film / tv / substack / social media / lists / web / celeb / pajiba love / misc / about / cbr
film / tv / substack / web / celeb

die-spencer-1923.jpeg

About the Ocean-Set Cliffhanger On This Week's '1923'

By Dustin Rowles | TV | February 5, 2023 |

By Dustin Rowles | TV | February 5, 2023 |


die-spencer-1923.jpeg

After a month-long midseason break, Paramount+’s 1923 returned this week to begin airing the back half of the first season (the streamer announced this week that it has also picked up a second season of the series). I had expected a time jump after the midseason finale to account for the months it would take for Harrison Ford’s Jacob Dutton to recover from his injuries and Spencer Dutton to make his way to the ranch from Africa.

That is not what happens, however. 1923 will track Jacob’s recovery and Spencer’s journey from Africa to Montana, assuming that Spencer survives. That’s the question lingering at the end of this week’s episode when the captain of the tug boat (played by Peter Stormare) taking Spencer and Alexandra from Africa to the Suez canal dies while manning the boat. Without the captain of the boat, Spencer cannot prevent it from crashing into a ghost ship (a ship abandoned by its passengers and crew). The episode ends with Cara Dutton (Helen Mirren) receiving a cable from Spencer saying that he was on his way home juxtaposed with a shot of Spencer’s tugboat face down in the ocean, the fate of its occupants unknown.

Did Spencer and Alexandra survive? It’s a hell of a cliffhanger, especially for a series that is not afraid to kill off characters, and now that we know Elizabeth is pregnant with Jack Dutton’s kid, we also know that the Dutton family line could continue without Spencer. There is no preview for next week’s episode to put our minds at ease about the fate of Spencer, but there is one shot of a shirtless Spencer — not in this episode — taking aim at a shark with a shotgun. That means he survives at least long enough for that to happen.

Moreover, in the first episode of the season, Elsa Dutton’s narrator also said that only one of James Dutton’s children would live to see “his children grown” and “carry the fate of the family through the depression and every other hell of the 20th century.” Spencer is James’ only surviving child at this point (John Dutton was killed in episode four, and Elsa during the events of 1893), so he will clearly survive and carry the family through the depression. That does not answer, however, whether Alexandra will survive. It’s possible that Spencer will return to Montana alone.

Meanwhile, back in Montana, Jacob is slowly recovering; Jack and Elizabeth are unofficially married (and Elizabeth is pregnant), and a man named Donald Whitfield (Timothy Dalton) has fancy electronic appliances and plans to buy the Dutton ranch. He thinks that Cara Dutton will be dying to sell it to him after a rough winter. Oh, and John Dutton’s wife, Emma — too grief-stricken over the death of her husband — took her own life. Another Dutton bites the dust.

Elsewhere, Teonna Rainwater is on the run from the folks running the Catholic boarding school for Indigenous children (which is an actual thing that actually happened). She encounters Hank (Michael Greyeyes), an alumnus of another boarding school, and he is going to take Teonna and hide her from the school leaders who want Teonna dead (they have already murdered her closest friend).

Interestingly, when Teonna asks whether they should run to Canada, Hanks says that it’s even worse there. He’s not wrong. Things for Indigenous people were awful in America (and continue to be) but somehow, even worse in Canada, where the residential boarding schools were not only more widespread, they were operated by the federal government and continued to run through the 1970s. To Canada’s credit, they are more apologetic, have made efforts to educate their citizens about the schools, and there’s even a national holiday, Truth and Reconciliation Day (or Orange Day) to recognize the legacy of the Canadian Indian residential school system.