'Dark Winds' review: Well-crafted season 4, but not quite up to Tony Hillerman's vision

WHAT IT'S ABOUT A frantic search for a teen girl who's run away from a boarding school on the reservation leads Lt. Joe Leaphorn (Zahn McClarnon), Officer. Jim Chee (Kiowa Gordon), and Sgt. Bernadette "Bern" Manuelito (Jessica Matten) to Los Angeles, where ›››a car theft and drug smuggling ring enters the picture, along with its jailed leader,  Dominic McNair (Titus Welliver, "Bosch"). But the action of this fourth season -- which began last Sunday and is loosely based on Tony Hillerman's 1984 novel, "The Ghostway" -- is largely propelled by a sinister German hitwoman, Irene Vaggan (Franke Potenta, "The Bourne Identity"), who has a particular interest in Joe.

MY SAY As a "Dark Winds" dabbler over the first three seasons, I'd pick up an episode here, or an episode there. Nothing consistent and certainly no deep dive. This commitment phobia was, I suspect, shared by other Hillerman fans for essentially the same reason: This wasn't really Hillerman. Hillerman-adjacent, HiIlerman-lite, or Hillerman-in-name-only — take your pick — are not the same as pure-grade, 100-proof Hillerman.

One hundred proof Hillerman (he died in 2008) is difficult to get on film because most of his 20 mystery novels unfold in silence — the silence of his "Indian Country," of human thought, of feelings and other worlds where words are neither welcome nor always apposite. The novels are constructed of the sturdy bricks of any well-crafted mystery, but their magic was the mortar in between. A former newspaper editor from Oklahoma, Hillerman was a soldier with the 103rd Infantry Division during World War II when he was nearly killed by a landmine. He was temporarily blinded instead. A devout Catholic, he must have believed that God interceded because, to Hillerman, God was the bricks-and-mortar of all human affairs. When he picked up novel writing decades later, he perhaps saw a distant analogy in the Navajo principle of "hózhó," the necessity of one's life to be in harmony, balance and order, or to "walk in beauty."

Reading any Hillerman novel was to see — seeing so important in these novels — a radically secularized western culture spread into the far reaches of the "Rez" (reservation), with witchcraft, ghosts ("chindi") and murder never far behind. His heroes were Lt. Joe Leaphorn of the Navajo Tribal Police and protégé Jim Chee. As they saw it, their job was to restore hozho to Diné Bikéyah (the spiritual Navajo Homeland, bound by the four sacred peaks) but especially to themselves. 

You didn't come to this review for a disquisition on Hillerman, but it might help get you to a place where you can properly appreciate the series for what it is. If "Dark Winds" isn't Hillerman, then what? Foremost, this is the only series on TV (perhaps the second overall after "Reservation Dogs") with a predominantly Native American cast and writers' room. An Indian story told on TV by Indians is a perfectly sensible idea, or anywhere except Hollywood. If diversity, equity and inclusion still counts for something somewhere, then here's the show taking a lonely stand.

That's one reason to watch, the excellent cast another. The three leads have captured the spiritual drift of Leaphorn, Chee and Manuelito while adding depths of their own. McClarnon has had a hell of a TV career but it took this to remind everyone just how good he really is.

Nevertheless, "Dark Winds" still feels like a work in progress this season. Presumptively about Diné life and culture, there's little of either. Other than episode titles and a minor "chindi" ghost sickness plot thread, Diné cosmology and language are largely missing too. Without those, the wild, expressive silence of Hillerman's Indian Country is just ... silence.

He was on to something, and "Dark Winds" still needs to find that something too.

BOTTOM LINE Nicely crafted, but still Hillerman-lite.