Abby, Kate, Calian and Hoyt join agendas; Hoyt and Abby journey to Hays City to gather intelligence on Sheriff Davidson. His aunt Teresa Davidson (Valerie Cruz) appears during the Independence Founders Day celebrations and makes a play to take over Hagan's saloon.
Four episodes in, it looks like we still have a ways to ride on character development. Hopefully Abby will find some firmer basing for her presence. A beautiful woman sashaying off the plains dressed to the nines, taking up residence in the dance hall and integrating seamlessly into town life may be a necessary plot device to kick things off, but compensatory writing should be rendered ASAP. Taking over the school or the postmistress' job might be possible. In addition, though Ms. McNamara's career has been spent mainly in superhero shows and romcoms, she has done period costume work once (2014's "Tom Sawyer"). She probably had the range to lose the CW-West Coast modern girl vibe and move more toward an 1870's persona.
Teresa's appearance hints at a possible matriarchal crime family, and we see something of Kai's backstory; he crossed one of the (immigrant Chinese association) tongs in San Francisco in aiding a brothel escape, and fatalities ensued. Cannot really see a period tong sending out a white enforcer, though.
We do in this episode get a documented date for the series setting - 1870. The street banner reads its the 35th Founders Day In Independence, and the real Independence sprang to life during the Texas Republic period in 1835. As noted before Independence was a substantial university town by the 1840's, and showing a Frontierland town set with one main street and not much else does little for the series' world building. Much could be done with CGI or even the simple 1960's "Gunsmoke" camera angles techinque, which depicted a crowded and sprawling cowtown by lots of closeup action on a wide variety of small, simple sets. Combined with black and white filming, we could at least taste the sensation that we were looking in on Gunsmoke's nominal setting of 1873.
The production value of a saloon musical number gives the episode a notable boost. Hopefully some additional plot complexity is en route.
Four episodes in, it looks like we still have a ways to ride on character development. Hopefully Abby will find some firmer basing for her presence. A beautiful woman sashaying off the plains dressed to the nines, taking up residence in the dance hall and integrating seamlessly into town life may be a necessary plot device to kick things off, but compensatory writing should be rendered ASAP. Taking over the school or the postmistress' job might be possible. In addition, though Ms. McNamara's career has been spent mainly in superhero shows and romcoms, she has done period costume work once (2014's "Tom Sawyer"). She probably had the range to lose the CW-West Coast modern girl vibe and move more toward an 1870's persona.
Teresa's appearance hints at a possible matriarchal crime family, and we see something of Kai's backstory; he crossed one of the (immigrant Chinese association) tongs in San Francisco in aiding a brothel escape, and fatalities ensued. Cannot really see a period tong sending out a white enforcer, though.
We do in this episode get a documented date for the series setting - 1870. The street banner reads its the 35th Founders Day In Independence, and the real Independence sprang to life during the Texas Republic period in 1835. As noted before Independence was a substantial university town by the 1840's, and showing a Frontierland town set with one main street and not much else does little for the series' world building. Much could be done with CGI or even the simple 1960's "Gunsmoke" camera angles techinque, which depicted a crowded and sprawling cowtown by lots of closeup action on a wide variety of small, simple sets. Combined with black and white filming, we could at least taste the sensation that we were looking in on Gunsmoke's nominal setting of 1873.
The production value of a saloon musical number gives the episode a notable boost. Hopefully some additional plot complexity is en route.
