Greetings, Glibertarians. I have returned (for a time) from the depths of Discord—

*record scratch*

(Actually, side note first, I posted this as a comment on the links post on Saturday but I know most people won’t have seen it—if you were looking for more Woke Charmed recaps, the problem was that it stopped being woke and thus became difficult to recap in a funny way, and then the series got a soft reboot in season 2 and actually got really good, but then they killed Macy and I am really mad about it so we shall not speak of Woke Charmed.)

Anyway, I have returned (for a time) from the depths of Discord to bring you… A RAGE POST.

You may or may not know (let’s be real, you probably don’t, it hasn’t exactly been well-publicized) that AMC has made a new TV version of Tony Hillerman’s Navajo Mysteries, also known as the Leaphorn and Chee series. This is one of my very favorite book series, and I am pretty well obsessed with it. The series has been adapted a couple times before this. The gold standard, in my opinion, was the PBS version produced for Mystery! in the early 2000s. That version was produced by Robert Redford and featured Wes Studi as Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn and Adam Beach as Sergeant Jim Chee. The series adapted three of Hillerman’s books: Skinwalkers, Coyote Waits, and A Thief of Time.

The PBS versions were generally very faithful to the books, especially the last two which followed the plots pretty much beat-for-beat. However, even though the series was well-received, it was canceled after three movie-length specials.

Robert Redford continued to try to get Hillerman’s books adapted for the small screen after the PBS series ended, and he was recently joined in these efforts by George R. R. Martin.

Yeah. George R. R. Martin.

You see why I’ve been somewhat dubious about this project.

The way I understand it is: GRRM and Hillerman were friends, and after Hillerman’s death, GRRM wanted to use his TV connections, established thanks to Game of Thrones, to help get his friend’s books the TV treatment they deserved. I mean, that sounds nice. But like. GRRM.

But on the other hand, many of the people involved with the PBS version stayed on board, and they’re here for the AMC adaptation, called Dark Winds. (Despite the title, it is not based on The Dark Wind, which was made into a movie in 1991. The first season of this new series adapts two books, Listening Woman and People of Darkness, books 3 and 4 of the series.) Chris Eyre, who directed two of the three PBS specials, directs four of the six episodes of Dark Winds. Robert Redford is still producing. Other members of the production staff are there as well. So since they did a good job the first time, this new version should be good, right? Right?!

I honestly had been holding out hope. Then I watched the first two episodes, which premiered on Sunday evening.

My trepidation actually began before that, as in the days leading to the premiere early reviews started rolling in. For one thing:

The last several years have taught us what this kind of score means

But worse, I started reading some of the critical praise from sources like Variety and the New York Times, suitably glowing. And that’s really when I started getting concerned.

Now, listen. It’s current year. Of course I expected it to be woke af. And considering the subject matter—namely, mysteries that take place on the Navajo Nation with a full cast of Navajos, Hopis, Zunis, and other Southwest Native American tribes—it’s ripe for it. So if one or two or fourteen stupid/anacrhonistic SJW phrases got dropped in, I wasn’t going to be too shocked. And I was pleasantly surprised that in the first two episodes, the so-called “social justice” that did appear was, frankly, both in line with what was in the book and squared with reality. I’m not going to flinch at the line “when did the government ever care about dead Indians,” because it’s true.

What I’m mad about—what is really, really souring me on this entire series—is what they’ve done to the characters.

What first set me off on this, what inspired me to write this article before I’d even seen the first episode, is a major change they made to Jim Chee’s character, which was teased in the early reviews and the promotional trailer. This change drastically alters who he is. In fact, it makes it so that it’s impossible for this character to ever be Jim Chee. He will never be Jim Chee. He simply can’t be.

