Two Muscogee Nation teenagers, lifelong friends (along with their two other Rez Dogs pals), have been painfully at odds. Bear (played by D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai), who believes he's the group's leader, has felt abandoned by Elora (Devery Jacobs), its most driven member. She's been discovering the world beyond her home as he's become more deeply involved with his community. In the series finale of “Reservation Dogs,” the funeral of one of the pillars of that community brings them back together. Elora finds Bear alone, in the presence of the casket, to tell him that she's leaving for college.
“The heart of the scene is them trying to get together and say goodbye and that they love each other,” says showrunner and co-creator Sterlin Harjo. “But if you add a funeral to it, you add a dead body, everything around it, and their lack of communication skills, it can end up being something really beautiful just because of the behavior. And that’s what happened.”
Earlier in the series, Bear had shown a selfish and immature tendency. He is likely to react poorly to Elora's harsh news. You sense her bracing herself for it. He says nothing, looks down, and presses his mouth shut. When she tries to cushion the blow, he says he just needs a moment. After composing himself, he reveals a warm smile and congratulates her.
“Bear can hold a grudge,” says Woon-A-Tai, who is of Oji-Cree tribal descent. “It was a really beautiful moment for him to let that go and realize 'it's not just about me.' There were bigger issues at play than his personal issues with Elora. These are people who see each other as brothers and sisters, and they've known each other since they were young, so they get along really well.”
“And it was very sad for me to do it because I really felt like it was the end,” he adds.
Harjo says: “They were so good in that scene. I cried many, many times during the editing.”
Lane Factor, left, Paulina Alexis, D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai and Devery Jacobs star as the teens at the heart of “Reservation Dogs.”
(Shane Brown / Special Effects)
“Reservation Dogs” treated us to three unique, emotional and funny seasons leading up to Harjo’s planned conclusion. The often irreverent, sometimes creepy and often emotional comedy followed its four self-proclaimed Rez Dogs as they grew up in their small town in Oklahoma.
The story begins with them still dealing with the death of one of their own, a year after the fact. Harjo saw that struggle as the show's story arc from the beginning. And after getting the kids to a better place emotionally, the time has come.
“The ending is built into the beginning,” she says, explaining that the show couldn’t end “without seeing these kids find hope or find ways to deal with grief, get to a point where they can deal with grief in a healthier way. That’s what it’s all about. Without the ending, there’s no story. It didn’t feel right to continue with it.”
For its final season, the two-time Peabody and Spirit Award-winning and three-time AFI honoree series finally received Emmy recognition: five nominations, including best comedy series, and a first-ever nomination for lead actor Woon-A-Tai.
The Woon-A-Tai actor begins the series as a fatherless, directionless teenager and grows into a young man with a purpose. At just 22 years old, the actor grew up on set. “It was so beautiful to have spent the three years with my castmates and crew, watching them all grow. And even more than that, to see the arc that Sterlin and the writers pulled off. It’s a big theme in Indian Country, how a young Native boy can become a man without a positive father figure in his life. And that’s because of the community around him.”
Growing up together as a family on and off camera made it even more difficult to learn of Harjo's plan to end the show at the conclusion of Season 3.
Finding out the show was ending was like “your dad saying, 'We have to leave the amusement park,'” Woon-A-Tai says.
(Jennifer McCord / For The Times)
“I can remember exactly when Sterlin took us aside, when we were filming the bus episode. [a harebrained caper story] “And we were all on the bus together. We were having a blast. It was like your dad was telling you, 'We have to leave the amusement park.' We were having a blast in the middle of a cool slide and you hear, 'We have to leave soon.'”
Completing those arcs and leaving it there seemed like the ideal ending. The final season has a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. “Bittersweet” is the word that comes to mind.
“For me, [that scene with Jacobs and Woon-A-Tai] “I felt like we were saying goodbye to the audience and saying, ‘It’s going to be okay, we’ll see each other around,’” Harjo says, quoting Elora. “And I love that Bear acknowledges that, ‘Yeah, we’ll see each other,’ she’s coming to visit, but he also doesn’t believe it because he knows there’s a lot that can happen between now and then. He carried all of that inside of him in that answer. And it was like speaking to the audience, too.”
The ending contained more than one farewell. William “Spirit” Knifeman (Dallas Goldtooth), the ghost of a 19th-century Native warrior who served as Bear’s unconventional spiritual guide, said in his Final manifestation before the young man“I can’t say ‘goodbye’ because it’s like a colonial way of speaking. Yes. Our people say things like ‘See you later!’ or ‘Peace!’ because we don’t have a word for ‘goodbye.’”
Harjo says, “The following spring, I was driving through Okmulgee, [Okla.] “It's where we normally film and it would have been when the whole cast and crew were getting together to do a new season. That's when I got emotional. I realized that family wouldn't be getting together again this year.”
It's hard not to think of Elora and Bear expressing their love, crying and hugging each other as they come to terms with the end of what they had.
