Even though Dark Winds has become more procedural in nature than we expected the show to be when it debuted in 2022, with new season-long mysteries every year, there are still threads running through the seasons that tie it all together. Mostly those threads have to do with Navajo mysticism butting up against modern world (at least modern as of the early 1970s) realities, and how Navajo Police Lt. Joe Leaphorn deals with both factors. At the end of season 2, Leaphorn got a modicum of revenge for the death of his son. Will that come back to expose him this season?

DARK WINDS SEASON 3: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: To the strains of “Space Oddity,” the camera pans across some rugged, sandy terrain. We see a fallen flashlight and a walkie-talkie. Lying on the ground nearby is Navajo Police lieutenant Joe Leaphorn (Zahn McClarnon), who has a dart in his neck.

The Gist: Leaphorn comes to, but is still paralyzed from the waist down. He manages to call into his dispatcher, then drag himself to more of a hiding spot. There, he sees a giant monster-like being coming out of the brush.

“SEVEN DAYS AGO.” Leaphorn is making breakfast for him and his wife Emma (Deanna Allison), and he gets a call about a missing teenager, Ernesto Cata (Alonso Rappa). He and Sgt. Jim Chee (Kiowa Gordon), who has rejoined the Navajo Police, go to the scene where the teen’s bike was found. Also there is county sheriff Gordo Sena (A Martinez), who is temporarily back on duty after retiring. The missing teen was with his friend George Bowlegs (Bodhi Okuma Linton); Chee has had run ins with the George’s father when they were both growing up. The scuttlebutt is that “La Llorona” did this, which is similar to the Navajo legend of Ye’iitosh: A monster or some other sort of supernatural being.

In the meantime, at the US/Mexico border in Hachita, NM, rookie Border Patrol agent Bernadette Manuelito (Jessica Matten) finds a white van with Mexico plates in the woods around the border. The van is empty, but she sees a mother and daughter running through the woods towards the river. She catches up to them, but the mother pulls a gun on her; Bernadette puts her gun down in order to ease the mother’s fears. She has to run to catch the mom, and when she comes back to grab her gun belt, the gun and the van are both gone. She thinks that the pair were running away from the van, trying to escape from someone trying to traffic them in the US. But her boss would rather just deport the mother and daughter than let her investigate.

When the Bowlegs teen slips through their fingers, Leaphorn and Chee go to see his father. The father is reluctant to talk, but the teen’s little brother tells Leaphorn that a “monster” named Ye’iitosh took Ernesto.

FBI Special Agent Sylvia Washington (Jenna Elfman) shows up at the Kayenta Police station. When Leaphorn finds her in a storage room looking over old files, she tells him she’s there to “button up” federal cases that occurred on the res. One of the cases is the disappearance of B.J. Vines; as far as Agent Washington is concerned, something about it doesn’t add up.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? As with the first two seasons, Dark Horses reminds us a lot of Longmire; both McClarnon and Martinez worked on that series, too.

Our Take: As we mentioned before Season 2, there is plenty of material from Tony Hillerman’s Leaphorn And Chee novels for showrunner John Wirth and his writing team to pull from; this season is a combination of the novels Dancehall Of The Dead and Sinister Pig. We’re at the point in the series’ life where the main characters are well-established, and we know what kinds of decisions they’re going to make while working on their cases.

That’s especially true when it comes to Leaphorn. After what he did to B.J. Vines at the end of the second season — letting him wander the snowy desert instead of shooting him as revenge for the death of Joe Jr. — he remains a flawed but still moral character. He’s still the guy who’s seen too much as a cop to buy into Navajo legends like Ye’iitosh, but now there’s a ding in his stoic armor, and we wonder how far Agent Washington is going to get in the Vines investigation before that ding is discovered.

Elfman is an interesting casting choice for Washington, by the way. During her years on Fear The Walking Dead, she shed the quirky/funny image that defined the first 20 years of her career, showing she’s down for action-oriented drama. But Washington has quirks, like pointing out that she’s named Washington and she’s from Washington. What we wonder is what the character will do once she gets closer to the truth about Vines; will she be empathetic towards Leaphorn or throw the book at him?

While we like seeing Chee back on the force and working cases with Leaphorn while trying to reconnect with his Navajo roots, we’re wondering if the trafficking case Bernadette is pursuing will connect back to the res or just stay a separate story. We don’t love when characters that used to be part of the fold go off on their own during subsequent seasons of a show, and we wonder if the trafficking story — the part that’s taken from The Sinister Pig — is there to give Matten the meaty material she deserves or if it’s a way to fill because there just isn’t enough to the Ye’iitosh story to fill a full season.

Sex and Skin: None in the first episode.

Parting Shot: Leaphorn and Sena are crawling through a drain pipe, and suddenly a body falls through the dirt above them. Sena grabs something out of the corpse’s mouth, and it’s an old coin of some sort.

Sleeper Star: Let’s just say that two of the show’s executive producers show up in a cameo, and there’s an inside joke about one of the producer’s notoriously slow pace in adding to a famous franchise.

Most Pilot-y Line: One of Bernadette’s fellow Border Patrol agents tells her to “take the win”, because the mother and daughter didn’t get killed, something she refuses to accept. Was “take the win” a saying people uttered in the early 1970s?

Our Call: STREAM IT. While we’re not in love with the separate storylines for the show’s main characters, season 3 of Dark Winds continues to combine Native mysticism with whodunits rooted in the real world, all anchored by the reassuring presence of McClarnon.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.