–is the first to realize this, and installs a lawful good character because he recognizes it is ultimately to his own advantage is a really neat commentary on human nature.
It’s been awhile since I watched, but I’m remembering that the victims were either bad guys who nobody would care about, or people killed in fights. The only innocents I remember being killed were Ellsworth, Alma’s first husband – forgot his name – and the miner who was smuggling gold dust.
So if you kept your head down and behaved yourself, you were pretty safe.
Even Bullock definitely considered a justified shooting to be just fine - see, for example, the confusion between Slippery Dan and some other Dan, when one got banned from Nutall’s bar and pranked the other by giving him his coat. Nutall shot the wrong Dan, believing him to be the Dan who had peed on him. Bullock called it a fair one.
ETA - other innocents include Sophia’s family, for which there was a big outcry.
Harry Manning shot Bummer Dan mistaking him for Slippery Dan whom he had banned from the premises after he urinated into the spittoon and then on Harry himself.
Al was quite likable to me later on, especially when standing up for the underclass in his hate of the Pinkertons, and his fight against Hearst.
However, his act early on seems completely unforgivable. Did he order his agents to kill that family, just to take their cash? That seems too cruel considering the rewards.
Al didn’t order the murder of the squarehead family, but I don’t doubt that he was above such things. What really drew me into the show was the realization - despite living up to every mustache twirling caricature of villainy - that Al wasn’t the worst person in town.
He was also kindly showing Johnny that Johnny was not cut out to replace Al’s road agent at the same time. Phil? Anyway, the guy who killed them squareheads.
Which Al didn’t order not because he wasn’t a nice guy but because he wouldn’t want to get the camp all riled up - in other words, even as the series started there had already been a shift in acceptable behavior.
He didn’t order the killing of the squareheads, but he did order Dan Dority to kill their daughter so she couldn’t identify the killers who in turn could be connected to him. Dan couldn’t do it, and Al reconsidered once it was clear she couldn’t I.D. the murderers.
Murder of some unknown drifter, one who may have well just wandered off and “got hisself kilt by injuns” wouldn’t be much of a issue assuming you disposed of the body (like Al did) so that the town populace never even knew (or cared) if there was a murder.
But note that the killing of innocents or well known people was swiftly dealt with. True, the killer of Wild Bill did get himself off for a time, but was hung less than 7 months later for the crime.
So, most of the time the townspeople didn’t know about the murders.
No, he assumed she could ID the murderers but getting to her would be enough of a pain in the ass that he killed the only person she could have identified instead. Dan and the doc suggested it.
Al ordering Dan to kill Sofia was good character development (“This guy Al is eeeeevil!”) but made no sense. It’s doubtful Sofia could have identified them, even if they were suggested as suspects. They probably had their faces covered, and didn’t the attack happen at night?
Seth and Wild Bill would have figured it out if they’d been inclined to investigate, but they seemed content with killing the guy who came back to town. And they didn’t need Sofia to find out who else was involved. Just ask around, see who the dead guy hung out with, take it from there.