The thing about Strange Empire (CBC, 9 p.m.), which continues to blast along exultantly, is that it sets out to upend expectations and at the same time is soft-hearted and gee-whiz good-natured.
Tonight's powerful episode (directed by Anne Wheeler, written by Jackie May) has several key scenes and twists that more or less justify the on-screen warning of adult scenes, violence and so forth. Last week's episode and tonight's contain serious shifts in the narrative. In the hallucinatory-strange western outpost where events unfold, in 1869 somewhere in Alberta near the border with Montana, a woman, Kat (Cara Gee), is now the sheriff. Last week the dangerous buffoon Sheriff Little (Eric Keenleyside) decided that in wanting himself a whore, he could view all the women there as whores.
He called upon Fiona (Ali Liebert) to satisfy him. She objected and her mother was horrified. Then Fiona made a decision to do his bidding, for the financial reward. Sheriff Little, drunk and resentful, declined to pay. That's when Kat took action and there was that loaded argument about the allegedly male matter of not shooting someone in the back. Meanwhile, in the same episode, called "Electricity," Rebecca (Melissa Farman) nursed her passion for Finn (Joanne Boland) and they kissed. Finn is a woman disguised as a man and the "electricity" was as much about the growing sexual attraction between the two women as it was about the electric wires in the outpost. Where Rebecca goes now is key. Her husband Thomas (Bill Marchant) has a gangrenous leg that must be amputated, which probably means his death. Tonight, the amputation scene and a revelation to Thomas by Finn.
Strange Empire is trippy, laconic and dazzling. It presents such a richness of possible interpretations that one hardly knows where to begin. There are scenes that spell out the overriding theme of the profound strength of women with gorgeous, theatrical panache. One scene in which Kat talks to Rebecca about amputating Thomas's leg is achingly good. Rebecca explains she's not sure if she has the strength to use a saw on the leg. Thomas is the doctor and she relied on him for such acts. Kat says, "Problem with leaning on a man, that pillar crumbles, leaves you not used to standing." As they talk, one realizes that, on the ground beneath them, is a pathetic man, a drunk thrown out of the bar, who is whimpering for more liquor.
Male desire is viewed as redundant, the mere idle exercise of power. Male attention to things that matter is utterly unreliable. While the square-jawed, serious-minded Marshal Caleb – the one man presented as honourable – sleeps the night away, it is Kat who takes care of rustlers and women in danger. Her casual scorn for Marshal Caleb amounts to contempt. The ideal of the western male hero is thrown upside-down here. And yet this theme is not suffused with anger, but with resignation. All men let women down.
Simultaneously, while the fortitude of women is celebrated, there is the lament, "Nothing worse than being a woman," which is heard tonight. It is kindness that is the core element of Strange Empire's story. More than the observance of female strength, the series is a paean to the integrity of benevolence that is removed from issues of power, sex and desire. That's the good-natured crux of it.
As such, Strange Empire delves into something primordial, timeless. And yet it is a western and that is where some confusion about reactions to it persists. We tend to think of the mythology of the west as America's myth, and it is. But the American western mythology is fossilized. The west was won, the journey west accomplished. Stories of that journey are investigated, and spun as contemporary interpretations. That works, though it is rarely done these days. The last serious reading of the west in popular culture was David Milch's Deadwood.
In Canada, our western myth is still evolving and it zigzags as part of our current affairs – Alberta, oil and the oil sands. It is not history yet to become fossilized. Thus when we look at Strange Empire, a rare contemporary western, we tend to try to locate it within the realm of American myths.
It can't be done. Strange Empire is not to be pegged as a "genre" exercise – it's a western of the imagination, which is why I call it "trippy." It's not what happened or what could have been. It's an excursion into ostentatiously imagined fiction – melancholy, bittersweet and brilliantly rendered.
The best way to interpret it is by succumbing to it.