I think I figured out what was off. To me, the whole show was just more polished. The lighting, camerawork and wordplay didn’t seem to have the same grittyness to it. Still, very enjoyable.
Scripted? Realistic, more like. Of course, we don’t have any audio recordings of how people actually talked in the middle-to-late-1800s; but there are a lot of writings. Going by books and letters that I’ve read that were written in the 19th Century, from the early part to the late part, and from readings of the same, I’d say the dialog is fairly accurate for the time.
Historically, it was common for middle and upper class spouses to call each other Mr. and Mrs., and after they had children, it’d be Mother and Father.
But it’s obvious they’re not well-acquainted with each other.
Little William is a charmer. “Is your ward a boy?”
A laugh-out-loud moment was Al’s spot on mimicking of E.B. He did that in the DVD commentaries too. Wonder if that’s why they worked it into the show.
One of the things I’ve learned as a genealogist is that this sort of arrangement was very common. It was an obligation to be taken on and not necessarily a ‘marriage’ in the physical sense of the word. Without a husband, a woman could be in serious trouble in those times.
I had a little trouble following some of the discussions - maybe they were too Shakespearean for me.
Al is upset because he doesn’t have Alma’s money. Ok, but was he also saying that the money would do more good in Deadwood then being sent home? Did he have some sort of legitimate (if self serving) point there? Make everyone in Deadwood richer?
Cy looks like he has killed a few too many brain cells. What the hell was he talking about? I know his best whore boss/girlfriend is leaving to start her own place, but who is the Borg Queen and why is she there?
Seth’s letter to his wife supposedly explained everything. The only thing it mentions was the construction of the house. Fair enough, his skull is basically split open, and it is clear there is no romance between them - at least on his part. So the letter shows that - none of that “I miss you honey” crap. I know the real Seth Bullock was married. From a historical perspective, does anyone know if he was married to his brother’s widow?
The circumlocution between Alma and the mine manager or whoever he is was pretty good. The “never mentioned in the letters…we lose more letters…” was a nice touch. But I thought the best line was Al’s “Welcome to f**king Deadwood.”
Milch said in an interview that there was a “Biblical injnction” to marry your brother’s widow. He said it wasn’t so much to protect the woman as to provide a father for the son. Martha had been in Michigan, “with her people”, for the whole time Seth was in Montana and South Dakota, so she was being well-protected.
I don’t think Seth would have felt obliged to marry her if there hadn’t been a child, who needed to be raised right, carry on the family name in an honorable way, learn a trade, yadda yadda.
We can interpret their distance in a couple of ways – that was the way married people of a certain class acted in those days, and they barely know each other.
I hope against hope that the writers don’t emphasize the romantic triangle. The relationship between Seth and Martha is way more interesting, IMHO.
No, he wasn’t. The real Martha was a (to quote Al) pillar of the fuckin’ community, started a school, did a bunch of stuff.
The website for the Adams Museum in Deadwood has a lot of information.
I like that Al is upset at Alma’s money going to Denver. That’s the way a lot of small towns are – make your money here, keep it here, improve the community. If it’s in Denver, Al doesn’t have any way to get a piece of it.
Alice Krige, aka the Borg Queen, looks like her character has a past with Cy, probably working for him in the past. But now she is out of the active part of that business and is now in more of a managerial position.
I suppose the Chez Amis (the new place) will be competing with the Bella Union for the “high end” customers as it were. The Gem is more of a middle class, working man’s establishment.
I assumed (and earlier suggested in this thread) that Swearinger intentionally picked a fight that he intended to be non-lethal because he believed Bullock was losing his way as the town’s sheriff. If it makes any sense, I saw the fight (with Swearinger telling his men to stand down and not do anything lethal) as an attempt by Swearinger to have a good punchout with Bullock, clear the air, and basically “reset him.”
Swearinger doesn’t love Bullock, but he does think that at his worst he would be a sheriff on the straight and narrow, which can at least be accounted for and is better than someone who would intentionally act against him in the pocket of another. That’s why he compromised and “allowed” Bullock to act as a sheriff. His comments early in the show suggest that he believed Bullock to have lost his course, and he wanted to do something drastic (like a big blow out fight between people in a workplace that sometimes clears the air).
I still don’t understand why Alma would have expected to have been mentioned in Seth’s letters home. Odd circumstance or not, he did tell Alma he was married. Did she really expect that he was going to tell his wife that he was boinking a rich lady in Deadwood?
Swearingen (it ends with n, not r) is very worried that all of the outside forces creeping in on Deadwood are very bad for his bottom line.
There are more places now that compete with the Gem: the Bella Union, the soon to open Chez Amis
There is little or no representation for the Deadwood area in the Dakota territorial legislature which means that he won’t have much access to government funds to profit from
Mrs. Garret’s gold should be going to him. After all, he killed her husband fair and square didn’t he? (Well he had Dan do it for him.)
Al is also in a crappy mood because he has a kidney problem. Notice how much trouble he had urinating. An LA Times review said there will be an upcoming uncomfortable scene where the Doc uses an instrument in a place that um … hurts … a bit.
