Spoilers follow for “Dig,†the series finale of Reservation Dogs.
There are spirits throughout Reservation Dogs, but they do not ghost. In the closing minutes of the nearly flawless FX show about a group of Indigenous teens growing up in Okern, Oklahoma, Bear calls out to William Knifeman and receives an answer. Never mind that Bear banished the spirit early in the season after years of receiving (mostly unwanted) advice. The sentiment of Knifeman’s final words to Bear — “I can’t really say good-bye, because, you know, it’s like a colonial way of talking†— is a lovely capper to this goofy and profoundly meaningful relationship, but also a little incongruous for a series where each season has built to an act of farewell. The titular childhood friends separated from each other at the end of season one, then came back together to lay the memory of their best friend Daniel to rest at the end of season two. Making peace with the past was catharsis, and saying good-bye was a necessary part of the Rez Dogs’ growth.
But the full impact of William Knifeman’s words lies in the context of Bear’s decision to call out in the first place, to reach a resolution with a character whose presence began as an intrusion. It’s a sign of Bear’s newfound maturity that Spirit helped enable, and it’s also a microcosm of how Reservation Dogs, for all its concern with saying good-bye to the past, recurrently had Bear, Elora Danan, Willie Jack, and Cheese embrace the present by connecting with others and absorbing what they have to offer. Every time one of the Rez Dogs allowed someone new into their lives — adults already in their orbit, onetime strangers — Reservation Dogs stretched its world a little wider.
In the show’s second episode, “NDN Clinic,†Willie Jack and Cheese make friendships with elders that will turn familial: Medicine man Fixico, with his table in front of the clinic, eventually becomes Willie Jack’s mentor in season three; patient Irene, who mistakenly believes Cheese is her grandson, ends up formally adopting him in season two. They initially resist these interactions — Willie Jack just wants to sell Fixico a meat pie and Cheese is thrown off by Irene feeling his face. Yet their eventual curiosity about who these adults are, what they do, and where they came from sets into motion Reservation Dogs’ ongoing conversation between past and present.
In season three’s ’70s-set flashback “House Made of Bongs,†we learn that Fixico and Irene had a friend group of their own that rivaled the Rez Dogs, alongside fellow Okern elders Bucky and Brownie, Elora’s grandmother Mabel, and the mysterious Maximus. The outline of those relationships had already been established. In season one’s “Uncle Brownie,†Elora, Bear, and Willie Jack draw Elora’s cousin-uncle out of his reclusion by arriving unexpectedly on his property, asking him to teach them how to fight. The lessons don’t go well, but the teens’ precociousness — how they need Brownie for his particular set of skills — inspires him to stay in the present, enmeshed in the Okern he’d turned away from years before. Later in the same season, in “Come and Get Your Love,†while Cheese is on a ride-along with tribal police officer Big, Cheese introduces himself to Bucky with what becomes his self-identifying catchphrase, “My name’s Cheese, and my pronouns are he, him, and his.†(Bucky echoes that statement of openness and vulnerability with only the tiniest bit of irony during a sharing circle in season three’s “Frankfurter Sandwich.â€) As the Rez Dogs grow to trust these elders, they turn to them for assistance over and over — to lift a curse, to take care of Mabel in her last days. “These elders have lived very complicated lives,†Cheese deadpans about Bucky and Brownie, who are feuding over a woman in season two, but those complications are exactly the life experience the Rez Dogs need to be exposed to in order to figure out their own shit.
As the series neared its end, the teens worked to enable their own sense of closure, which often meant extending a hand to characters with whom they have a past in order to collaborate in the present. Sometimes it was begrudging, like Elora’s terse “Yeah, I know who you are†to her absent auntie Teenie in “Mabel†and her dismissive “Everything I need from you fits on that piece of paper†to her estranged father, Rick, in “Elora’s Dad.†But Teenie is the first elder to know that Elora is leaving for the College of the Muscogee Nation, information that Rick knows, too, since Elora has dinner with him and her half-siblings, and promised to stay in touch. Sometimes it was painful, like Willie Jack visiting Hokti in prison to tell her about Fixico’s death and admitting to her aunt that she isn’t sure what she’s learned. Back in season two, the acid-enthusiast cowboy Willie Jack met in the prison waiting room (whose psychedelic trips seem to have connected him romantically with Hokti’s spirit visitor in the finale; where is their spinoff?) told her, “You’re listening to your heart, that’s good.†Hokti’s words in “Dig†carry a similar message that Willie Jack is now more ready to put into action: “It’s up to you to take care of the people that he left behind. That’s the thing about community: You gotta take care of it. You have to play your part.†Okern might be small, but the bonds it produces are strong — and its doors are always open for those who want to come back, as Teenie does and Elora will.
That generosity perpetuates a hello-good-bye cycle that is central to the entire third season. Maximus left Okern after no one believed that he had met “star people†aliens as a teen, and returned to Okern as an elder after a chance meeting with Bear and a (sort of) abduction heist by the Rez Dogs and their friends. When Maximus sits by cousin Fixico’s bedside in “Send It,†the decades of resentment they held between them disappears. When Maximus, Bucky, Brownie, and Irene easily settle back into their friendship in “Dig,†they mimic the comfortably laconic rhythm of their youth, teasing Cheese, Bear, and Willie Jack together. (Cheese’s longing “I can’t wait to be an elder†is a perfect line delivery from Lane Factor.) Their reunion is a hello that heals the pain of that long-ago good-bye, and it again proves what Spirit tells Bear: No farewell needs to be for forever.
When Elora left town with Jackie in season-one finale “Satvrday,†Jackie’s good-riddance parting words toward Okern actually describe what makes the town so special: “Everything in the city is better. Everybody sticks to themselves. Nobody fucks with anybody else.†The series finale gently rejects Jackie’s former opinion, moving through all the reassuring dynamics that Reservation Dogs has built over time between the Rez Dogs, their peers, and their elders. Elora and Jackie laugh, chat, and cook with the aunties in the kitchen. Willie Jack razzes the community’s men, including a possibly concussed White Steve and a newly mohawked Kenny Boy, as they work through the night to dig Fixico’s grave. And Bear, who was once left behind by Elora and took years to fully appreciate all his mother Rita sacrificed in order to raise him, finally understands that those women’s lives are their own, and that he can stand by himself. “You deserve to be loved, and you deserve to love. That’s what all those people in there are offering you,†Knifeman says to Bear before their impermanent parting, and Bear’s decision to spend a year in Okern, absorbing the “amazing community†he’s part of and exploring his options for what’s next, is a long-time-coming act of self-acceptance.
So many coming-of-age stories are about discovering who you are by leaving home and abandoning a part of yourself. Reservation Dogs doesn’t entirely discourage that idea. Elora leaves while Bear, Willie Jack, and Cheese stay in Okern, a community they now better understand, and have found their places within. But their parting isn’t a breakup, and the relationships that the individual Rez Dogs will maintain — Elora and Rick, Bear and Maximus, Willie Jack and Hokti, Cheese and Irene — are additions, not replacements. When the Rez Dogs blur into their surroundings in the last minutes of “Dig,†they’re one with each other, and one with the community they came from. These quantum threads can’t be disentangled, and these journeys are always beginning. Reservation Dogs closed its narrative with good-byes, but it opened its characters’ lives with hellos.