Recap of Episode 3 titled “Wrap Thee in Terror” from Season 2 of ‘1923’

“A story about the beginning of Yellowstone” became the new focus for Season 2 of 1923. This means we need to consider Spencer and Alexandra’s baby as a future member of the Dutton family lineage in the series. However, for this idea to come to fruition, the baby must first be born. In the third episode of the second season titled “Wrap Thee in Terror,” Alex experiences the reality of how the American government uses the term ‘mongrel’.

Alex’s initial view of America and New York City is like something out of a movie. Standing on the deck of the ship, she and her fellow immigrants brace themselves against the wind, with Montana visible on the horizon, tantalizingly close. However, as a third-class passenger, Alexandra, a former member of the English nobility escaping her past, must endure scrutiny at Ellis Island from security officials, as well as layers of legal and medical checks. The promising brochures she once read painted a false picture of America as a land of opportunity, revealing it to be a place where humiliation awaited.

During the processing at Ellis Island, the uniformed official scrutinizes Alexandra’s name, refusing to acknowledge her as “Alexandra of Sussex.” Asserting her true identity by proudly stating her name aloud feels like a reclaiming of her individuality. Her arrival is officially documented, marking the introduction of a new generation of the Dutton family in the country’s records. Despite facing physical examinations colored by eugenic theories and racism, Alex fears that her pregnancy might lead to her rejection. Traveling alone, pregnant, and accompanied by a husband whose details seem too good to be true, she must assert her humanity repeatedly to each authority figure until she finally convinces the last official through a poignant recitation of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.

Alexandra departs Ellis Island as air, and shakes her white locks at the runaway sun. She writes to Spencer. “Are we not done proving that we have earned each other? What calamity awaits to keep me from you?” She follows the advice of both a kindly street vendor and a ticket agent at Grand Central. But a shifty-eyed pickpocket has already clocked where she hid her wad of dwindling cash. 

It’s not clear where Alex is writing Spencer, because he’s without an address as she continues her journey into America’s interior. And his brief career as a bootlegger looks to be over. “I’m not dying for a bunch of fucking booze” – somewhere outside Fort Worth, with armed police manning a roadblock ahead, Spencer bails on Luca. He says the route was always a death trap, that Sal Maceo put his cousin on it just to get rid of him, that Spencer would rather restart his walk to Montana than continue on as a Prohibition foot soldier. 

Luca did continue on, and from a distance, Spencer watches as the temperance cops shoot him down. Luca did offer a resonant quote, however, as justification. “They’re family – right or wrong. Look what you do for your family.” Lying back in the switchgrass, wondering about what part of the American sky Alexandra is under, Spencer thinks about everything he would be doing for his family if he was only with them.

It looked pristine, like an oil painting of a landscape in deep winter, until the spokes of an upended wagon’s wheels appeared against the treeline. The latest blizzard to hit Montana has passed, and Jacob and Jack and the cowboys did manage to get a debilitated Zane back to the ranch with his family. But the situation is bleak. The rabid wolf stalking the property has bit Elizabeth and devoured the responding doctor’s nursing assistant, and a dayslong rabies-killing regimen featuring long needles has Elizabeth still determined to leave Montana. “Eight more and I’m done with this place!” she declares, and hollers up a new storm while the shots to her belly are delivered.    

A wolf literally ate the nurse sent to help treat her, and wagon boss Zane is one room over from hers, about to take a doctor’s drill to his skull – with no anaesthesia – just so he can recover enough from his subdural hematoma to stay in this place. You’d think Elizabeth could endure a few hypodermic needles. But she’s adamant about shoving off from the Dutton ranch permanently and rejoining her mother Back East. (Conceivably, Elizabeth would pass Alexandra on the rails as Spencer’s wife headed west.) “If you want to be my husband,” she tells a bewildered Jack Dutton, who’s standing there in his sidearm and goosefeather chaps, “be him in Boston.”

As the Duttons navigate cold, turmoil, and harm, and Spencer continues his fight to find a route to the fam, Alexandra isn’t the only one witnessing America’s ugly side. Marshal Mamie Fossett just got done delivering a warning about respect to Kent and Renaud. But as she and her men observe where the racist marshal and his killer priest companion trampled Comanche children in their so-called noble quest to find Teonna Rainwater, Fossett knows she’ll have to catch up to the posse before they kill again.

Kent and Renaud enact violence with sneering arrogance. These two should realy be in leg irons or trying to catch bullets in their teeth. But worse even than his dogged, murderous pursuit of a young Native American woman who was only defending her dignity is that Kent is not just a blunt instrument. He’s smart. And Marshal Kent has perceived that Teonna, Pete, and Runs His Horse will have hooked on with a band of herding cowboys. (“Cowboys don’t care the color of your skin or what’s ‘tween your legs, only that you can ride.”) The posse will head toward Texas, and the river valley full of cattle where Teonna and the others hide. 

Wait, Texas? Where a certain former lion hunter currently is? Could the Teonna Rainwater chase converge with – and be helped to its end – by Spencer Dutton and his double rifle? Good and bad, anything’s possible in the land of opportunity.       

Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social) is a Chicago-based writer. A veteran of the alternative weekly trenches, his work has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork, The All Music Guide, and The Village Voice.