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Alexandra Dutton isn’t just a passenger on the Indignity Express, as it roars west across America. With Episode 5 of 1923 Season 2 (“Only Gunshots to Guide Us”), now she also works there. Since Alex escaped the stifling bonds of Sussex society in a quest to rejoin Spencer, she’s been been physically and emotionally traumatized by agents of the US government, beat up and robbed by thieves in the streets, and as a woman traveling alone across the country, either dismissed as a grifter or discarded as chattel. Now penniless, and with no meal ticket to accompany her shared accommodation, Alexandra makes an appeal to the train’s hospitality staff: she will work for stew. And she is serving coffee in the dining car when a rapist subjects Alex to her latest indignity.
The asshole who targeted her deserved it, for the assault and for his smug assumption of no accountability. Beating him with the coffee pot was also Alexandra’s response to the entirety of what she has endured. But it looks just as bad in the aftermath, as her protests of self defense are ignored by the all male staff and she’s locked in a cage in the laundry car. Alex avoids arrest once the train reaches Chicago – a well-to-do English couple who witnessed the assault, Hillary (Janet Montgomery) and Paul (Augustus Prew), took pity on the woman who they perceive as only a hardworking commoner from Oxfordshire. And she steals her bag and meager dining car tips back from Mary (Hayley McFarland), the single mother in her sleeper car who said in America, “You gotta make it, marry it, or steal it.” But at Union Station in Chicago, Alex is once again returned to the end of her rope. Snowdrifts canceled her connecting train to Fargo. She is weeping on a bench when Hillary and Paul appear once again. “Come with us,” they say, inviting Alex to their home on the city’s tony north shore. “A respite from your adventures.”
After all she’s been through, Alex has to convince herself the couple is not the latest threat on the Indignity Express. And maybe they aren’t. But with everything Taylor Sheridan’s writing has subjected Alexandra to this season on 1923, when and if she makes it to Montana, she will have a lot to talk about with Elizabeth.
As for Spencer Dutton, his own train circumstances have inserted him directly into a different 1923 storyline. After escaping the boxcar bandits, Spencer’s nap against a Texas tree is disturbed by Marshal Mamie Fossett’s gun in his face. Fossett connects Spencer’s Montana story to the same one she’s chasing – murderous Marshal Kent and his pursuit of Teonna, Pete, and Runs His Horse – but even though Fossett takes Spencer into the sheriff’s office at Amarillo, there is no run-in with Teonna’s group. Kent and Father Renaud have connected their quarry to the cowboys bossed by Anders (a fabulously-mustached C. Thomas Howell.) Though as Anders tells Kent, after they helped drive the cattle to the train depot yard, the Native Americans lit out of Amarillo on soft-footed horses. As Fossett and Spencer speak with the sheriff, the marshal and the priest pass by in the street outside, as they give chase onto the treeless plain. The indignities continue for Teonna, Pete, and Runs His Horse as they try to escape Kent, whose ugly soul refers to her as “the bridge between our animal ancestors and modern humans.”
Like a rich white lady vouching for Alexandra to Chicago police, Sheriff William McDowell asks the white male sheriff of Amarillo to vouch for Mamie Fossett, America’s first female federal marshal. But after that unfortunate business is through, down the phone line, McDowell also heartily vouches for the man she has in custody. Not only is Spencer a Dutton of the Montana Duttons, a wild game hunter, and a war hero, he is a recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor. Fossett says Spencer’s free to go, and even puts him on a train heading toward Montana. He gets to keep his long gun, too. Right in the passenger car. Perks of winning a medal for valor Spencer says he doesn’t remember.
What he does remember is what Cara Dutton told him about the war in Montana. “The men who killed my brother. Where are they? Are they still free?” His words for McDowell are few, beyond the insinuation the sheriff hasn’t been doing his job. And he stops the man’s warnings about not starting the second round of a range war. It’s already started. Come spring in Montana, it will only be Round Two: Spencer Level. And with this latest train ride, he will be closer than he’s ever been.
The Dutton ranch is not seen at all in this episode of 1923. No Cara, no Jacob, no Elizbeth and Jack, no Zane with his cartoon skull bandage. But we do get a glimpse of where they might be, if Donald Whitfield wins the war. “This is where we’ll put the whole fucking lot of ‘em,” Banner Creighton says to his men at the lip of the Train Station, the Sheridan-O-Verse’s lawless corpse receptacle. He talks easily about murdering multiple people and dumping their bodies in a common grave. But somehow Banner can also get emotional over the needless death of the sex worker Whitfield forced him to dispose of.
As they roll the woman’s body down the slope, the Montana side of this episode continues to illustrate the rot brought forth by Whitfield’s deviance and greed. While he plots for a new offensive against the Duttons, Lindy, his sex worker accomplice, is in town picking out their next “plaything.” It’s Mabel (Virginia Gardner), who Lindy entices with tales of a client who pays more in a weekend than she’d earn in a month – make it, marry it, or steal it – and enjoys “theater in the bedroom.” Mabel accepts Lindy’s euphemism for death by sexual asphyxiation. Her indignity expressed at the hands of Donald Whitfield is just beginning.
Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social) is a Chicago-based writer. A veteran of the alternative weekly trenches, his work has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork, The All Music Guide, and The Village Voice.
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