WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Season 1, Episode 5, “Come and Get Your Love” of Reservation Dogs, now streaming on FX on Hulu.
Reservation Dogs established its local reservation cop, Officer Big, as a drifting, not entirely competent character. Big is obsessed with conspiracy theories, paying more attention to a mysterious “crop circle” of catfish heads than the salvage yard and its stripped, stolen car business in the premiere. However, “Come and Get Your Love” makes Big its spotlight character this week, and he gets to prove that he’s actually attuned to the world around him in the ways that matter, as he tells Cheese why he became a cop, and the answer makes him the rez town’s heart.
Cheese asked early in the episode about Big’s motives to be a cop, as part of his desire to become a detective someday, and Big hilariously but bluntly refused to answer. However, when the unlikely pair solves a mystery involving stolen trucks and bizarre art objects left around the reservation, Big decides Cheese earned an answer, clearing up the early weirdness of Big’s childhood memories.
Big’s childhood is peppered with encounters with a strange woman with an eye for dangerous men and a pair of deer feet. The first time he sees her, she’s getting into a sports car with a sketchy-looking man. The second time, young Big passes a missing persons poster featuring said man, and while he’s stuck in a gas station bathroom, the woman (aka the Deer Woman/Deer Lady in Indigenous folklore), interrupts the gas station’s robbery, killing the assailants. However, the story Big tells Cheese takes place at his grandmother’s funeral. The Deer Woman (Kaniehtiio Horn from Letterkenny) claims she was an old friend of the family, and that Big has nothing to fear from her, so long as he stays a good person.
It’s a scary series of encounters for young Big, but the Deer Woman is telling the truth. In a number of tales, her job is to teach men about the consequences of their bad behavior. If they’re dangerous or disreputable, the Deer Woman will appear as a beautiful woman, ready to ruin their lives, but Big, like the Reservation Dogs, is a sweet kid with a curious mind and plenty of heart, so she’ll never be a threat to him.
Big grows up into a man who’s stayed the same, readily looking for the good in others while quick to avoid the cruel. It’s a way of life that makes his scenes in prior episodes more poignant and makes it obvious why Big lets a man that stole a truck and frightened his neighbors with his weird art go free, as he’s not a bad man, just an ordinary soul who’s lost his way.
After Big tells his story to Cheese, who accepts it, they peel off to finish Cheese’s day out with the reservation cop, but they pass a man in a nice car who’s all too willing to pick up a pretty hitchhiker, and like countless fools before him, he’s too fascinated by a pretty face to notice her dainty deer feet. The lesson Big teaches Cheese is that it’s not about if the things from their culture’s folklore are real, but that the morals their stories teach will always survive. Good people are the heart of their families and tribes, there to lift up each other when times are tough, but bad people will eventually find trouble all by themselves.
Created by Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi, Reservation Dogs drops new episodes every Monday on FX on Hulu.
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