Zahn McClarnon as Lt. Joe Leaphorn looks pretty shaken as he takes on his next case in 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 role played by Kiowa Gordon, and fellow officer Bernadette Manuelito (Jessica Matten), this time in a search for a missing Navajo girl. That takes them for part of the upcoming season from the safety of Navajo Nation to gritty 1970s Los Angeles as they race against the clock to save the young girl from an obsessive killer with ties to organized crime.
“I had this badge for four years before I saw my first murder,” a haunted Leaphorn tells Manuelito at one point in the short trailer. Then, as an overhead shot of a corpse and then another of Leaphorn shining a flashlight into a crime scene play on screen, he tells his fellow officer about the price of justice: “Now it just feels like every day. It’s hard having to hold it all. I’m sorry I’m asking you to.”
Already during the first three seasons of Dark Winds — as the show follows the lives of Navajo law enforcement officers in the 1970s as they solve mysteries in the present and face trauma from their past — it was revealed that Leaphorn as a Navajo boy was forced to abandon his culture after being sent to a Christian boarding school.
During the fourth season, Dark Winds fans are likely to learn far 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 man 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 four cast Franka Potente, Isabel DeRoy-Olson, Chaske Spencer, Luke Barnett and Titus Welliver.