Source: Variety

For me, there is a single defining factor in whether I’m going to like an adaptation or not. And it’s whether you have captured the essence of the characters. You can change the details of their stories, you can change the situations and scenarios of the plot. You can make events unfold in completely different ways than they did in the source material, but if the characters are still who they are, who they’ve always been, I will more than likely be on board with it. But if you lose their core identity, you lose me. This is why I walked out of A Wrinkle in Time halfway through the movie after racing to the theater to see it on premiere day.

(P.S. If you want to hear me rant about why I hated that movie, you know, four years late, let me know.)

So let me tell you a little bit about Jim Chee. Chee is a good deal younger than Leaphorn, probably around 20 years. In the books, Leaphorn was forced to attend US government-run boarding schools that focused on assimilating Native Americans to White culture. Because of that, he was largely raised away from the reservation and is somewhat alienated from it. Despite returning to the reservation as an adult and working for the Tribal Police for many years, he views the culture in a more detached and clinical way, and though he respects it, he isn’t entirely immersed in it. Thus, he serves as the more pragmatic detective of the duo.

Chee, on the other hand, coming of age near the end of the boarding school period, was raised on the reservation, fully immersed in Navajo culture. He dreams of becoming a hataalii (shaman/medicine man) and is learning the various rituals and songs from his uncle. He is undergoing that training when he first appears in the series, and the ultimate crux of his character, the very essence of who Jim Chee is, is a traditional Navajo.

Early in the series, his uncle Hosteen Frank Sam Nakai tells Chee that he believes in order for Chee to progress on his journey to becoming a hataalii, he must actively choose to be a Navajo, and that involves him learning more about White culture, something which Chee knows nothing about. He has to learn about the Whites. And over the course of his journey, he falls in love with three women. The first is a White woman named Mary Landon. They get engaged, but she expects him to leave the reservation, leave his culture, and move to Wisconsin with her. He can’t do this, because he cannot leave his people.

After Mary Landon sends him a Dear John letter, Chee meets Janet Pete, a half-Navajo, half-White defense attorney. They also get engaged and actually make it as far as the wedding planning stage. Janet is extremely ambitious. She has visions of Chee leaving the Tribal Police in order to become an agent at the FBI. She has powerful political connections in Washington, D.C., and she arranges a promotion for Chee that would involve them moving there. Again, Chee is unable to do this because he can’t leave his people. (Also, he hates the FBI. It’s a major plot point in multiple books. He hates their guts and routinely winds up reprimanded because he can’t work with them. Janet and Chee ultimately break up because he crosses the feds and blows the referral she got for him, and he’s unrepentant about it.)

Beyond that, Janet and Chee are completely incompatible. In addition to her ambition, she is materialistic, obsessed with wealth and status. Chee follows the traditional Navajo teaching that accruing wealth for yourself is selfish. He lives in a trailer on the San Juan River, not because he can’t afford to live in a nicer house, but because his beliefs dictate a humble living—he’s got the necessities and that’s all he needs. He wants them to get married in a traditional Navajo ceremony, but Janet ridicules it. Even though she’s half-Navajo, Janet Pete is fully immersed in White culture and is not interested in Navajo ways. She thinks their traditions are quaint, superstitious nonsense, whereas Chee believes in the ways of his people wholeheartedly. She and Chee could never last long-term as a couple, because who she wants Chee to become is someone that he is not.

But in the world of Dark Winds, this is who Jim Chee is. He’s not Chee. He’s who Janet Pete wanted to change him to be.

Chee’s first appearance in Dark Winds was so egregious that I had to actually pause the episode for more than ten minutes to try to calm myself down. (Read: rant on Discord to the other Glibs.) The scene is one that was actually described in one of the later Hillerman books (I want to say it was The First Eagle, but don’t hold me to that). He rolls into town in a brand new sports car, driving fast, wearing a designer suit and listening to loud music. A group of Navajos are stranded on the side of the road with a broken-down car, and they attempt to flag him down to help them. Chee’s response? He smirks and hits the gas, sailing past them.

I wanted to puke.

