Recap and review of Reservation Dogs season 3, episode 10: “Dig”

In the series finale of the FX original series Reservation Dogs, the community buries Old Man Fixico, and the four friends decide who among them will stay in the rez and who will go on to other adventures. This is it.

This is the end friends, and at a running time of 38 minutes, the series finale “Dig” is a very glad and very apt bookend to the show’s 28-episode run. The rez’s medicine man Old Man Fixico has passed away, as the episode opens with a poignant lesson from an inmate.

Reservation Dogs season 3 episode 10: Life, the Universe, and Flaming Flamers

Willie Jack visits her Aunt Hokti in jail. She buys her aunt chips, snacks and fizzy drinks, so they can ostensibly “share a meal” together when she delivers the sad news that her mentor has died.

Willie Jack says that she doesn’t feel like she had enough time with Old Man Fixico, who was passing on the torch of native medicine to his protégé. With the grace and easy wisdom of someone who has spent much time living within the lifeblood of indigenous traditions, Hokti illustrates that Fixico hasn’t exactly passed away.

He lives on as long as stories and memories of him live in the heads of those who cared for him. Albeit this is a grandiose concept, Hokti the prisoner, illustrates this to a noob as best she can: by the chips and snacks.

She puts a chip on each of the other snacks to represent what Fixico taught each person he encountered. This is how his sharing of knowledge empowered him with a kind of immortality.

“It’s how community works,” Hokti explains.

Reservation Dogs season 3 episode 10: Who stays, who goes?

The rest of the episode is simply a community running through its traditions of grief and mourning, yet at the same time, it’s an absolutely fitting capstone to such a captivating and groundbreaking series made by two excellent showrunners: Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi. This episode is arguably one of the best episodes on streaming TV of all time.

Just like the series will arguably be ranked as among the Top 5 for years to come. As a window into a community that is often invisible (at best) and ignored (at worst), the legacy of Reservation Dogs will be studied and dissected by critics and pundits, even as it paves the way for similar entertainment that’s pregnant with meaning and pleasurably well-crafted, too.

As the twentysomething Rez Dogs now face adult challenges, they all get a reckoning. Even as they confront a new death, they have since evolved from their first awkward attempts at dealing with sorrow during the first season when their friend Daniel killed himself.

Bear says goodbye to his spirit guide William Knifeman, telling him that he learned how the burden of leadership doesn’t need to be solely on his shoulders. Willie Jack rests easy in her decision to stay and carry on the profession of medicine man that Fixico has left vacant.

She will be the community shaman and wise woman. Cheese looks like he will also stay, comfortable in drawing comics and playing games.

The local geek culture rep, part-slacker and part-tech whiz. Meantime, Elora has gotten the financial aid she needs to go to college, courtesy of her reunion with her estranged father, Rick.

She bids goodbye to Bear, as they sit on the church pews in front of Fixico’s coffin, hugging each other and confessing their love for one another.

Reservation Dogs season 3 episode 10: Participating in grief and catharsis

Looks like Bev was right as well, as we see when Bear’s mom Rita leaves to go work in Tulsa, Bear and Jackie (formerly the NDN Mafia leader) are seen hugging Rita. Romance for Bear and Jackie?

Bev was spot on in her prediction. One of the traditions I noticed was the men of the community taking turns to literally dig Fixico’s grave.

The women are cooking up a feast as the men work to the tune of Bob Dylan and The Band. Traditions are carried on.

The community becomes stronger even as they lose one of their own. An act of catharsis as long as the Creek nation.

Even Kenny Boy, the owner of the neighborhood junkyard with aspirations of native identity, pitches in and lends his many shovels. Why he has so many digging implements at hand though, is something worth the nerd conspiracy thread.

Reservation Dogs season 3 episode 10: Legacy of the rez dogs

This episode is best experienced with the weight of the rest of the season behind it in mind, in recent memory. By wearing its inspirations on its sleeve and paying homage to its own unique storytelling comfort zone, it has become a unique gestalt of pop culture slacker comedy and native American drama—sometimes fictionalized docu drama.

As we bid goodbye to the rez dogs, I look forward to the other projects that are now free to be made in its wake, showing studios that these kinds of stories are not only entertaining but also highly profitable. I mean, when is that Scalped series coming?

Also, where to score those Flaming Flamers? Thank you Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi, or as they say in these here parts: “Mvto.”

What were the best moments you loved in Reservation Dogs? Let us know in the comments below!

You can watch all three seasons of Reservation Dogs on HULU.