Zahn McClarnon as Joe Leaphorn in 'Dark Winds' season four, episode eight.

Michael Moriatis/AMC

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[This story contains spoilers from the Dark Winds season four finale, “Ni’ Hodisxos” (The Glittering World).]

Heading into the final episode of Dark Winds season four, which aired Sunday, things were looking pretty bleak for Joe Leaphorn and Billie, the teenager he and the Navajo Tribal Police have been trying to protect all season long. Irene Vaggan (Franka Potente) proved to be a worthy adversary for Leaphorn, and an unpredictable one.

After abducting Leaphorn (Zahn McClarnon) and Billie (Isabel DeRoy-Olson) in the penultimate episode, Vaggan held them in her bunker as sort of a dollhouse family, trying to manipulate them into pretending the kind of filial bonds she’d never experienced.

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In the end, Joe’s quick thinking and observation allowed him to free Billie and himself and finally arrest Vaggan. He also unraveled Vaggan’s plot to have her boss, mobster Dominic McNair (Titus Welliver), cleared through false testimony. Chee (Kiowa Gordon), meanwhile, found healing from his ghost sickness after the whole community turned out for his ceremony.

But just when it looked like Joe was ready to ride off into the proverbial sunset of retirement, there was another shocking turn: Gordo Sena (A. Martinez) had been murdered. Earlier in the episode, Sena had told Leaphorn that he wished he hadn’t retired himself, saying he wanted to die with his boots on, and mentioned that he had been digging into some old, unsolved cases.

THR talked separately with showrunner John Wirth and the show’s stars about all the resolutions from the finale — and everything that’s still not right on the Navajo reservation as we look forward to season five.

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In Tony Hillerman’s book The Ghostway, which inspired this season, Vaggan was a man. In the show, she was a woman with an unsettling fascination with Leaphorn. Why the change?

JOHN WIRTH [SHOWRUNNER] [In the novel,] the character of Vaggan is very much like Colton Wolf that we did in season two, played beautifully but Nick Logan, so my first thought was: This character should be a woman. We had lots of conversations about if that’s believable that in 1972, you have a psychopath who works as an assassin for a guy who’s running a gang in San Pedro. But we just decided to buy into it, and we created a backstory that made sense for her in terms of being raised in Germany during the war.

Her grandfather and father were Nazis, and they escaped to South America, and so they were determined that she would be the one to usher in the Fourth Reich and gave her all this training. Then when she had to flee from South America to California, she realized that “I have skills that I could use in this underworld and make some money.” That’s where it all started.

She also was fascinated with these novels when she was growing up during the war, by a writer named Karl May. They were fantasy novels about the Southwest and Native American tribes, and so she had identified with a couple of characters in that book and had fallen in love with a couple of warriors, one warrior character in particular. So, when she finds herself on the reservation on a job for Dominic McNair and runs into Joe Leaphorn just by accident in the trading post [back in the first episode], it’s a surprise to her that she sees standing, right in front of her, in the flesh, the man of her dreams. That’s when the obsession starts, and as you see throughout the course of the season that obsession grows to a pretty dramatic place.

Isabel Deroy-Olson as Billie Tsosie and Frank Potente as Irene Vaggan in Dark Winds season four.

Michael Moriatis/AMC

Why does Vaggan go to the strange lengths she does to coerce Billie and Joe into playing family instead of killing them?

FRANKA POTENTE [IRENE VAGGAN] She has all these ideas of family, which she never had. In her mind, she’s just fabricating this narrative that culminates into, it’s like a play that she’s putting on where she’s like, “You’re going to be the dad and I’m going to be the mom, and she’s going to be the kid, and we’re going to live here in this weird bunker situation. We’re going to eat like a family.” Irene is kind of putting together a play, and it’s for her. She wants everyone to like it, but it’s like, “I want to play family.”

[Later, when she eventually tries to remove Joe and Billie’s bonds] she feels safe enough in this weirdness that she created that she feels like she’s known him for a while now. It’s a gift to herself that she feels she&rsquo

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