‘Dark Winds’ Showrunner John Wirth Breaks Down That Powerful Season 3 Finale and Leaphorn’s Intense Visions

Editor’s note: The below interview contains spoilers for the Dark Winds Season 3 finale.

Well, Dark Winds Season 3 ended with quite a bang, and now all we can do is hope that Lt. Joe Leaphorn (Zahn McClarnon), Jim Chee (Kiowa Gordon), and Sgt. Bernadette Manuelito (Jessica Matten) are able to find themselves in Season 4. Ahead of those powerful last few episodes of Season 3, Collider had the pleasure of speaking with executive producer and showrunner John Wirth, who reflected on this third season while teasing what’s to come going forward.

John Wirth Discusses Joe and Emma’s Fractured Love Story in ‘Dark Winds’ Season 3

MICHAEL JOHN PETTY: What an incredible third season this has been. Dark Winds has been one of my favorites for a while now, and it’s largely because of how well-written all of these characters are. I especially loved Joe’s arc this season, which leads me to ask you the same question I asked [director] Chris Eyre the other day: Why was it so important that Season 3 ended with Joe being alone?

JOHN WIRTH: Well, I don’t think we set out to tell that story. The story kind of evolved as we went through the season, and the Emma/Joe relationship is really the heart and center of the show in Season 3. I’ve always invested a lot in that relationship. It’s hard when you have… We’re doing a cop show, and our main cop has a wife, and she’s not a cop. Throughout my career—which stretches back now 40 years—I’ve done a lot of cop shows, and it’s really hard to integrate characters into the story when they’re not on the job. I think we suffered a little bit from this in Season 1. Trying to figure out how to make her essential to the show was the challenge. And the happy accident that I inherited coming into the show in Season 2 was the death of their son. Then the idea popped up that there was a murder in Season 2, and Leaphorn started investigating it, and it turned out that he was investigating his own son’s murder, and it pulled his wife into the story in a very essential, emotional, dramatic way. That continued into Season 3 because he was not free from his actions in Season 2, and it just carried over into Season 3.

As we started mining and writing those scenes between them, at one point in time, I was sitting on the set, and I was watching a scene between Leaphorn and Emma in their kitchen. And it just felt to me like the Leaphorn character was being very selfish because he was so involved in the haunting and what was happening to him and trying to sort out what he had done in the previous season and what that meant to him and his code and his life on the job, and so forth. Sometimes, in those situations between two people, one person gets short shrift. It just occurred to me, and it seemed very vivid, that this was happening to her. So, I wrote a scene for them where she sort of stood up and called him out on his selfish behavior. It was really beautiful because he was shocked at her… I don’t know if you call them accusations or observations, and it just went from there, and the story just developed. She just realized, “I can’t live like this,” and once somebody makes that statement in a marriage, things have to change dramatically, and if they don’t change, then the situation might change. And it just sort of developed from there. I think there’s a lot of clichéd expressions like, “You make your bed and you lie in it,” and all those sorts of things. I think it just went that way for him, despite his best efforts and despite his love and respect for his wife. It just played out that way, which was good for us because it’s super dramatic.

After the way that things ended between them, what should we expect for Joe and Emma going into Season 4, and why is this (hopefully) temporary separation a necessary step for their love story? Or do you think it was necessary?

WIRTH: I don’t think it was necessary, but it’s hard to tell a story and keep it riveting if there’s no conflict in the story. If they’re just in love and she supports him and he supports her, there’s not much story to tell except, “How do you want your coffee? With cream or not?” So, for us, it’s really given us a lot to play with. I can tell you already, in Season 4, it’s forced him to make some adjustments and some decisions about how he lives and about how he’s going to continue to live and do the job. It’s given us a really good story to tell, at least on the personal side, with him and Emma.

John Wirth Reveals How ‘Dark Winds’ Famed Vision Episode Came to Be

One of my favorite episodes this season, getting into that more personal side, was Episode 6 [“Ábidoo’niidę́ę́ (What We Had Been Told)”], which I’m sure a lot of people have felt the same way about. It very much felt like something out of Twin Peaks.

WIRTH: [Laughs] Yeah.

What was your inspiration for Joe’s spiritual journey in that particular episode, and why was Season 3 the time to do it?

