The English

 

Two-thirds of the way through Hugo Blick's extraordinary miniseries The English (Amazon Prime), Emily Blunt, a relocated British aristocrat in the American West of the 1890s, exchanges memories of home with her Pawnee companion, played by Chaske Spencer.

Lady Cornelia shares that she can never leave the perilous killing and thieving of the American frontier for the comforts of her home in England, where she buried her teenaged son after their isolation and exile because of the circumstances of his birth. Her life there was ended, she tells her friend.

Eli, a former scout for the U.S. Calvary, is touched by Cornelia's painful resignation and offers that the locket she wears as a memento of her son IS her home, just like the family totem he carries with him. This, he tells her, allows them to find "home" where they might.

The two embrace, but Cornelia withdraws, running off and stripping down to her undergarments. She covers herself in prairie soil, in what appears to be an attempt at expiation.

It's an important scene that does not play out as viewers might expect. But that can be said for all of Blick's remarkable series. It is fresh and refreshing, and so much more than a conventional Western, with most of its exceptionalness coming from Blick's poetic storytelling and Blunt and Spencer's delivery. They are two souls bound by their desire for revenge and resolution.

The series is brutal and graphic in its depiction of the horrors of the Western expansion and the unbelievable toll taken on the native people and settlers. Evil and menace stretch to the horizon. But Cornelia and Eli try to find peace where they might -- outsmarting many truly despicable characters -- but the prospect of finding lasting peace grows dimmer as the series progresses.

Startlingly good.