Editor's note: The following contains spoilers for Reservation Dogs, Season 1, Episode 5, "Come and Get Your Love."Reservation Dogs’ Deer Lady (Kaniehtiio Horn) is phenomenally creepy and deep, bursting onto the screen in underhanded and erotic ways in Episode 5 of the series’ eight-episode first season while giving one of the show's strongest monologues. That monologue — rather, a conversation she commands a young Big (Bodhi Okuma Linton) to have with her — underscores the series most important themes so far: Indigenous women standing up for themselves, Indigenous (and non-Indigenous) men behaving badly, a fracturing social construct in their rural Oklahoma town, and, to the latter, providing a rationale for the town’s policing force, the LightHorsemen, and their work.

Deer Lady is the series' first genuine antihero and vigilante, an example of what Bear (D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai), the self-proclaimed leader of the Res Dogs, thinks their group should be like (with Devery Jacobs as Elora Danan, Lane Factor as Cheese, and Paulina Alexis as Willie Jack). Big’s early interactions with Deer Lady (that conversation and other chilling things I get to soon) are presented in flashbacks as the reason Big goes into policing. When we meet Big (Zahn McClarnon) present-day, he is the lead LightHorseman. Deer Lady personifies what the Res Dogs and Big want to be and get away from, even if they can’t elucidate it themselves.

Kaniehtiio Horn in Reservation Dogs
Image via FX on Hulu

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Okern, Oklahoma in 1984 is the first time we see her: More accurately, a high-on-himself, testosterone guy in a fancy car sees her, reacting to her hitchhiker's thumb out coupled with a glib head toss, pulling a U-ey and swerving back. Deer Lady is used to attention. Translation: attention is who she is and, we find out, the first step in how she prepares her killings.

Our first close-up is her midsection and crotch area; our POV is the driver’s, leering, as she talks to him. Cue the eerie music (god, it’s good, that Mato Standing Soldier) as they chat, her face now fully framed. Deer Lady flirts through each sentence, a seductive "Hey," a cheeky smile as she self-effaces. She is the best of the Bond villains here; a Charlie’s Angel; a femme fatale. She's traveling out of his way, but wouldn’t you know, he doesn’t mind, and picks her up.

It is so easy, we almost hear her say it. She sneaks one hand behind her back (not that it matters; the driver is still transfixed on her body, but she is not sloppy), pulling out a silver object curved into a horseshoe, sharpened at the tips. When she steps into his car, we see it: two furry, brown hooves, coming out of her bell-bottoms. This was already a perfect scene for its feminine, Indigenous power; then, it goes effortlessly Get Out. Young Big is watching, and when the camera focuses on his expression, he is thrown (that was some crazy, orchestrated shit!), yet calm.

It is almost like Big understands, from that one interaction, what Deer Lady is about. This is why, not much later, when she hands him toilet paper under his stall door at a store when he calls for it, after she slits the necks of two attempted robbers in the front, he takes it. There is an implicit, unstated trust between her and Big; a code of values being exchanged and accepted. Big’s is, "I see you, I get you." Deer Lady’s is, "You’re not one of the bad ones (and that’s fine that you see me because I will never really be seen, haha, but haha in a nice way)." She tells Big, “Be good and fight evil” (and to imagine his grandmother is with him always). Do that, and he will never see her again.

Bodhi Okuma Linton in Reservation Dogs
Image via FX on Hulu

Deer Lady is so enigmatic and good at her job of killing “bad men,” should she stand for more? Or, at the least, be more acknowledged for what she does? That sense of conflict — will there be an acceptance that things are, actually, as they are, and that can be enough? — is central to the Res Dogs’ difficulty to articulate their future in California. After their friend, Daniel (Dalton Kramer), commits suicide, though, they want out even more.

That their dreams are “big” and “Big,” whose raison d'être is Deer Lady herself, is who tries to puts order in the town is intentional. Dreams can be big and so can ideals; but the day-to-day, the relationships carried out, the way the air softens when Elora brings food to her friends or Willie and her father bond at dawn during a hunt, the preciousness of life is what they already have. And so, Deer Lady’s duty is mundane in the sense that there are bad people in the world, just as there are good people, just as there are good moments, good potentials, and bad ones, and crises, and tragedies.

But there is an order to things (circumstances, karmas) that must be maintained, and Deer Lady’s exactness assures this gets done. Each character on Reservation Dogs has their place in portraying a truthful experience of living on a modern-day reservation in rural Oklahoma, from the methheads' black market junk to the police chief’s wins and losses. Deer Lady ends Episode 5 stepping into another car. Actively create the world you believe in — and, when you figure out your role in supporting that world, do it again and again.

Reservation Dogs airs on FX on Hulu.

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