In the end, “Reservation Dogs” reminds us that every final act invites us to begin again

When they’re done well, series finales are slices of wish fulfillment. That’s why so many shows end with weddings and births, life events marking a desirable end to one life chapter with the assurance that what happens next, the part the audience usually doesn’t see, will unfold as it should. “Reservation Dogs” closes with a funeral which, if you’ve been watching this show, is entirely appropriate. One of the best episodes of the series was the second season installment called “Mabel,” named for the grandmother of Elora Danan (Devery Jacobs).

The implied co-leader of the namesake group of friends had run away but didn’t get far, coming back home in time to see off the woman who raised her. Mabel’s story was much bigger than her bond with her granddaughter, though. That episode showed viewers how one life rippled outward to touch an entire community, all of whom showed up in her final hours to eat and laugh together, bringing the spirit of her daughter and Elora’s long-departed mother with them.

Series co-creator Sterling Harjo, who directed and co-wrote the finale “Dig” along with Chad Charlie, encircles the whole third and final season with that spirit, making this 10-episode goodbye feel substantive and the show itself feel whole and complete. That isn’t something one often says about a series that only lasts for three seasons. But “Reservation Dogs” was never the typical TV show — not quite a comedy or a drama, but more like a series of visits that often felt like short films.

Harjo, who has fingerprints on seven of the season’s 10 episodes either as a writer or director, once explained to Salon that he fell in love with movies by watching them with this father. Hence, where other auteur directors have been hailed for making movies about movies, Harjo shows us how those movies bridge generations by recreating their plots in the lives of his characters.

His show’s legacy is and will be massive, having showcased emerging talents like Jacobs, who wrote another biographical episode for her character Elora this season under her birth name Kawennáhere Devery Jacobs as well as directing an episode, while giving other deserving talents their due as the rest of industry catches up. Lily Gladstone, introduced in the second season episode “Offerings” as Aunt Hokti, is already receiving award nominations buzz for her co-starring role in Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon.”  Those who first noticed her work on this show, might have suspected that such honors were only a matter of time.

Season 3 pulls in several cinematic homages, from a horror episode inspired by “Suspiria” to the fifth episode, “House Made of Bongs,” an homage to “Dazed and Confused.” The second episode, “Maximus” is reminiscent of a lighthearted episode of “The X-Files.” These nods serve as a common language connecting older generations to the ones assuming the mantle of responsibility – linking Elora, Bear (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai), Willie Jack (Paulina Alexis) and Cheese (Lane Factor) to the elders and peers surrounding them.

Ending with a funeral, then, is the only sensible way to close a show that was never about a group of young criminals (despite that being the original hook) or expressly about a group of kids.

Their lives were always at their funniest and most touching when their adventures butted up against the people surrounding them – mothers, fathers, uncles, aunties, and elders like Big and Bucky (Wes Studi). Funerals in this Indigenous community are celebrations, reunions where the family net covers many more people than the ones connected by blood. That means we get to hang out one last time with Bear’s mother Rita (Sarah Podemski) and the wry, gum-cracking Bev (Jana Schmieding), along with Teenie (Tamara Podemski), Big (Zahn McClarnon) and Uncle Brownie (Gary Farmer).

Gary Farmer as Uncle Brownie in “Reservation Dogs” (Shane Brown/FX)And if are part of the generation who saw those movies to which Harjo refers in theirs, you probably have more in common with the elders in these stories — including Ethan Hawke’s Rick, appearing in one episode as Elora’s dad — than with its young adventurers. Still, their discoveries remind us what it was like to be young and bewildered about what comes next.

The death bringing everyone together in “Dig” is that of the community’s traditional healer Old Man Fixico (Richard Ray Whitman), a fixture outside the health clinic offering herbal remedies and other medicine he tacitly acknowledges to his apprentice Willie Jack are soul-soothing placebos. Willie Jack visits Hotki in prison (where we first met the character in last year’s excellent “Offerings”) to break the news of Fixico’s passing and receive guidance. Since Hokti can see spirits who lend her advice and share wisdom, and the younger woman feels out of her depth in this new community role, she’s hoping her aunt can help.

What Hokti tells Willie Jack could have easily been meant for an audience that was always smaller than this show deserved, and that is going to miss it deeply. “I know it feels like Fixico is gone, and in a way he is,” Hokti tells Willie Jack. “But he’s also not gone at the same time.”

TV shows leave us all the time. Very few depart on their own terms. “Reservation Dogs” doesn’t merely complete its mission on strategy but does it in a way that completes a circle. To ensure we don’t miss that intention, the finale opens with the local radio playing a rendition of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” a callback to the opening scene of the series where the same DJ plays The Stooges anthem “I Wanna Be Your Dog.” The Rez Dogs were originally motivated to find their purpose after their friend Daniel died by suicide; they’re ending our time with them by stepping into responsibility, having put his spirit to rest in California.

Paulina Alexis as Willie Jack and Lily Gladstone as Hotki in “Reservation Dogs” (Shane Brown/FX)Dressing a body one last time involves getting the details right. Including “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” in the show’s farewell reminds us that there’s ample pleasure in returning to previous seasons and chapters to remind us of everything that connects us to what made Okern, Oklahoma special.

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Many third-season episodes co-star the spirits of loved ones who have died or strange guides such as Bear’s spirit mentor William Knifeman (Dallas Goldtooth), but the subplot that carries the greatest heft involves Graham Greene’s Maximus. Through him, we understand how the people in our lives can be lost without dying, and how it’s always possible to mend those rifts even after they die.

“Even if you’re not seeing them, the quantum thread cannot be disentangled,” Bucky tells Cheese in an earlier episode, when the younger man worries he may be losing his friends, adding, “These are bonds you don’t want to break.”

But the lyrics of A.P. Carter’s funerary folk classic thematically summarize the larger moral of the third and final season’s story — a conclusion that is also the truth of humankind’s story – which is that our previous generations never entirely leave us. We learn lessons from their legacies and the wisdom they pass on, and we gain knowledge from considering their mistakes.

Bear, Elora, Cheese and Willie Jack make it to California and back, and of the four, Elora decides to step out of that circle, as does Rita, while the rest stay. “Reservation Dogs” debuted one year into the pandemic, don’t forget, and these side trips into the spirit realm touch that part of us that remains sensitive to loss and death even as we laugh at the folly of the living. But it also leaves us with the reminder to value community, sending us off “in that good way,” as Uncle Brownie says, affirming that while it’s done, it isn’t truly gone – just waiting for our next visit.

All episodes of “Reservation Dogs” are streaming on Hulu.