‘Reservation Dogs’ Recap: Acid Trip or Alien Encounter?
This post contains spoilers for this week’s episode of Reservation Dogs, “House Made of Bongs,” now streaming on Hulu.
Earlier this season, Bear’s new friend Maximus showed him home movies from Maximus’ own teenage years, and it was hard to look at those images and not imagine a Seventies version of Reservation Dogs. We no longer need to imagine it, though, as “House Made of Bongs” fully embraces the idea, giving us a version of this series cross-pollinated with Dazed and Confused.
It is 1976 in Okern, and the last day of school for the teenage Maximus (Isaac Arellanes) and his friends — who are, conveniently, all younger versions of characters we already know. So Maximus — or Chebon, as he prefers to be called at this age — is crushing hard on Mabel (Shelby Factor), who will later become Elora Danan’s grandmother. Mabel’s best friend is Irene (Quannah Chasinghorse), aka Cheese’s fake grandmother and current guardian. If Mabel is around, that of course means we get a teenage version of Uncle Brownie (Nathan Alexis), and the crew is rounded out by Mato Wayuhi as a younger Bucky, the would-be physicist played in the present-day by Wes Studi. Plus, we see that Maximus is estranged from his cousin Fixico (Josiah Wesley Jones), who will age into the medicine man who hangs out in front of the clinic.
It could feel contrived that all of this episode’s significant characters are Muppet Babies versions of the show’s elders — and that Bear and Maximus are connected by more than just the former randomly stumbling onto the latter’s property. But nothing on Reservation Dogs is ever purely coincidental, and one of the recurring motifs of the show is about how small the reservation feels. As it is, rez life in America’s bicentennial year looks less sparse than what we see of contemporary Okern, where it often seems as if Bear’s crew and Jackie’s are the only teenagers to be found.
More importantly, it’s valuable to see characters we know so we can better understand the limits of both their dreams, and of the 2023 characters. Bucky, for instance, wants to do great things with science, but close to 50 years later, he’s a folk artist who sleeps on benches, and whose connection to physics comes mainly from reading books about string theory. The Brownie of today is essentially the Brownie of 1976, and that guy doesn’t seem to want anything more. But Irene thinks about political activism, and instead is still hanging around Okern. Mabel got to be a mama like she wanted, and then a grandma, but she also suffered a huge loss along the way when Elora’s mother died. And Maximus never got to be either a filmmaker or the patriarch of a huge family.
It’s his story that’s central to “House Made of Bongs.” For all the Seventies atmosphere (including a killer soundtrack that avoids repeating the same hits you hear in every movie and show set in this era), the episode is ultimately a sad origin story for the mentally unstable loner Bear met in “Maximus.” He wants nothing to do with Fixico, to the point where he would rather spend the summer living in his boarding school dorm(*) than stay with his extended family. He and Mabel are growing close, but he still feels at a remove from the rest of the group, and often seems more comfortable interacting with them through the lens of his movie camera than simply talking.
(*) The episode’s opening scenes at the school provide an interesting contrast to both the glimpses we’ve seen of Bear and the others in school, and to the monstrous place that gave birth to Deer Lady. Irene complains that the boarding school is inherently anti-Native, but the one teacher we meet is Native. And even if the structure of the place clashes with Native culture in assimilationist ways, there’s also no institutionalized abuse going on. And on the whole, the school feels much more vibrant and useful than the present-day one.
Yet despite this, there’s a sense that Maximus/Chebon might have turned out fine if not for what happens at the end of the episode. After dropping acid with the group, he winds up behind the wheel of Brownie’s car, struggling to stay awake while driving his friends home from the party. And while the rest of them are passed out, he has a close encounter of the third kind, not only seeing a UFO flying overhead, but getting to speak to one of the “star people” he’s so obsessed with as an old man.
Is this real? Is it just a bad trip? As with so many of the supernatural elements on Reservation Dogs, the episode allows for both interpretations. But what is not open to debate is that Maximus is the only one who sees this strange visitor, and that he hears the star person declare himself a relative. Considering the vulnerable, isolated place in which Maximus finds himself, it’s not hard to imagine him feeling desperate for some kind of familial connection that does not involve Fixico. But it’s also not hard to draw a line straight from this bizarre moment in 1976 to the guy flitting in and out of a mental hospital in 2023. He alone sees this. He alone needs to believe in this. And while his friends obviously care about him, and are worried about his current state, they are also teenagers, with their own immature concerns. Anything Maximus has to say to them about the star people would at best inspire gentle concern, if not outright teasing, that would leave him feeling even more alienated.
Because Reservation Dogs is so rarely serialized outside of everyone’s ongoing grief about Daniel, I never expected to return to Maximus, either in the present or the past. But what a great decision the creative team made to turn that small glimpse into its own story.