Summary
Billy the Kid Season 3 continues to rewrite history in “The Last Buffalo”, which has a bit of a side quest feel to it as Billy and Jesse hunt down a disgraced Pat Garrett.
The penultimate ever episode of Billy the Kid feels pretty unmistakably like a side quest. Perhaps that isn’t entirely fair, since it’s very much an outgrowth of longstanding character arcs and builds to a pretty significant, albeit ahistorical, moment. But Season 3 has been feeling a little off the rails ever since it revealed that Billy survived being shot by Pat Garrett, and Episode 7, “The Last Buffalo”, is where the sense of an epilogue to the real story really manifests.
I’ll grant you that it’s a very interesting idea to explore Pat’s post-shooting headspace. He dedicated his life to killing Billy, and he believed that he did. But the disappearance of Billy’s body and the tight-lipped nature of the Mexicans who near-worshipped him left lingering doubts, and those doubts were picked up on. He was relieved of his duties as the Sheriff of Lincoln County and continued to fall further into disrepute, working a series of menial odd jobs. He drank. He wrote a book that nobody really cared about, one that only propagated the legend of Billy, making a mockery of Pat’s own exploits.
This could have perhaps been a terrible enough fate for Pat. But Billy is adamant on revenge, so “The Last Buffalo” is built around Billy and Jesse pursuing him for a final confrontation, using the book he wrote and news reports, many of them stemming from his own ego, to follow him around the country. It’s a unique structure, and a fairly clever one, but it doesn’t make for an especially interesting episode, with a lot of it being spent watching Billy and Jesse lounge around under trees laughing at Pat’s latest public disgrace.
Catron isn’t coping with the ambiguity around Billy’s demise especially well either, and his refusal to believe that Billy is dead – tightening his home security, increasing the reward for his apprehension, and stating publicly that Pat didn’t kill him as he claimed – hastens Pat’s decline. But Catron’s lifetime of corruption has left him to face his fear alone. Even Emily, now armed with knowledge of Catron’s involvement in Edgar’s “suicide”, couldn’t care less. Catron’s paranoia is funny in this episode since even though Billy does ultimately intend to target him, he spends all of his time here tracking down Garrett.
It’s Garrett’s latest low point that ensures his demise. Working for a blacksmith shoeing horses, he’s seduced by the blacksmith’s psycho 16-year-old daughter, who basically forces herself on him and then tells her father the situation happened in reverse, for no reason at all beyond her own amusement. Garrett is branded by the blacksmith, and the story makes the news; Billy and Jesse sit laughing about it under a tree. From there, they’re able to track Garrett down at his latest job, guarding prisoners on their way to jail. In the middle of nowhere, they ambush the prison convoy, and Billy presents himself to Garrett like a spectre emerging from the deepest recesses of his own mind.
Again, it probably would have been fate enough for Garrett to know that Billy was still alive. Previously, it had been the uncertainty that had haunted him. Seeing Billy in the flesh unravels every story Garrett had told himself about his own heroism. He was already ruined; this insult is a final indignity. But it’s not enough for Billy, who does him the courtesy of allowing him to draw first in a final duel. Billy wins, easily, and executes Garrett with a shot through the heart, exactly the same fate that the former sheriff had attempted to visit on him.
You might find yourself wondering what could possibly be next after Billy the Kid Season 3, Episode 7. Several times, Jesse tells Billy that he’s wasting the second chance, the “rebirth” that he has been given. He could be spending his time living blissfully with Dulcinea and their child. But his thirst for revenge consumes him, and it isn’t just Garrett whom he wants to pay. There’s Catron, too, and the entire Santa Fe Ring, which he believes it’s his moral responsibility to shut down. But while Jesse was willing to help Billy hunt Garrett, he’s not willing to take on the seemingly impossible task of battling against institutional corruption. That, at least, seems like a fight that even Billy can’t win, and he’ll be riding into it alone. Surely the show wouldn’t spare Billy from his historical fate only to kill him off in a different way, would it?
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