Summary
Chief of War gets more intimate in Episode 2, focusing on a clutch of core characters and taking some surprising turns for good measure.
Meet Ka’ahumanu. She’s a character who is going to be pretty integral to Chief of War, but she’s introduced in Episode 2 without a great deal of fanfare in a cold open that left me a bit confused. To make all of our lives easier, I’m going to frontload who she is and why she’s important because it’ll clarify a few things that I’d otherwise have to explain later. Don’t worry — we’ll pick up from where we left things in the premiere in a minute.
Anyway, Ka’ahumanu is the daughter of King Kahekili’s sister, sired by a Hawai’i war chief named Moku, and thus has spent her life hidden from the King’s gaze for her own safety. Needless to say, the man who invents outlandish pretexts on which to manipulate his surrogate nephew into helping him conquer neighboring kingdoms just for funsies isn’t a big fan of his bloodline mixing with rival kingdoms, so Ka’ahumanu’s name is mud in royal circles.
The cold open in “Changing Tides” finds Moku sneaking onto Maui’s shores to convince Ka’ahumanu and her mother to leave with him for Hawai’i, since Kahekili’s actions in O’ahu mean he’ll promptly be shutting the borders. To ensure they’ll be welcome in Hawai’i, Moku has promised Ka’ahumanu’s hand in marriage to the local chief, which she isn’t thrilled about, and she spends her remaining time on the island doing a lot of soul-searching and, like Ka’iana before her, communing with Taula. The prophetess doesn’t have much positive to say about her future, but she does reiterate that one path will lead her to freedom, but that she won’t be able to find it without a guardian. In other words: “You’re going to be a main character.” She also says the gods fear her, just to make the point clear.
Anyway, all of this will become important as we go. For now, let’s check in with Ka’iana and Kahekili back on O’ahu.
As was strongly implied by the premiere, Ka’iana is fuming about Kahekili’s acts of savagery and the manipulation that made him complicit in them, so he and his fam are brainstorming how best to proceed when Ka’iana comes up with the only workable solution. He agrees to meet Kahekili in the local temple but only leaves behind his father’s snapped war club, laid on the altar as a pretty clear message. While the king’s distracted, Ka’iana and the gang jump in a canoe back to Maui.
It isn’t a great mystery where they intend to go, though. Heke remained on Maui, and since there’s no way Kupuohi will go anywhere without her, it stands to reason that they’ll call there first. Kahekili sends several men, led by his son, Kupule, who clearly thinks he’s bonkers, to pursue them, giving Chief of War Episode 2 its essential cat-and-mouse structure. This is very different from the tone of Episode 1, and that’s welcome, since it keeps the audience guessing as well as adding in a few new elements like Ka’ahumanu and, surprisingly, the British.
Luciane Buchanan in Chief of War | Image via Apple TV+
The first clue as to the presence of the British comes when we catch a glimpse of their ship while Ka’iana and the others row back to Maui, but it isn’t until later that we get a sense of them. The sailors are lost, starving, and deeply terrified, especially after what happened to Captain Cook when he landed on the islands with his band of Paleskins. This is not the angle that I expected the show’s obligatory colonization subplot to approach from, and it takes a couple more surprising turns before the end of “Changing Tides”. We’ll come back to this in a minute.
In the meantime, most of the episode takes the form of a chase sequence. When the gang finally locates Heke, Ka’iana does a runner to lead their pursuers away, leading to a breathless and extremely extensive chase across the entire island. Eventually, after using a baby hog as a distraction — not a fan of the way Momoa tossed that little piggy! — Ka’iana eventually runs into Ka’ahumanu, who gives him the rundown of her backstory that I laid out at the top. Needless to say, Ka’iana looks very much like the guardian that Taula told Ka’ahumanu about, so their immediate team-up feels more logical. Ka’ahumanu invites Ka’iana and his family to travel with her to Hawai’i.
While they’re making their way to the shore, though, they run into the Paleskins. There’s a bit of confusion, but Ka’iana kills one of the king’s men who tries to attack them, so the sailors realize he was doing them a solid and let him and Ka’ahumanu go. Ka’iana instructs her to find his family and take them to safety while he once again leads the king’s goons on a merry chase, this one culminating in a great-looking fight on the edge of a cliff. Surrounded and overwhelmed, Ka’iana dives over the edge into the churning ocean below.
Having rather improbably survived the fall, Ka’iana wakes up to find he’s now a guest of the British, who pulled him to the relative safety of their ship as a way of repaying the favour he did for them earlier. This leaves Ka’iana sailing away from Hawai’i and his family, which is a bit problematic. We also see Ka’ahumanu find Kupuohi and the others and convince them to leave with her, and she welcomes aboard one of the sailors who was accidentally left behind. She does this to stop him from giving the king’s men any information about where they went, but it’s obviously part of a calculated population swap that caps off Chief of War Episode 2. We’re leaving things with one of the British among the indigenous people, and one of the indigenous people among the British, inevitably setting up a lot of welcome culture-clash drama. I’m just wondering how they’re going to solve the problem of both groups currently heading in completely opposite directions.
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