[Later this
month, the sixth
and final season of my favorite current TV show (and one of my all
time-favs as well), Longmire, drops on
Netflix. So this week, after a repeat of my first post on the show, I wanted to
AmericanStudy a handful of Longmire’s
many fascinating characters. Leading up to a special weekend post on Native
American popular culture!]
On the
similarities and differences between two complex, compelling characters.
From its opening
episode on, Longmire has balanced the
male friendship and comraderie of Walt and Henry (and of the Western genre as a
whole, which has been depicted as a boys’ club at least since Natty Bumppo and
Huck
Finn lit off for the frontier wilderness at the end of their respective
stories) with two very well drawn and interesting central female characters. There’s
Victoria “Vic” Moretti
(Katee Sackhoff), a
former Philadelphia cop who has relocated to Wyoming after she blew the whistle
on crooked cops and who has badass and stubborn streaks to match her new boss
Walt’s. And there’s Cady
Longmire (Cassidy
Freeman), Walt’s adult daughter and a talented lawyer trying to make sense
of both her personal and professional lives in the small Wyoming town of Durant
(and in the aftermath of her mother Martha’s death, a challenge she shares with
Walt). Both are of course defined through their layered and evolving relationships
to our protagonist and title character, but both are from the outset fully
formed and compelling characters in their own right, and add significantly to
the show’s ensemble and palette of characters and perspectives.
Yet while both
Vic and Cady have remained key figures throughout the show’s five seasons to
date, I would have to say that the evolving storylines have done more justice
to Cady as a complex character in her own right. Vic’s two most consistent
roles (other than as a very capable police officer, to be sure) have been as a
damsel in distress and a potential love interest. For the former, she was threatened
for multiple seasons by Ed Gorski (Lee Tergesen), a rogue ex-Philly cop (and
ex-lover of Vic’s) who turns up in Wyoming seeking vengeance; but she has also
spent a number of episodes as a potential target of both crazed survivalist
Chance Gilbert (Peter Stormare) and her fellow deputy Branch Connally (Bailey
Chase). All of those distressing situations have played into the will-they or
won’t-they romantic dynamic between Vic and Walt, but she has also consistently
been defined through her romantic relationships with first her husband Sean
(Micheal Mosley) and then post-divorce with fellow deputy Eamonn O’Neill (Josh
Cooke). Sackhoff gives all of these relationships and storylines depth and
nuance, and of course both threats and romances as part of any human life as
well as any story. Yet in all these situations Vic has been portrayed more as reacting
to men in her life than pursuing an arc of her own.
In Season 1, it
seemed as if Cady might suffer a similar fate, as her character was largely
used as a wedge between Walt and Branch Connally (with whom Cady had a secret
romance while he was running against Walt in an election for sheriff). But the
dynamic of her evolving knowledge of and perspective on her mother’s death
already added distinct layers to that role, and in subsequent seasons, with the
Branch romance a thing of the past, Cady’s character has acquired a number of
other compelling layers as well. More exactly, over the last couple of seasons
Cady has become interestingly and importantly linked to the Cheyenne
reservation, first through particular relationships and storylines but now in
an ongoing role as a reservation lawyer (working, to add one more level of
complexity, for Walt’s longtime enemy Jacob Nighthorse, on whom more tomorrow).
While of course Walt’s friendship with Henry links him to the Cheyenne community
(as do many particular episodes and mysteries), Cady is the first white character
we’ve seen move fully into the world of the reservation, and the rareness and significance
of that move has been noted by a number of Cheyenne characters. I’m interested
to see where the final season takes both Vic and Cady, but have to admit that Cady’s
arc is to me both the most uncertain and the most compelling of them all.
Last Longmire
post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Takes on Longmire, or other
shows, you’d share?
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