(This review has been Deadwood-ized)
My *#*&# son did enter whilst I was availing myself of the *&#*# pleasure of watching this fine *&#*&# Western, *&&#&# Deadwood. And after standing there for a (_*#(# moment, he did ask, "Is this *&#*&# show the (*#(#&* last episode of )*&(&* Firefly?"
I said, "No… if this were Firefly, they'd be swearing in Chinese."
This was the third season opener I watched; never watched before, no idea who all these people were. Like "24" and "Lost", I didn't have the luxury of learning to care for the characters. So when a bunch of them died right after the opening credits, not sure what I was supposed to think.
So I spent the next hour trying to figure out who was going to die next. There was a fistfight or two, but unfortunately, no more deaths. They had this weird crossdressing woman in there. Gerald McRaney eventually showed up, and all I could do was watch him try to give himself space to make mistakes, like a Persian rugmaker.
They made a special effort in the episode to point out the stereotypes of the day, especially through the plot device of a teacher teaching children to read through a primer that had nasty things to say about Jews and Indians. Now, my dad bought my daughter a series of primers, McGuffey's Readers, that were printed originally around the same era Deadwood is set. They didn't have anything like that in them. I read my dad's beginning reader books from the 1930s. They didn't have anything like that in them. I went to a summer camp in Maine when I was a kid that had a LOT of kids books from the very early 1900s. They may have assumed every one of their readers were white Christians, but they never mentioned that, or any other race or religion, at all.
Doesn't mean books like those in Deadwood didn't exist, but I doubt many elementary reading books concerned themselves much with promoting racism. That's what parents are for.
So why did Deadwood add this? To show how enlightened we are these days? A little twenty-first century pat on the back?
I got to the end of the episode without spying anything that looked like a plot. Oh, I get it. It's a post-modern Western…
