Story Recap – what happened in The English season 1?

By Marc Miller
Published: November 11, 2022 (Last updated: January 4, 2024)
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The English is a series that captures the dangerous elements of the American West and the vast number of things that can kill you. Hugo Blick’s series is brimming with bushwhackers, hucksters, killers, adventure seekers, gunfighters, frontiersmen, miners, and even the genuinely naive, including the ones looking for their fortune, while also tackling issues of overt racism and the genocide of the Indigenous people. This article gives a full Season 1 Recap, so beware, spoilers ahead!

Story recap – what happened in The English season 1?

Episode 1 — “What You Want & What You Need”

Eli Whipp (Chaske Spencer), a Pawnee scout for the United States Army, retires after helping catch a Pawnee leader named Running Hawk. He retires and heads north to claim his birthright but is strung up by some locals looking to pin the murder of a wealthy English woman named Cornelia (Emily Blunt). After escaping certain death from a roaming prairie gang on horseback, he helps the English woman escape her capture and agrees to help her on her way to Powder River, Wyoming, where she plans to kill the man who murdered her son.

Episode 2 — “Path of the Dead”

After the bushwhackers murdered a Mennonite, they tried to take Cornelia’s bags. Big mistake because Whipp kills two, and Cornelia shoots one with a bow and arrow. They both come across the Mennonite family, and the pregnant wife is dead, but Whipp delivers the baby. She finds another daughter hidden under the wagon. Whipp and Cornelia decide to go their separate ways. He is off to Nebraska, and she takes the two children to Wyoming.

Episode 3 — “Vultures on the Line”

The Clarkes, it turns out, are the cleanup crew for a region of bushwalkers and hucksters dominating the country. They knock out Whipp and hand him over to a man they call Kills on Water. He wants Whipp to tell him what he knew about the massacre at Chalk River. Cornelia turns back, killing the wife and holding the husband at gunpoint. She demands they tell her where they took her friend.

Episode 4 — “The Wounded Wolf”

This is a backstory on how Trafford, Meyers, and Flynn came to be land and cattle owners in Wyoming. Trafford and his hired hands run into the Army execution squad that roams the prairie, looking for Native Americans to kill. Against Trafford’s orders, one of his men, Melmont, joins the death squad to mass murder a group of Cheyenne at Chalk Rover with a Gatling gun. Later, we find Melmont trying to con Cornelia out of money to get Trafford out of jail. Thomas is Cornelia’s fiance, and Melmont tells her he is the one responsible for the massacre. Cornelia later finds out Melmonte was lying but takes her money to buy a mine in Colorado.

Episode 5 — “The Buffalo Gun”

Cornelia can saw down “Black-eyed Mog” and save Whipp from Kills on Water. As they travel to Wyoming together, they run into Red Hawk’s wife, Touching Ground, who has been forced into servitude. She asks them to take her son but is attacked by the men that enslaved them. Both Whipp and Touching Ground kill all four men attacking her son, but Cornelia passes out from the untreated infection from a burn she suffered while shooting Mog.

Episode 6 — “Cherished”

Well, raise your hand if you thought the series’ biggest plot mystery was that most of the characters are carrying syphilis. No, keep them up. Yes, so the death squad that murdered the Cheyenne at Chalk River had themselves a grand old time at a brothel with a woman who had the disease. When Melmont traveled back to London, he had a child with Cornelia, and the child was born with it. They died at the age of fourteen.

Cornelia also has it and has been covering up the sores for years. Therefore, we can assume that Flynn shot his wife, who had sores on her hands, and turned the gun on himself. Meyers asked the sheriff about the marks on their bodies. And when Jerome McClintock shows up, he is hideously scarred by the disease. When Cornelia finally confronts Melmont, he torments her and reveals one sore under his lip. He meets his fate when the Meyers widow shoots him with a rifle, and Whipp finishes him off by stabbing him in the heart.

The series ends with Whipp having to leave to protect everyone involved. Thirteen years later, in London, the son of Touching Ground and Running Hawk is in Wild Bill’s Wild West Show. The young man is playing Eli in the show. Cornelia’s face is now covered with a black veil from the disease, and she gives him Whipp’s bird skull.

That is the full story recap of what happened in the Prime Video series The English Season 1. What are your thoughts on the story? Please comment below.

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