"Godless": A Godforsaken Reduplication of Jigsaw-Puzzle Plotlines About Men in a Town Without Men

Godless, on Netflix, is reputedly about an Old West town occupied entirely by women, with the two major characters a lesbian couple.  Wow, a tv series about a1960s radical lesbian separatist commune!  I shy away from it for several years because of the title -- "godless," keying into the myth that when you are gay, God abandons you.  Plus if it's all !00% women, there won't be any beefcake!  But Bob likes queer representatioon in all of its forms, and we're running out of things to watch, so...

Scene 1: Creede, Colorado 1884.  A stark, foggy landscape.  Howling wind. Ugly Moustache Guy and his posse ride into town.  All of the men have been killed -- some hanged, some shot, and some in a train wreck.  A woman kneels by a body, singing hymns.  

So the town wasn't built as a women-only lesbian feminist commune.  All of the men were killed.

Meanwhile, Young Guy (Jack O'Connell) rides up to an isolated ranch house.  He's been shot in the neck.  A woman and her preteen daughter take care of him.  

Meanwhile, Scary  Old Guy and his possee knock on the door of Elijah Graham, M.D. (Wait -- I thought there were no women in town...  So everyone was killed except the town doctor?).  He's been shot in the arm, and it will have to be amputated.  He introduces himself as Frank Griffin, and says "Don't worry, I won't die.  I've seen my death, and this isn't it."

I'm lost.  Who are these people?  And for a town with no men, there certainly are a lot of men.  

Scene 2: An elderly Paiute woman treats Young Guy by burning his wounds.  Gross!  But at least he has a shirtless shot.

Meanwhile, Yet Another Man in the Town Without Men awakens in an Indian village, with mud or something covering his eyes.  Grosser and grosser!  He walks out of the hut nude -- nice butt and flash of penis -- and complains that the cure isn't working.  

Meanwhile, Elijah has finished amputating the arm of Scary Old Guy (yes, we see the bloody arm).  

And at the Ranch, Young Guy wakes up and tries to dress.

Yet Another Man is wearing a sheriff's badge, so I'll call him Sheriff.  He sees well enough to pick flowers and put them on his wife's grave. 

He's about to die ("my twilight has come"), so he apologizes fro being a screw-up, and for disliking their daughter  Trudy ("but I can't forgive her for what she done to you").  Apparently wife died in childbirth.  

Pan out to the tombstone.  Sheriff's wife died  in 1882, two years before the town lost all its men.  Now we just need to meet Trudy to find out how much time has passed.

I'm actually cheating.  This is the second time I've gone through this episode.  The first time, I had no idea what was going on.  The second time, I'm stopping the streaming and taking notes, and paying attention to seemingly trivial details, and I think I've almost got it figured out.

Scene 3: Sheriff rides into town, where women are working as barbers and carpenters.  They don't seem to like him very much. 

Meanwhile, Young Guy goes outside and gets introduced: Alice Fletcher, her Paiute mother-in-law, and her son Truckee (sorry, they have long hair, so I thought they were a girl -- besides a town with only women)

Sheriff goes home, where Middle Aged Woman berates him for not greeting the Little Girl, who is deaf (I'll bet one of them is his daughter Trudy!) He berates her for wearing Albert's pants and hat -- a woman wearing men's clothes looks ridiculous.  Women do all of the masculine-coded jobs in town, and you're worried about costume?

The cure didn't work -- it just gave him an erection.

Aha!  The woman is Aunt Maggie, so the deaf girl must be Trudy, so it's been about five years since Wife died, or two years since the men were all killed.  

Scene 4: Scary Old Guy and his possee invade a church. (Hey, there are men in the congregation!  I thought....).

 He berates them for committing adultery, fornicating, and not Loving Thy Neighbor.  If they don't change their ways, Roy Goode will come and kill them all.  (I guess Roy Goode is like Krampus)

Scene 5: Night.  Alice from the Ranch is teaching Truckee to read.  Later she goes out to the barn and tells Young Guy that as soon as he's well, he's got to leave.  But he proves that he's good with horses, so she changes her mind.

Meanwhile, Ugly Moustache Guy from Scene 1 and his posse are scouring the hills, looking for Krampus, aka Roy Goode (probably Young Guy).

Back at the Ranch: a young woman shows up with her baby, which has scarlet fever, and there's no doctor in town (What about Elijah? Is the in a different town from the women-only town?).  Alice agrees to use Paiute medicine. 

Young Guy asks how Alice, the Paiute woman, and Truckee ended up on the ranch, and she  tells a long, convoluted story (good, the plot's not complicated enough yet!) about how she came to town to meet her fiancee, but on the way back to the ranch, they were caught in a tidal wave, and he was killed.  That doesn't really answer the question.  And Truckee is obviously from a second marriage, so there's another dead husband, no doubt with another complicated back story.

Scene 6: Ugly Moustache Guy rides into town and stops to flirt with the schoolmarm and stare at a cowboy's bulge.  He introduces himself as the Marshall.   

Next he visits Sheriff McNue (The Blind Sheriff from Scene 2!  If it was another sheriff, I'd be outta here!)

He's looking for Frank Griffin -- the Scary Old Guy who got his arm amputated.  He gives us a plot dump about what happened in Creede  (aha, a different town from the wonen-only town, just to make things confusing!): 

Scary Old Guy and his possee tried to rob a train, but Krampus, aka Roy Goode (aha!) arrived and stole the money.  He also shot Scary Old Guy in the arm (aha!).

Two members of his gang (apparently regulars, played by Matthew and Russel Dennis-Lewis) started to rape a young woman, so the townsfolk grabbed them and tried to lynch them.  Scary Old Guy didn't like this, so he and his posse killed everyone in town.

Ok, so we have three towns:

1. Creede, where everybody was murdered. They made it look like men only in Scene 1 in order to confuse us.

2. Unnamed town with Elijah and the church.

3. Unnamed town with no men except the Sheriff , the Undertaker who plays chess with him, and the unnamed cowboy with the bulge.  What happened to the men?  Maybe the tidal wave that killed Alice's fiancee?  

I went back and searched for the name of  Town #3.  If you freeze frame when Sheriff enters, you see the name on a building in the distance -- LaBelle. Or it could be the name of a store.

Scene 7:  At the taven, the Marshall discovers what happened to almost all of the men in Town #3 (LaBelle, probably) -- mining accident.  Nothing to do with the dead people in Scene 1 or the tidal wave in Alice's story.. Then why did I sit through all of those plotlines twice?

Scene 8: Sheriff rides up to the Ranch to ask about the stranger Alice has living with her. Krampus admits to being Roy Goode, who stole the train money from Scary Old Guy, so his posse would chase him and not kill everyone in the town.  A noble act, but Sheriff arrests him anyway.

If we have a sheriff, why do we need a marshall, too? They have the same job.  

Last scene: Marshall looks down on a town (I think LaBelle)  and says "God help you folks."

God help us for sitting through this twie, plus freeze framing, to figure out what's going on.  Why three towns, and the one you think it is, it isn'?  Why two tragedies -- or three, if Alice's tidal wave is something different.  A marshall and a sheriff/  Two bad guys, of whom one might not be bad? Why reduplicate the complexity?  Thisi isn't entertainment, it's homework.

And where are the lesbians?