'Lawmen: Bass Reeves' Is Quickly Turning Into a Sheridan-Verse All-Timer
Lawmen: Bass Reeves's portrait of 19th-century America is an unforgiving hellscape. Killers roam the West and Bass Reeves’s family holds each other tight every night, hoping that the famous lawman returns home alive. Last episode, Reeves brought in a prisoner in—even after he ripped another man’s face off. Whatever defines justice in this world, Reeves is just getting it done. No questions asked.
Episode Five kicks off with a warning sign for our hero. A hanging scarecrow displays the message, “Bass Reeves will swing here.” The lawman and Billy Crow are on the lookout for Jim Webb—the “dark-hearted bastard” that Silas Cobb ratted out last week. Entering a gunfight in town, Reeves shouts for Webb's surrender. "You can drown in your own blood or have your day in court," he screams. "Hanging Judge" Parker will likely hang him for whatever crime he did anyway. So, Webb runs. Lucky for Bass, the lawman pulls up behind him and pulls the trigger. Easy. I guess Reeves’s mercy only goes so far.
Back home, the Dundy Carnival is rolling into town. I'll be honest with you: I’ve mostly ignored the plots involving Reeves’s wife, Jennie, and their daughter, Sally, but there are some slow-moving potential threats brewing. A man from Chicago named Edwin Jones is courting Reeves’ wife for a vision of a new town in Indian Territory. Meanwhile, Reeves’s daughter is secretly spending a lot of time with a young suitor named Arthur. He seems like a nice, genuine guy—but something must be building here. Same goes for Jones. Maybe we’ll find out what's going on soon.
The family will be without Reeves for another stretch of time, because the deputy marshal has another outlaw to hunt for. Sherill Lynn (Dennis Quaid) hands him the order from Judge Parker, even though Reeves pleads that he hasn’t been home with his family in over 40 days. A man named Jackson Cole killed a man running for state senate in Texas. He was captured already, it seems, but Reeves is supposed to deliver him to the Rangers over in Texas.
When Reeves stops at home to see his loved ones, his children are barely excited to see him. Well, they’re going to hate him even more when he tells them that he’s going to miss the carnival. “Telling us you love us ain’t the same as showing us,” Jennie tells him. Judge Parker, Reeves needs more vacation hours!
So, it falls on Arthur to take Sally to the carnival. A young white girl cuts them in line, and when Sally complains, the girl says, “the back of the line is for you.” Sally threatens to rip the girls tongue out. Later on, at night, the girls' older brother finds the couple and surrounds them with his lanky group of friends. “Shouldn’t talk to my sister like that,” he warns, calling Sally and Arthur "monkey faces." Sally punches him in the face. A brawl ensues, but Sally and Arthur are lucky to get out alive after the boys flee. Sally keeps the incident a secret from her mother.
Back on the road, Reeves picks up his prisoner, Jackson Cole. Naturally, his sidekick, Billy Crow, rides along as well. Reeves isn’t treating his partner like a friend, however, and Crow brings up the questionable animosity between them. “When you started riding for me, you asked if you had the grit to be deputy marshal,” Reeves reminds him. “You don’t. Figured you would be now.” Damn, Reeves. That’s cold. What did Billy Crow do to deserve that?
The night brings a rainstorm, so the trio needs to find shelter. They stop at a Spanish couple’s house nearby. Reeves removes Cole’s handcuffs, hoping that they’ll let them in for a meal and shelter. Sharing a smoke, Cole tells Reeves why he killed the man who ran for state senate in Texas. According to Cole, the man was a former plantation owner who burned his slaves alive in the field. Cole was serving in the army at the time, and when they came to his plantation, they couldn’t even bury the bodies. Now out of the service, he saw that the plantation owner was threatening to bring back the past laws during his political campaign. “I already seen what that man done to one plantation,” Cole tells Reeves. “Not again.”
In the morning, Reeves struggles with the moral implications of putting Cole back in handcuffs and taking him to the Rangers. The law, which he’s followed so dutifully, will likely see Cole hang for murdering the former plantation owner. For Cole, the murder was justice. It’s another case that mirrors Reeves’s escape from his own bondage—though he didn’t kill the Colonel that night.
Putting the cuffs on Cole and continuing his journey, Reeves and co. run into Esau Pierce. Bass Reeves fans may recall Pierce as the former Confederate Army regiment leader who shot and killed the Cherokee boy from the family that took care of Reeves in the premiere episode. He's definitely the worst of Reeves’s current rogues' gallery, but we’ll have to wait until next week to find out if this chance occurrence turns deadly.
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