Deep Water

Small rooms, hard looks

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The premiere was Milch’s own script, directed by Walter Hill. Deep Water is the first hour handed to the staff. Like most of the series it’s credited to one of Milch’s writers, Malcolm MacRury, and it’s directed by Davis Guggenheim, one of the show’s producers. It picks up a few hours after the premiere ends and stays close to it. The first hour rode out into the dark. This one stays indoors: Doc’s cabin, the Gem, a card table, a negotiation over a lot. The tension comes from people in small rooms trying to read each other.

That puts the weight on the actors, and they carry it. Ian McShane’s Swearengen gets quieter as Persimmon Phil talks, and the quiet is worse than the beating that follows. Brad Dourif plays Doc Cochran as a tired man who lies well. He tells Swearengen to his face that the girl probably won’t live. Robin Weigert has the hardest turn. Her Calamity Jane rode into camp as Hickok’s loudest company, and here she breaks down and weeps when Swearengen does nothing more than look at her. W. Earl Brown gives Dan Dority a heavy reluctance when the order comes to kill a child.

The girl in Doc’s cabin

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A few hours after the premiere ends, E.B. Farnum delivers Tim Driscoll’s body to Mr. Wu for the pigs, and Swearengen wakes beside Trixie. Farnum brings news: the Metz girl survived, and she might talk. Swearengen has a problem. Persimmon Phil, the last of the road agents behind the killings, is still in camp. When Phil starts to spin a story, Swearengen cuts him off: “Keep lying like that and I’ll cut your fucking throat.” Phil tells him what happened on the road, tries to buy his way out, and gets a beating instead.

Sofia Metz lies in Doc Cochran’s cabin with Calamity Jane watching over her. Doc keeps her condition from Bullock, afraid it will get back to Swearengen. It does anyway. Swearengen comes to see for himself and pushes past Jane, who breaks down. He sees the girl is awake and leaves her alive. Asked directly, Doc tells him she probably won’t make it.

Swearengen has a second threat to manage. He turns to Tom Mason, the brother of the man Hickok killed, to finish Hickok. In the saloon Hickok is losing at poker while Jack McCall needles him. “Why are you playing?” Hickok asks. “If it’s to piss me off, you’ve already won.” He tells Bullock that Tom and Phil, in the corner, mean him harm, and asks him to watch his back. Tom, drunk, comes for him, and Hickok shoots him before he can draw. “He meant me harm,” Hickok says, and Bullock stands by him.

Bullock and Sol Star still need their lot, and Swearengen means to block the sale. The first meeting goes badly. Sol goes to the next one in Bullock’s place. Trixie offers Bullock her company, and he politely declines. It’s the refusals that bother Swearengen: he wouldn’t drink and he wouldn’t take a woman. His answer to their terms is “Here’s my counteroffer to your counteroffer: Go fuck yourself,” and the partners end up taking his. Brom Garret, meanwhile, finds no gold on his claim and tries to sell it to Farnum, who tells him he was drunk. Garret starts to understand he’s been conned.

Then Swearengen sends Dority to kill the girl. Dority doesn’t want to, but he goes. Doc uses the one lever he has: without him, the Gem’s women go untreated. He talks Dority into lying to his boss, and tells Swearengen that Jane has “absconded with the child,” which puts the girl under Hickok’s protection. He tells Sofia never to tell anyone what she saw that night. Swearengen stabs Persimmon Phil himself, and the last man who could tie him to the massacre disappears. Jane and Charlie Utter take Sofia out of the camp and into the hills.

Heroes, villains and everyone between

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Deep Water plays fair with the Western. A gunfighter outdraws the man who comes for him. A saloon boss sends his man to kill a child. A doctor stands in the way. All three parts are here, and none of them comes out straight.

Start with Hickok and Bullock. Hickok shoots first, on a read, and Bullock backs him on his word alone. In the premiere Bullock knew Ned Mason was lying the moment he heard the story. Here he refuses Swearengen’s whiskey and Trixie’s offer as if he’s already seen the bill. The same instinct makes him take Hickok at his word without seeing Tom Mason reach for anything. The show doesn’t say whether that’s judgment or loyalty. It leaves the camp’s first act of law resting on one man’s sense of another man’s character.

Then the villain. Swearengen never needs a plan to work. Tom Mason is supposed to kill Hickok, and Tom ends up dead. Dority is supposed to kill the girl, and Dority comes back with Doc’s story. So Swearengen takes the story. A child under Hickok’s protection, out of camp and silent, is nearly as good as a dead one, so he removes the one witness he can still reach and puts Phil in the ground himself. With Bullock it’s the same. He blocks the lot, insults the offer and gets his price. Watch what he does at Doc’s cabin. He’s the most frightening man in the camp, he sees the girl awake and he lets her live. Hours later he sends Dority anyway. Both moves are his, and the episode doesn’t pick one as the real Swearengen.

Doc is the episode’s moral centre, and he wins by lying. He needs Swearengen. The Gem’s women are his patients and the Gem pays him. That’s the leverage he turns on Dority, the patron’s own business put to work against the patron. He keeps the truth from Bullock, the one man who might help, because he can’t be sure where it would go. He lies to Swearengen’s face. The good man in this camp protects a child with exactly the tools Swearengen uses, and the episode lets that stand as heroism.

Jane gets the plainest version of the same turn. She’s the camp’s foul-mouthed iconoclast, and one look from Swearengen undoes her. Nobody makes a speech about courage. She takes the girl and heads for the hills, and by the end of the hour the lie Doc told Swearengen is true.

What I Liked

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• Doc Cochran. A caregiver devoted to his craft, holding his patron, his patients and his conscience in balance. When Alma Garret asks him for more medicine, he snaps, “There are other people in the camp who actually need my help.”
• Calamity Jane. An iconoclast and a caregiver at once, looking after Bill, Charlie Utter and the orphan girl. The hour ends with her and Charlie singing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” to Sofia in a round, and Charlie can’t hold his part.

What I Disliked

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• The Garrets. Brom and Alma are flatly unbelievable. Next to people who reveal themselves by what they do, they play like types: the New York mark and the wife who wants her medicine.