DARK WINDS Season 1 | Official Trailer
RLJE Films
In 1971 an armored car gets robbed in Gallup, New Mexico, and the guards are killed. The bad guys escape in a Bell Jet Ranger helicopter. Meanwhile, a couple of people are killed in a motel on the Navajo Indian Reservation. Are these two crimes connected? There is no obvious connection other than their proximity in time, this level of violence is unusual, and the fact that the helicopter was seen heading toward the reservation.
If you look at the details, it's a little rough, but the story itself is good. We've got obvious good guys and obvious bad guys, and then we also have good guys pretending to be bad guys and vice versa, so we've got a good cross section of humanity. But most importantly the heroes are good guys and they win their little war against evil, so everything turns out all right, well, except for all those people who got kilt. Didn't turn out so good for them.
The worst part of the show was the robbers. Their plan was pretty good to start with but they made so many bad mistakes along the way that you wonder how they manage to come up with this plan in the first place. Ostensibly, the bad guys are members of the Buffalo Society a militant group.
- First mistake was killing the guards. Robbery is one thing, but murder is another.
- They destroy the helicopter. I'm thinking the take from an armored car robbery in Gallup, New Mexico, is not going to cover the loss of the helicopter. Of course, if you steal the 'copter it doesn't cost you anything. I guess I'm just not ruthless enough. Of course, if you are killing people you are already extremely ruthless, so relatively speaking, destroying a fancy helicopter is small potatoes.
- They take the stolen cash and stash it in the backs of silly tourist trap paintings. Anybody picks up one of those paintings is going to notice that they are much heavier than a painting should be. If they had given the frames solid wood backs it might have made them more convincing.
- They kidnap a Mormon family because they bought one of their tourist trap paintings from a local tourist trap. They could have just followed them and negotiated with them for the painting, or just stolen it from them. Kidnapping is just ridiculous. Murder seems more like these guys style, they've already killed three or four people, what's another bunch? On the plus side we get a whole lotta complicated cave action.
- They decide to co-opt a local used car dealer to launder the money for them. He's married and they photograph him screwing his girlfriend. Holding these photos over his head he acquiesces to their demands. There are easier ways to conceal money. Like put it in a lockbox in the closet. Or a safe deposit box in bank.
- They can't shoot. The two bad guys get in a shootout with two cops and in spite of having superior weapons and a boatload of ammo, they can't manage to injure the cops much less kill them like they intended, and one of the bad guys gets shot, though not fatally.
Early on the cops discover traces of hyrdraulic fluid in a small lake (big pond?). I would think that would be enough to mount a full scale search, but they don't. It isn't until our girl cop (of course there's a pretty girl cop) finds an aluminum rowboat floating in the middle of the pond. Now we've got a dead helicopter pilot and a dead teenager who the lead cop had set to work searching the pond. Don't know what you could see, the water appears to be opaque. But he manages to find something, just in time for the bad guys to show up and shoot him. I can't quite recall what triggered the girl cop to visit the pond. Was she looking for the kid or just nosing around? Anyway, the boat drifting in the middle of the pond wasn't right. and that leads to a full-on search of the pond.
They show some Dine (Navajo) traditions, but it's a little forced.
A couple of the houses were pretty iffy. I wouldn't mention it, but I've seen it in at least one other show and it's starting to become annoying. Bad guy's grandfather lived in a shack. The siding is haphazard with gaps between the boards. Even a shack, if anyone is staying there, is going to get sealed up against the wind. You might get away with walls like that for a few days of pleasant weather, but eventually the wind will come up and you are going to stuffing those cracks with something. It does allow for everyone to have a limited view of where people are on the other side of the wall. If you can't pull off an ambush under those conditions, you ain't much of a bushwacker.
Jim Chee, the handsome young police officer was raised on the reservation. He goes back to visit his old home. It is a small round structure, maybe 15 feet diameter, possibly adobe, and the conical roof has fallen in. That's all okay, it could have been built like that, but I don't think I've ever seen a conical roof anywhere in the southwest. But the walls looked to be made of big stone blocks, like two foot tall and four feet long, and I don't think I've ever seen anything old in the southwest that was built like that. I dunno, maybe the old man was a student of Roman architecture or something.
Is it a true story? Not exactly, but a Google search turned up several robbery / murders around this time:
Map with locations from the show and from the three stories listed above:
 |
| Murder & Mayhem |
The full map has more placemarks. When I was in high school I spent a summer at my uncle's cabin outside of Taos, New Mexico, so all the places in the show were pretty familiar. What I especially remember was the long drives across long stretches of empty. It took a good two hours to get from Los Alamos to the cabin. Basically going anywhere took at least an hour whereas back in Ohio where I lived everything was a half hour away, so twice as long as what I was used to. Also, I was driving in Ohio, but I wasn't in New Mexico, so that made all those trips very long. I wouldn't be surprised if a New Mexico police car racks up 50,000 miles a year.
P. S. The character B. J. Vines looked awfully familiar, but I couldn't place him. Thanks to the internet, I now know that he was played by the same actor who played Detective Larry Zito in Miami Vice: John Diehl.
No comments:
Post a Comment