Reservation Dog's final episode ends with a funeral. But for series creators Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi, a funeral doesn't have to be a sad affair.
"The word farewell doesn't exist in our language," the spirit William Knifeman says to young Bear. (Yes, spirits are common in the series, as are aliens and other beings.)
It will be a worthy ending to one of the best, funniest, and criminally overlooked, TV series of recent years.
Reservation Dogs is set on a reservation in the home of the Seminole people of Oklahoma. For three seasons, we have followed teenagers Bear, Elora, Cheese and Willie Jack in the aftermath of their friend Daniel's suicide.
It started with them stealing a truck with crisps and continued via a dramatic road trip to California to finally land in a melancholic reflection on aging and homecoming.
Reservation Dogs is a wild series – idiosyncratic, vibrant, and cross-genre. We suddenly run from the mainstream into some uncle's childhood, or the story of how the deadly The Deer Lady got her hooves.
But in retrospect, an elegant whole emerges: a story without love stories that is still about love.
Reservation Dogs is basically a declaration of love for the hard-to-translate English term "community" – community, family.
It tenderly shows how the group takes care of their own: with collective cooking, a hand on the dying person's chest, a failed escape from the madhouse.
Many stories are about pulling, realizing oneself. Here it is about stopping and allowing yourself to be absorbed by a larger whole.
"It's all connected" is the motto of the third season. The focus is on the older generation, not least Uncle Maximus (Graham Greene), a psychotic loner whose return to the sanctuary reminds us that some wounds can only be healed by keeping them open.
And I guess that's what we should take with us: self-realization may not necessarily be over there. But in the homecoming, in cherishing what was already here.