Welcome to America; now, please leave. About half of “Wrap Thee in Terror” is dedicated to the arrival of Alexandra Dutton, née of Sussex, on the shores of a new homeland. I have no idea how her precious ringlets survived a swampy month below deck, but I felt proud of Alex as the ship pulled into port. Emigrating is the first thing she’s ever accomplished on her own, without Spencer or her aristocratic privilege to help her (at least, not that much). When the lookout calls “Land, ho,” she’s first to grab her valise, eager to glimpse New York City and its streets paved with gold. (But also, obviously, lined with thieves and perverts.)
Except Alex is not disembarking in New York City because that would be actual progress. Instead, she’s rerouted to Ellis Island because it didn’t occur to our dippy, determined romantic that settlement would require a visa. Sometimes it feels like this show is just about finding new containers to keep our characters. I imagine Taylor Sheridan alone in his study, the walls bedecked with the heads of taxidermied animals he’s personally killed, on the bezel of his laptop lives a single faded post-it note on which he’s scribbled the series’ watchword in capital letters: DELAY.
Needless to say, Alex stands out on Ellis Island as she did in steerage. Her clothes aren’t worn and drab; she wears her golden curls like a halo. What happens next is a series of humiliating physical examinations that I’d rather not have seen. They make her pick up a stool; they make her undress all the way. Another passenger warns her, conveniently, that pregnant women are returned to their countries of origin and so Alex sobs through each doctor’s inspection, worried that all this pain — this loss of dignity — is for nothing.
Though her examiners distrust the existence of a rancher husband waiting to love and keep her and her unborn child, she makes it through the medical screenings and moves on to the interview stage of this ugly beauty pageant. Another passenger warns her, conveniently, that unaccompanied females can buy their way into America, either with money, which she doesn’t have, or sex, which she won’t sell. In reality, there turns out to be a third currency: marketable skills, like literacy.
Alex is a peculiar starting point for trying to convey what it feels like to come to interwar New York because she starts out “unfree” only in the most rarefied of senses. It will be tragic if she never sees the love of her life again, but it won’t teach us anything about the world in 1923. The immigration officer assigned to her case thinks his job is to keep people out of America, and he instructs Alex to read to him from the Whitman primer on his desk, hoping to catch her in a lie. She haughtily sifts through the tome to find a passage “appropriate” to the occasion, picking the one that earnest high school seniors reliably — and to their future embarrassment — insert into graduation speeches. (Guilty!) “Dismiss whatever insults your own soul.” She also lets him know that the trollop he processed before her left lipstick on his collar. But the officer approves Alex’s visa application anyway because America used to be a real country. Gumption used to get a girl somewhere.
Sheridan writes about New York — the most urbanized population center in the world in 1923 — with the same over-the-top aversion to city slickers that he brings to his treatment of Bozeman, Montana, population 6,500. Luckily, almost as soon as Alex is released from immigration holding, she meets a sage old Black newsie who gives her the rundown on our wolf of a city. Hide your money in your shoe; keep your eyes open; don’t wander any empty streets. He teaches her to navigate New York like a mom letting her teenage daughter take New Jersey Transit into Manhattan on her own for the first time. Is it cheesy? Yes. But New York always looks good on screen, and somehow this holds true even when it’s incredibly obvious that it’s not really being filmed in New York.
Alex makes it to Grand Central to buy a train ticket to Bozeman where the well-meaning gent who sells her the ticket delivers a version of the same sermon. Hide your money anywhere but your shoe; buy a solo car; don’t wander any empty train platforms. Welcome to the Big Apple, where the people are pickpockets, the cabbies are kidnappers, and the tunnels are rapists. Unfortunately, the ticketing agent forgets to warn her off using public restrooms, and we see Alex stalked into the toilets as the episode closes. Who told her that it was safe to pee? Everyone knows that in New York City you just hold it until Boston.
Episodes of 1923 aren’t really structured like a TV show. There’s rarely a clear A story; at almost any moment, half a dozen plots compete to be the B story. It’s unclear what’s happening simultaneously or even if time progresses the same way in each theatre. Does Alex land in America on the same day that Spencer takes off from Galveston with a truckload of booze for the Italian mafia? Does she buy her ticket to Bozeman around the same time Spencer abandons Luca, who is gunned down by federal agents immediately, or are we on a shifting Dunkirk clock?
To me, the most poignant parallel in episode three was watching two differently situated women get punched in the gut. For Alex, this literal gut punch happens at the hands of the Ellis Island medical examiner. For Lizzie, it’s Aunt Cara stabbing her in the belly over and over again with the cure for rabies. Lizzie spends the time between jabs throwing her few personal possessions into a suitcase, like Alex. She wants to go back to Boston with her family; Boston, where Alex will change trains for Chicago. What do I make of this symmetry? Not much. It’s the baby that will be Alex’s ultimate anchor to Montana. If Lizzie hadn’t miscarried, would she still be telling Jack it’s time to dust off and move east with her? Does she even mean it? Since the deaths of his parents, Jack’s completely transformed as a character. He used to be the show’s warm heart; now he’s just another grumbling cowboy.
It’s hard to get worked up about their love story or Lizzie’s aversion to really long needles, given the life-and-death stakes of the other Montana storyline. By some miracle, Alice and Zane survive the blizzard only to learn that Zane’s going to die in some other terrible way. Doc diagnoses the Yellowstone foreman with a subdural hematoma. They should have caught it at the hospital, where they have the drill and the anesthesia necessary to treat the life-threatening condition. Out on the range, meatball surgery is the only medicine available. They’ve got the drill, but no way of preventing Zane from feeling it as a series of burr holes are made in his skull. You want to look in Zane’s face and complain about those pesky little shots now, Lizzie?
Things are also taking a turn for the worse in Texas, where Runs His Horse successfully tracks down the ranch cowhands that interrupted Pete and Teonna’s tryst. They repeat that he’s free to stay on the land; they’ll even pay him for catching strays. (And, wait one second, is this going to turn out to be the Four Sixes, the Sheridan-owned mega-ranch outside Guthrie from which the bard of cowboy country flogs direct-to-consumer beef? The same Four Sixes supposedly destined to become the setting for its own yet-unaired Yellowstone spin-off?)
The rancher’s offer should be a positive development for Teonna & Co., except that Marshal Kent and Father Renaud are poised to cross the Texas border, too. When the teenage runaway doesn’t turn up among the Oklahoma Comanche, Kent deduces that the crew must be on the run to Mexico. He shrewdly guesses that they’ll stop off in the Lone Star state to make some money cowboying before heading even farther south. Is this Runs His Horse’s plan? Not explicitly, but maybe Kent is right. There’s no place in America for an Indian on the lam from the law.
It’s also not a great place to be a lawman on the run from Indians. The Comanches back in Anadarko find the bodies of their slain tribesmen and vow to hunt down the marshal and the priest who killed them, despite Mamie’s pleas for peace. As Teonna’s story races toward a collision with Kent’s, I find I’m most interested in what role this newly introduced character will play in deciding the young girl’s fate. Marshal Fossett’s already revealed herself to have a more collaborative relationship with the tribes under her jurisdiction than her Montana counterpart. Teonna is guilty of the murders she’s been accused of committing, yes, but one suspects Fossett might have a more nuanced sense of justice.
Perhaps for every unscrupulous bastard guarding the Land of the Free’s front door at Ellis Island, there’s an old-fashioned hero in the West willing to help a desperate teenager escape America’s evil tendencies. Here’s hoping that the Four Sixes, or wherever she might be, is the final container Sheridan puts between Teonna Rainwater and real freedom.