Stick To Your Guns: Godless

The Wild West. Long cuts of orange landscapes. A disillusioned law man who has seen too much hurt. A morally ambiguous lone outlaw. Wise elderly native americans, and a powerful gang that holds sway in town. Does this sound familiar? It oughta! These are the familiar archetypes of the western. All of these tropes and more can be found in Godless. Boy, I feel a bad wind blowing through this here blog post.

Frank Griffin is the leader of a ruthless gang what lynched the entirety of the town over. The brutal nature of this attack isn’t played down in the slightest; a small boy is shown swinging in the dry breeze, hanged by his thin child’s neck. This view is seen by our sheriff who looks hauntedly up at the boy, alone in a now ghost town. Roy Goode is the lone outlaw what double crossed Griffin and holed up in La Belle, the town our show takes place in.

A major plot point of the show is that this town is populated nearly entirely by women, as the men all died in a mining accident. This fact is advertised in Netflix’s description of the show. Despite this, the first episode’s narrative manages to be driven by exclusively the happenings of the few men. I appreciate that the “woman-town” gimmick isn’t played up to the extreme, but I am surprised at how man centric the plot is. Being that it is 2017, I expected that a show about a town of women would feature more important strong female roles. So far, the multitude of women have been support characters to the men.

Griffin storms the town church and tells all of its patrons that, for the love of god, they had better not be hiding Roy Goode. Lest the town be razed to the ground. Goode is taken in by a woman and her child, to whom he is very gentle and kind. She doesn’t know who he is. However, we find out that he has killed at least a dozen men. I love this. There is so much appeal in a character who is more complex than right and wrong.

From the first episode, conflict is coming to a tee. A shoot out approaches. Goode admits who he is to the law, despite this meaning his inevitable hanging, for protection from Griffin. The sheriff tracks down available gunmen to side with the law, as Griffin is out for revenge. And blood.

Suffice it to say Godless isn’t doing anything new with it’s narrative. Its derivative, and it certainly colors in the lines it sets out for itself. It knows what genre it is going for. It paints an entertaining adventure despite the fact that it’s paint by numbers. In fact, the surety that the show has in its direction allows it to execute these well-worn tropes very effectively. In a time when every show is attempting to brandish a flashy new gimmick on otherwise used up plots, an honest return to form is comforting and welcome. Godless, like its gritty lead characters, sticks to its guns.