'Deadwood' Primer, Part 1: Why Deadwood's Prologue Is Such an Effective Introduction

"No law at all. Gold you can scoop with your bare hands."

HBO

This is the first in a series going deep into the 2000s era HBO show Deadwood.

I recently revisited Deadwood and was struck by how the short prologue — which is often overlooked in favor of everything that comes after — sets up what’s to come. It serves as a master class in establishing the tone of a show economically, but also stands on its own as riveting drama. The prologue even works a self-contained short story, which can’t be said of other notable prologues from shows like Game of Thrones or The Walking Dead.

The first 7 minutes of the Deadwood premiere is a prologue in the traditional sense, occurring before the primary narrative and mostly standing apart from it. In fact, if not for the involvement of Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant) and Sol Star (John Hawkes), there’s no real tie to Deadwood proper at all. It feels superfluous in a way, and a lesser storyteller might’ve cut it altogether.

Fortunately, showrunner David Milch knows his craft. Because the prologue foreshadows much of what’s to come, and is brilliant in its own right.

A brief plot synopsis—with lots of asides, like this one—feels necessary.

Bullock is a marshal in Montana. He’s only minutes from leaving his badge behind and riding off in search of wealth and the kind of independence that only comes from working for yourself. The American Dream, before commercialism reappropriated it.

Clell Watson (James Parks) is in a jail cell waiting to be punished for the crime of horse theft, a capital offense. Can you imagine if car jackers were hung by the neck until dead? Different times. Then again, you have a phone if you end up stranded without a car. If you’re on the frontier and someone rides off with your whip, you’re probably gonna die. So maybe it makes sense, in an eye-for-an-eye sorta way.

Bullock and Watson get into a conversation about Deadwood. Gold has been discovered and everyone is fixing to get their share. Bullock is on his way to open a hardware outfit with his partner; I’m a big fan of how pronounces business as “bidness.” It’s the little things.

Watson goes on about how he’d planned on going to Deadwood to prospect because word is you can scoop gold from the stream with your bare hands. Farfetched, but this guy is clearly an idiot. Though I love that he suggests he’s being held for “supposedly stealing Byron Sampson’s horse.” He isn’t side-stepping the truth but denying it even to himself. More on that in a minute.

We get just enough background on Deadwood to prepare us for what’s to come:

1. No law. Deadwood is situated on Indian land and outside Uncle Sam’s reach. It’s a den of rampant inequity and naked vice. A true gangsta’s paradise; and y’all thought Coolio was rapping about L.A.

2. Gold and lots of it.

We’ll be talking enough about the town of Deadwood in the future. For now I want to linger in Montana because there’s some interesting stuff going on in this brief scene.

For one, we get our first taste of the show’s poetic combination of the divine and the profane. Watson hits Bullock with a proposition: “I’d like to suggest an idea to you, sir, that I pray as a Christian man you will entertain on its own fucking merits.”

Bullock is not a Christian. Being a white man was just synonymous with being a Christian. Everyone else—Jew, Chinese, Indian—was an Other, and thus less than. It’s an antiquated worldview in keeping with the 1800s, but also feels newly relevant today.

Also, by the way: These pieces on Deadwood, if they continue, will be lousy with filthy language. There’s really no way around it. To not include it—or worse, pretend it isn’t there—would steal some vital essence from the show. Not exactly its heart or brains. Maybe it’s genitals? That feels thematically appropriate. Just know it’s not me saying these things, Mom. It’s them cocksuckers in Yankton.

Watson’s big idea is for Bullock to just let him go. Why not? Bullock’s a short timer. Furthermore, he wants Bullock’s help robbing a couple people on the way. Cash on hand. Easy scores. He feels zero contrition for stealing a horse—and, in fact, denies the crime—and in the next breath plots more crime. And yet he has the audacity to continually bemoan his awful luck. He’s forever the victim, even though he’s just victimizing himself. We all know somebody like that.

Why does my face hurt?

He also shot Bullock in the shoulder. But I’m sure he’s innocent of everything except having rotten luck.

Bullock has good humor about the whole thing. He empathizes with Watson’s situation, and holds no grudge on account of getting shot. The civility between the two is rather striking. Here we have a criminal who might’ve killed Bullock, and yet Bullock assures him the flesh wound doesn’t look like it’s going to infect. No harm, no foul. They are diametrically opposed in every way—the lawman honorably discharging his duty; the criminal who knows no duty but to himself—and yet recognize the humanity in one another, and treat as equals.

That’s a whole paragraph to say that if I was Bullock, I sure as hell wouldn’t be conversating with the guy who tried to kill me.

