If HBO is trying to be historically accurate (at least as far as characters go) we don’t just maybe know what’s going to happen to Wild Bill. I believe it was stated in this thread (or another) that he dies the in same year that Deadwood started the show. So it’s not exactly spoilerific to state the Bill’s going to die. The only way they could stretch it out a season or two is to either play fast and loose with history or take a really long time telling the story so that next season would still be “this” year.
Yes, like I said, we do know what is going to eventually happen to Bill. We had no clue about when. They certainly do not have to “play fast and loose with history” to stretch things out. We have seen three episodes that have covered a total of three days in Deadwood. At that rate, it would take three seasons for a month of Deadwood time to elapse. Also, if the ghost thing isn’t a spoiler, I don’t know what is.
So yes, that post is “exactly spoilerific” if true. I for one am hoping it’s not true. Keith Carradine is nailing the part of Wild Bill.
This is the first TV show I’ve been hooked on since I got over my Jeopardy! addiction ten years ago. Just glad it’s on several times a week.
I’m going to have to print out the summaries in order to learn everybody’s names, though. Always been lousy at that.
The NPR reviewer on Fresh Air raved about this show, but let drop a major spoiler relating to a “major character.” It’s true that just about everyone knows what happens to Bill in Deadwood, we don’t necessarily know when , and there might be some historical disagreement about how he was in Deadwood before it happened.
This show has enough strong characters to survive (handily) without Bill. Actually, he’s just eye candy compared to the strong and interesting personality of his buddy Charlie Utter.
I just love the way they talk. Not the profanity, although that’s sometimes imaginative, but sometimes it’s almost poetic.
My favorite line from Episode 3 is from Nancy (is it Nancy, from the Bella Union?), when Al says “pardon my French” and she says “I speak French.”
Also funny – “specialty acts”, “who cut the cheese?”, Trixie cutting calluses off Al’s feet but stopping guiltily when someone knocks at the door. If she’d been blowing him, she would probably have just kept going, but the pedicure was a bit too domestic for Al’s image.
I meant to say we don’t know how long he was in Deadwood before it happened.
Back then, morphine addiction (i.e. constantly sipping on laudanum) was not considered a big deal, let alone a problem. Back then, before the Harrison Act of 1914, all drugs were legal, plentiful, and cheap. There was no drug related crime, no social stigma to using drugs, and no prison overcrowding or severe health problems. If you were addicted you could easily get more. Chronic constipation was the worse part of being addicted to morphine. In this time period, the men drank alcohol at the bars and the women typically used morphine. At lesat 60% of morphine addicts were women in the days of Deadwood.
Nobody would “be on the first train back home” for using morphine, pot, alcohol, or any drug. Smoking opium eventually became taboo solely because it was seen as a Chinese thing. That racism, coupled with religious fervor over temperance, was what eventually led to the “drugs are evil” mentality we have today. Say what you want about the wild west (the more civilized northeast had the same laws, anyway), they had the right idea about drugs.