Zahn McClarnon as Lt. Joe Leaphorn looks pretty shaken as he takes on his next case within the season 4 teaser for the AMC noir thriller Dark Winds, which dropped on Thursday.
Leaphorn, of the Navajo Tribal Police, is joined again by Jim Chee, a task played by Kiowa Gordon, and fellow officer Bernadette Manuelito (Jessica Matten), this time in a seek for a missing Navajo girl. That takes them for a part of the upcoming season from the protection of Navajo Nation to gritty Seventies Los Angeles as they race against the clock to avoid wasting the young girl from an obsessive killer with ties to organized crime.
“I had this badge for 4 years before I saw my first murder,” a haunted Leaphorn tells Manuelito at one point within the short trailer. Then, as an overhead shot of a corpse after which one other of Leaphorn shining a flashlight into against the law scene play on screen, he tells his fellow officer in regards to the price of justice: “Now it just seems like day by day. It’s hard having to carry all of it. I’m sorry I’m asking you to.”
Already through the first three seasons of Dark Winds — because the show follows the lives of Navajo law enforcement officers within the Seventies as they solve mysteries in the current and face trauma from their past — it was revealed that Leaphorn as a Navajo boy was forced to desert his culture after being sent to a Christian boarding school.
Through the fourth season, Dark Winds fans are prone to learn much more about Joe Leaphorn and his estranged wife Emma, played by Deanna Allison, and whether their marriage has a future. Emma left Leaphorn ahead of the third-season finale because he killed the person who caused their son’s death.
The dark drama, executive produced by the late Robert Redford and George R.R. Martin, has added to its season 4 solid Franka Potente, Isabel DeRoy-Olson, Chaske Spencer, Luke Barnett and Titus Welliver.