WIRTH: Well, because the whole season was about him being haunted by this boogeyman, which came out of his decision to leave B.J. Vines (John Diehl) in the desert at the end of Season 2. The story just kind of built. We knew we were going to address it in the sixth episode. We were kind of building toward that. We weren’t quite sure how the story was going to manifest or what it was going to look like. We struggled with that episode quite a bit. We knew what we wanted to do and what we wanted to say, we just didn’t really have a vehicle for it. One day, Max Herwitz just walked into the writers’ room and said, “I think I have it,” and he kind of laid out this structure of telling the Navajo — having the kid’s play — telling the Navajo story of the twins, and how that would relate to our story and how we could then shift between the real-world and the ketamine dream, which we started in the first episode. Those three stories just kind of came together once we had the idea that Max had [about] how to tell the story. Then we just played through.

I have to say, it’s one of my favorite episodes of television that I’ve worked on, and I’ve done a couple thousand of these things over the years. I was really pleased with the script. Max Hurwitz and Billy Luther wrote the script, and then Erica [Tremblay] did an amazing job directing it. Zahn [McClarnon] was really into it, and Jenna Elfman was amazing in the episode. It was kind of a dream. I watched it myself on television on Sunday, and I’ve seen it a million times, as you can imagine, but I thought it played really well. It’s a very special episode of television.

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Joe Leaphorn could use some fine coffee.

Yeah, it’s phenomenal. As far as Dark Winds or any kind of neo-Western series is concerned, it really stands out for its originality in how it incorporates the children’s play and [Joe’s] own personal psyche and struggles into that. It’s just really well done.

WIRTH: Yeah, it just really worked. You know, we completely created the endless desert there. We shot it right where we shoot everything else, and the landscape looks completely different where we work. We used VFX to create those effects: the endless sunrise and the desert that was just flat with no vegetation. And we went through a lot of, as you can imagine, permutations trying to figure out what that should look like, and we had lots of different efforts. At one point, it looked almost like it was a Jimi Hendrix album cover… It’s like, “What is that?” And then we finally just evolved it to what it was. And the guys who did the VFX stuff, Alex [Knudson] and his whole crew, just knocked it out of the park, I thought.

‘Dark Winds’ Showrunner John Wirth Teases the Upcoming Season 4

Switching gears a little bit, we’ve been teased with a Chee and Bernadette relationship for quite some time now, but now it seems like that may be happening for real. What was the motivation for keeping the two of them apart this season, and how will it strengthen their relationship moving forward?

WIRTH: Well, her leaving came from one of the novels. I don’t remember if it was People of Darkness or Dance Hall of the Dead or The Sinister Pig… One of those novels had, I think it was Sinister Pig, her working for the Border Patrol…

Yes.

WIRTH: One of my favorite scenes in the series is the scene in the manshed where she tells Leaphorn [that] she’s going to leave at the end of Season 2. So, it was kind of set up. Actually, [Jessica Matten] called Zahn because she wondered if I was writing her out of the show… [Laughs] And people have mentioned that also, they thought she was leaving the show. So, we kind of set it up at the end of Season 2, so we played through. I liked certain aspects of the novel, Sinister Pig. I thought it would be really good for the show, so we kind of dovetailed Dance Hall and Sinister Pig for this season. She’s in the show, so she can’t be away forever, so we had to find a way to bring her back, and I thought that story worked out really well to get her back to the reservation.

Now it’s a question of, what is she doing there? Did she come back for Chee? Did she come back to rejoin the Navajo Tribal Police? Is she going to be a private detective like Chee was in Season 2? Is she going to get involved with the Navajo Nation, somehow? It just gave us a lot of opportunities. You know, love stories don’t really work on television or in movies or probably even in novels if there’s no conflict. So, we’ve had to kind of figure out what the conflict is between Chee and Bern for Season 4, and I think it’s pretty good what we’ve got going.

Lastly, could you offer us a tease concerning what we should expect from Leaphorn, Chee, and Manuelito in the next season — perhaps which Tony Hillerman novel you’re looking to adapt?

WIRTH: Yes, we’re doing The Ghostway.

Dark Winds is available for streaming on AMC+.