Summary
Billy the Kid Season 3 continues to idle, despite a few standout scenes in “Two Shots”. The inevitability of the outcome is hurting it, and Jesse remains the only real source of potential mystery.
Despite a very cool opening shoot-out, Jesse laying the smack down on a bar full of people, and Billy getting his bloody revenge on Miguel all in the span of Episode 2, “Two Shots”, I still find myself oddly uninterested in Billy the Kid Season 3. As the premiere suggested, this feels like a show that has run its course and is now biding its time until an obligatory conclusion, with real-life history having already prescribed a slightly ignoble end for the eponymous gunslinger.
Maybe it’s just me, but the clockwork certainty of Billy and Pat Garrett circling each other feels a bit dramatically inert. You can see it in the opening gunfight, which injures Juan and Fred Waite but leaves Billy and Pat free to cross paths another day. It’s a cool scene, it’s staged well and impressively orchestrated, but it lacks proper excitement given the inevitability of it all.
And the villains are dull, aren’t they? There’s a shrugging bit of business with Murphy telling Riley that he’s handing over the remaining shares of his business – aka The House – to him, but it’s difficult to care. Likewise with Catron and Edgar Walz. The latter and Emily attend a dinner at the former’s house to celebrate Emily’s pregnancy, which turns out to have been inviable, prompting a nasty argument that leaves Walz attempting to leave Catron’s employ. But no such luck. He knows too much about Catron’s operations to ever be allowed to leave them. At some point, you run out of sympathy for people whose bad decisions end up costing them.
Billy, meanwhile, takes the remains of his crew to Fort Sumner to hide out with Pete Maxwell, who’s sympathetic to their cause. Charlie Bowdre is there, who tells Billy that, far from being over, the Lincoln County War is only worsening. Governor Lew Wallace – Catron was gloating about this earlier – is expecting to be removed from office for failing to put an end to it, paving Catron’s way to the position. All the cards are in the hands of the bad guys – for someone like Walz, his position is so inescapable and untenable that he’d rather hang himself than face it.
Somehow, Jesse is the most interesting figure in all this. Billy the Kid Season 3, Episode 2, finds him distraught over Ana’s death and his subsequent murder of her father, albeit in self-defence. He initially takes to drowning his sorrows, but it’s clear he’s looking for a fight. Bob Olinger comes out worse off, but Sam pulls a gun on Jesse and makes him leave, which doesn’t do much for his self-esteem. At his lowest ebb, he goes to Pat and confesses to the killing, which Pat sees as an opportunity to deputise him and use him in the manhunt for Billy. It’s a cynical play, but Jesse, who still clearly has some affection for his old friend despite denying it, represents one of the only possible sources of genuine surprise this show has left (in 1882, Jesse Evans disappeared and was never seen or heard from again, giving the show a lot more latitude with his eventual fate).
The posse, including Jesse, eventually arrives at Pete’s place and searches it, but Billy and the Regulators are gone by then, having set up camp in the wilderness to plot about holing up somewhere and hiring more guns for the coming fight. There should be plenty of takers, since Billy still has ample public support, even if pitching in with him is dangerous on multiple levels. But it helps that his and Dulcinea’s desire for revenge is also the entire county’s desire for revenge, so sinister and flagrant are their oppressors in the House and in government.
At the end of “Two Shots”, Billy gets some revenge, sneaking into town on his own to stab Otero to death, which, to be fair, is what he deserves. But we didn’t spend much time with Otero, and weren’t really given to understanding his true motivations, so the scene doesn’t have the power it perhaps might have had otherwise. I assume this’ll be the first of many victims for Billy, if the House doesn’t destroy itself in the meantime, thanks to its leadership’s complete inability to not stab each other in the back, but his own fate is beginning to feel overdue, and he has ceased to be the most interesting thing about his namesake show.
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