Their little chat is interrupted when Byron Sampson arrives with a liquored up posse looking to engage in frontier justice. Sampson is the man who “supposedly” had his horse stolen. I think we can assume Sampson got his horse back. But the theft must be a stain on his manhood because It Cannot Stand. The thief must be killed posthaste. Some harm, much foul. As I said, different times. And yet not so different.

You can learn a lot about someone from how they finish a job they are minutes away from quitting.

The smart thing would be to just walk away. Especially when the alternative involves facing an angry gun-packing mob and you’re still sporting a flesh wound in one shoulder. Why further risk your skin for someone who’s supposedly-but-also-definitely a criminal and is going to be executed anyway?

Bullock demonstrates a strong moral character in honoring his oath until the very end. In a different kind of story, you’d expect him to become the show’s protagonist. The honorable hero who comes to a place of decadent lawlessness and bends the town by the sheer dint of his iron personality. It’s what hundreds of Westerns have conditioned us to expect. Part of what makes Deadwood so interesting is how Bullock—and Wild Bill Hickok—seem to fill the stereotypical role of the hero even as their flaws challenge the very idea of heroism. But Deadwood isn’t a place of capital H heroes. It’s not that kind of story.

Bullock hangs Watson from an improvised scaffold so the sentence can be carried out under the law, instead of handing him over to Sampson’s vigilante justice. At first it seems like a silly distinction—he dies in either scenario, so why risk a gunfight?—but it illustrates a crucial difference. In executing Watson himself, Bullock affords the man a final courtesy: The chance to give his last words. In facing death, all the bullshit and bluster fades away. Watson’s final thoughts are of his son. He asks for God’s forgiveness—surprising even himself; maybe he was a Christian after all.

His death—and Bullock’s brutal yet pragmatic handling of the situation—takes the fight out of the mob. This is Deadwood’s first death, coming not even 7 minutes into the episode. But it’s neither quick nor forgettable. The mob visibly pales in light of the hanging. Death looks different up close. Life in Deadwood is cheap only in the sense that the living squander it.

The prologue does everything it needs to setup the story to come. We get vital details about Deadwood—lawless town, gold rush—and are introduced to someone we think we can root for. But it’s the little details that almost go unnoticed, that almost defy examination, that set the tone for what’s to come. Dialogue and characterization combine to create some of the most wonderfully flawed humans I’ve ever encountered. People, not characters.

The prologue also raises some troubling questions. While we can certainly agree that Bullock’s impromptu hanging was likely more humane than whatever Sampson had in mind—I think his plan began and ended at getting Watson, and it would only get uglier from there—the execution goes way outside the duties fulfilled by a marshal. They were tasked with catching criminals. The passing of a sentence and the execution of it was never part of their purview. And yet here Bullock takes on the role of executioner. We look the other way because it’s an act of mercy and expediency, and the alternative is unpleasant. But the truth is Bullock doesn’t have the right to execute a man. He chooses to, and takes shelter under the cover of law. Is he more or less willing to do this because he’s going to place where law doesn’t exist?

If Deadwood is about any one thing, it’s how humans self-organize to avoid a lack of order. Even in a lawless backwater town, you need some agreed upon mores. What’s allowed and what’s not. The alternative is unrelenting chaos, and that profits nobody.

It’s telling that one of the first things done in Deadwood—for real, and on the show—is parceling out the claim sites and the town, and assigning dollar values to this remote bit of real estate. The fact that people pay the prices, and largely honor agreements without the backing of law, is mind-boggling. What’s to stop someone from muscling in on someone else’s claim and taking it for themselves? The town itself. It won’t allow it.

The 7-minute prologue is a deft introduction to the show’s themes, and though the titular town has yet to make an appearance, its shadow looms. This scene, harsh as it is, goes down in a place where the law is commonplace and the strictures of civilization mostly hold sway. How much worse will it be where there is no law but that of the jungle?

Everyone is rushing to Deadwood to escape the conventions and restrictions of civilization, and yet the first thing they do is recreate much of what they’d fled. But that’s a topic for another time.

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Let me know if you’d like more Deadwood coverage, because clearly what everyone needs is analysis of a 20-year-old TV show. I don’t intend a scene-by-scene deep dive because that’d be crazy. But an examination by episode seems highly doable.

Were that to happen, I’ll probably nurse the long-term goal of eventually binding all these together into something that goes on a bookshelf. Like a photo album, or a random tchotchke.

How about this: If you liked this and want more, give it a like. If I get 25 likes, I’ll do season 1.

Otherwise I’ll assume you want more Star Wars.