Reconnoitering the Rim

A rival in a better suit

#

Davis Guggenheim directs his second straight hour, from a script by Jody Worth, another of Milch’s staff writers. The new arrivals give it its shape. Powers Boothe was in line to play Swearengen before he fell ill, and Milch created Cy Tolliver, a fictional character, for him. Where Ian McShane’s Swearengen bullies, Boothe’s Tolliver smiles. He plays a man who has already done the arithmetic and is happy to let you catch up. Ricky Jay plays Eddie Sawyer, the Bella Union’s gaming man, and Kim Dickens plays Joanie Stubbs, who runs its women and carries herself like a partner rather than a possession.

The design does the arguing before anyone speaks. The Bella Union arrives with better clothes, finer women and craps tables, a game the Gem doesn’t offer. McShane answers it by playing Swearengen distracted, listening with half his attention while the other half counts what he’s losing.

The Bella Union opens

#

With the Metz killers dead, Calamity Jane and Charlie Utter bring Sofia back to camp. Swearengen has bigger worries. Cy Tolliver opens the Bella Union with Joanie Stubbs and Eddie Sawyer, and E.B. Farnum helped bring them in. It’s the first serious competition the Gem has faced, and Swearengen starts looking for whoever let it happen. He suspects Farnum, then wonders whether Hickok and the hardware partners are part of it. He tries to turn Leon, one of Tolliver’s dealers, into his informant. Tolliver sees it coming almost at once.

Bullock and Sol Star still want their lot, and the Bella Union is what gets the deal done. Swearengen sells on one condition: they don’t sell their goods to Tolliver’s people. Bullock agrees readily. When Jack McCall turns up at the hardware tent to brag, Bullock throws him into the mud. “This tent’s shut to you.”

Wild Bill Hickok has been playing poker all night with McCall needling him across the table. He beats him and gives him a thorough dressing-down. For much of the hour Hickok is sprawled in a hallway, sleeping it off. A man in the camp curses him to his face and hopes he gets what’s coming to him. Hickok ends the day heading for the Bella Union to drink and play.

Brom Garret still wants his money back. He tries to hire Hickok to get it, and Hickok and Utter warn him who he’s dealing with. Alma begs him to treat the camp as an adventure and leave, for the West or for New York. He won’t go without his money. He threatens Swearengen with the Pinkertons, and Swearengen orders him killed. Dan Dority takes Brom up to the rim of his claim and kills him there, and a prospector named Ellsworth sees it. Then Dority finds gold where the claim was supposed to be worthless.

The boss on the back foot

#

This is Swearengen’s worst day so far. In two episodes Swearengen has been ahead of everyone: the rent, the pigs, the road agents, the witness in Doc’s cabin. Here business, schemes and the camp itself all move faster than he does. He says that when he sees lightning he waits for thunder, and when he sees thunder he assumes it’s part of the storm. That’s a man trying to sound calm about a forecast he can’t read.

Watch where the pressure comes from. The Bella Union is a better business, and Swearengen knows it. His plan to plant Leon inside it fails before it starts. His swindle of Garret, the cleanest con of the premiere, turns into a threat that ends in murder, and the murder has a witness. Even the condition he puts on Bullock’s lot looks like a man protecting his flank, not dictating terms. The camp he ran by being first to every deal now has a second center of gravity.

Tolliver is what makes the hour. The easy version of this story makes him the polished villain to Swearengen’s crude one, and the episode gives you that version, with the clothes and the craps and the smile. Then it lets Tolliver read Swearengen’s spy before Swearengen has finished planting him. He isn’t nicer than Swearengen. He’s quieter, and every bit as calculating. The camp now has two men who think in prices.

Hickok moves the other way. Swearengen and Tolliver want the camp to settle so they can own it. Hickok can’t be owned or settled. He plays all night, sleeps in a hallway, humiliates McCall, gets cursed by a stranger and goes looking for the next table. Brom asks him for help, and Hickok gives him a warning. The most famous man in Deadwood has stopped managing anything, least of all himself.

The hour ends on the cruelest joke of the season so far. Swearengen sold Garret a claim he believed was worthless and had him killed for calling it a swindle. Garret died standing on gold.

What I Liked

#

• Cy Tolliver. Boothe gives him a host’s warmth and a dealer’s eyes. He makes the Gem look like a frontier dive without raising his voice.
• Ricky Jay as Eddie Sawyer. Casting one of the great sleight-of-hand artists as Tolliver’s card sharp is a perfect fit. When Eddie runs the Bella Union’s tables, you believe he knows every way a deck can lie.
• Swearengen at the close. After Dority’s report, Trixie shaves his foot and asks if she should do the other. “Yeah,” he says, and then, “Please.” A small courtesy at the end of a day of failed schemes.

What I Disliked

#

• The Garrets. Still naive and still unlikeable. Brom brushes off a warning from Hickok and Utter and still thinks a threat will get his money back.
• Sol Star. His disengagement is hard to square with how much Bullock likes him.