“It’s Organtic!” Reservation Dogs: The Spiritual Trial of Tribal Officer Big in Reservation Dogs

There are so many things I want to write about the FX show Reservation Dogs, available only on Hulu.

But I’m going to start with one character in one episode.

His name is Big, and he’s a Tribal Police Officer. But, unfortunately, his fellow officers and most people around them treat tribal cops as “barely even a cop.”

Big believes giant conspiracy theories that he finds on the Youtubes.

Anything that feels good to him, he names “organtic.”

A horrible memory haunts Big. He watched a close friend die; she may have been the love of his life. And he tried but couldn't stop it.

Reservation Dogs begins with a death that rips a hole in a small community that already had bigger holes. The first death was a tragedy, and the next was a suicide.

Big carries the burden of the former on his shoulders every day. An early life experience with a powerful protective spirit they call Deer Lady was a sacred moment for Big. He committed to being a good boy, and that’s how he approaches his role in the tribal community: to keep the peace by sharing peace.

That’s organtic.

During a late second-season episode, This Is Where The Plot Thickens, Big has a run-in with the local distributor for uncontrolled recreational substances. 

But this isn't Gus Fring's operation here. 

These chemists and growers are presented as chill, good people doing lowdown shit to survive the best way they can. While questioning them in their school bus, Big grabs a bottle of soda from a crate full of bottles. He guzzles half of it, and then everything turns crazy.

The sodas were dosed with some wild psychedelic mixture of hallucinogens, and Big is a cop who's never done drugs.

The head of the drug family has a kind heart and guzzles some down to guide his new friend through the woods. What happens on screen over the next twenty minutes is one of the funniest drug trips I’ve ever seen, and it made me cry.

While romping through the woods, these two kind-hearted boobs uncover a cult of old white men wearing catfish masks, pouring oil over themselves. At the same time, they masturbate with catfish chopped in half, chanting, “IT’S OURS! IT’S OURS! IT’S OURS” over and over again.

And the head of the group is the state's governor. So the security team captures them and ties them to a tree with blindfolds over their eyes.

Big has a lucid re-living of a terrible memory, where he tried to stop a woman he loved from dying. He was a cop. He had a cop car. They were pulled over, Cookie and this rough dude, taking her home. The guy was drunk coming out of the store, stumbling drunk, and getting on the motorcycle with Cookie.

They went rocketing off at top speed.

He chased them down in his cop car. He had them pulled over. And the guy on the motorcycle looked back at him, saw he was only a tribal cop, and said loud enough for everyone to hear, “Shit, I thought it was a real cop. Hold on, baby…”

…, and they rocketed away in a cloud of disrespect.

Minutes later, the bike was on fire. Cookie was scraped all over the road, dead. Her daughter was at home waiting for her Mom to come back. Cookie named that little girl Elora Danon after the baby in Willow.

Alora will grow up and find the boy she loved hanging from a noose where their fivesome had gathered to play since they were small children.

There’s a lot of sadness on the surface of this community. But there is also great joy and justice underneath them all.

There is a community of spirits in this show that supports these people in their times of greatest spiritual need.

One spirit in another episode informs a character that he had to leave immediately because someone else’s heart was hurting more at that moment. This is such a beautiful concept. Spirits of support who come to us in times of trouble. Our ancestors. For better or worse. Benevolent spirits that have passed on leave their wisdom and compassion behind in these smiling and shit-talking containers that offer solace to those grieving and lift the downtrodden to walk forward again.

These lovely but hurting characters in Reservation Dogs are lifted by their spiritual ancestors, just above the waterline of what is bearable to suffer in their lives, held there, suspended until they heal enough to crawl onward through the next insult.

And the spirit of the Deer Lady saves these two bumbling keystone detectives. Over the dead bodies of the white security guards she murdered, she makes sure they’re still trying to be good boys. The goodhearted tribal drug lord sees her too and knows her well enough to call her a great lady.

In their victory, he asks Big if he can call him brother. Big reluctantly agrees, but only if he doesn’t do it in front of his friends.

While tied to that tree, Big faced the demon of his memory. He tried to stop Cookie from being on that wasted guy’s motorcycle. He tried. And the guilt of failure has been magnified over the years by the impact of her loss. Cookie, whose daughter Alora lost her grandmother, now has nobody she can report to anymore.

Death has made her an adult.

And the boy she loved killed himself. Another black hole in her life, in all their lives. Sucking joy from the air.

And yet.

There are moments of transcendence in Reservation Dogs where pure light bleeds through, carrying the viewer across a river of pain and comedy.

The best we can hope for from any art is to laugh while being carried, the sunlight so bright we shut our eyes.