That scene that was described in the book? It wasn’t Chee who did that. It was one of the bad guys. Chee witnessed it and was furious about it. He can’t stand people who flaunt conspicuous wealth and don’t care about their fellow people. He reflected on the incident multiple times in his narration over the next few chapters, seething about it.

Dark Winds turned Jim Chee into the epitome of everything he hates.

And if all that wasn’t bad enough, that wasn’t all. That introduction was enough to almost make me turn the show off, but I kept going. And it got worse. And I don’t even mean the fact that he can’t speak Diné, or how he can’t relate to elders, or the fact that he scoffs at Bernadette “Bernie” Manuelito (who, in the books, was his soulmate—the third-time’s-the-charm, traditional Navajo woman who helped him actively choose to be Navajo and brought his journey full circle) when she suggests he carry a medicine pouch. Those are all slaps in the face to Chee’s core identity, but they’re not even the worst part.

Because it turns out that Chee isn’t who he says he is when he arrives at the Window Rock substation. It turns out he’s an undercover agent.

With the FBI.

The more I think about it, the more sick I feel. Laenhart recently sent me this monologue from Sargon of Akkad, and it truly encompasses everything I feel. This thing is not your wife. This thing is not Jim Chee. It may look like Jim Chee. But it’s not him, and it can never be him, because they have removed the thing that made him who he is. They took the absolute most integral part of his character and reversed it. This is not Jim Chee, this is the antithesis of Jim Chee.

In this version, Janet Pete won. She doesn’t even exist here, and she still won.

Chee’s entire character is thrown out. His whole story arc, carried out over thirteen books, is discarded. He is replaced with some kind of Star Trek Mirrorverse version of himself, and we are supposed to accept this as the real Jim Chee.

As I live-screeched the first two episodes on Discord, we had a conversation (mostly one-sided, with me screaming) about why modern TV shows are this way. We’ve gotten so accustomed to modern adaptations being pozzed, but what we’re expecting is for them to be filled with wokisms. What do we call it when a Current Year TV series eschews the woke route but still manages to desecrate everything about the original work it’s based on? And more importantly, why are they doing this if it’s not meant as a sacrifice at the altar of Social Justice? What purpose does it serve to take the protagonist of a book series that’s been beloved by millions of readers for fifty years and turn him into everything he stands against?

One plausible theory from thirite on Discord:

At the end of the day, Dark Winds seems on its surface to be an engaging, intriguing and suspenseful mystery. It’s got daring daylight heists, puzzling murders, dazzling vistas, and hints of the supernatural. But when you take a step back, you realize that all the things that are good about it are taken whole cloth out of Hillerman’s books, Listening Woman and People of Darkness. The things that are frustrating and infuriating are the changes that originate with the showrunners. Chee is a doppelganger. Leaphorn has a weirdly violent past. Bernie is a stronk femxle sergeant with years of experience instead of the spunky rookie cop she was introduced as—and what with evil Mirrorverse Chee going on, she’s also having to pull double duty as the traditionalist of the bunch. Yet no one is mentioning any of these things, and critics are disingenuously pretending that the only major change that was made to the series is bringing “Chee” and Bernie into the plot of Listening Woman, a book that only featured Leaphorn.

Those who haven’t read the books won’t notice these changes or likely care, but it spits in the faces of the fans who have loved these characters for decades. Those who haven’t read the books could have just as easily fallen in love with the characters the way they were written, the way Tony Hillerman intended them to be.

But then again, I don’t think the showrunners care all that much about Tony Hillerman. Because on the opening credits? George R. R. Martin and Robert Redford’s names are large, front and center. When does Tony Hillerman’s name appear? After the theme music has ended, in small letters over the beginning of the episode. Sandwiched between the director of photography and the screenwriter. If you’re not looking for it, you more than likely won’t see it at all.

This is what it says on the AMC+ homepage

Makes you wonder how much GRRM cared about his friend’s books after all.