After watching a BBC-produced version of Sense and Sensibility – I think they were hoping to have a Jane Austen series as popular as the Colin Firth/Jennifer Ehle version of Pride and Prejudice – what turned up in my “Hey, you wanna watch this?” queue was a Kevin Costner movie-series-whatever called Horizon. Looked at least somewhat interesting, being set in the trans-Mississippi old wild west, and he did a marvelous period move in The Highwaymen, and dare we hope for a movie-series-whatever which really went for a deep dive into that fascinating period in American history?

At any rate, I assumed that it must be better than that abysmally awful series Texas Rising, which was so bad that we bailed after watching the first episode, when a woman emerged from the crypt of the Alamo chapel after the fall of the presidio to the Mexican army under Lopez de Santa Anna. The crypt of the Alamo chapel … really? Texas history fans who watched every episode out of a masochistic sense of duty told me that it only got worse from there.

Anyway, I watched all of the first chapter of Horizon. Alas. just like Texas Rising, I am giving up on it after the first installment. Really, nothing at all happened in the last twenty minutes to pull all the various incoherent plot threads and random characters with unexplained motivations together. It was a series of brief, disjointed scenes set in widely-separated locations in the far west – a mining camp in Montana, an unsuccessful settlement called Horizon (whose residents are massacred in the first segment) and a US Army fort in what appears to be Apache country, alternating a wagon train of emigrants along the Santa Fe trail. All this taking place while the Civil War is in full swing, which makes the Apache country location for the settlement and the US Army fort and the Santa Fe emigrant train extremely problematic, as the Confederates and the Union armies were engaged in exchanging hot lead festivities for most of that period. There was also a railway being built through there with Chinese laborers … again, during the Civil War? Construction on the Central Pacific didn’t even begin until after the war. Emigrant wagon trains full of civilians going west along the Santa Fe trail, with a war on? In horse-drawn wagons, which seem to be treated as a kind of RV trailer, instead of being packed high to the covers with supplies, and the emigrants camping in tents at night? Well, OK then. At least I didn’t spot any zippers down the back of women’s costumes, and the ladies who have been seen in underthings are wearing shifts under their corsets. (This detail in 19^th century costume is often omitted in historic movies and TV series) Dramatic and somewhat suspenseful scenes were played out at random with hardly any explanation or connection – it was all rather random and pointless, which is a pity. I’m afraid that this series-movie-whatever has fallen into the same old trap of seeing the Wild West as one big indistinct blur, with no regard for geographic specificalities, or for the way in which the trans Mississippi west radically changed over the last half of the 19^th century; as I wrote some time ago, on another muddled movie:

“… to write something true, something authentic about the western experience – you have to do what the creators of The Trail to Hope Rose didn’t bother to do; and that was to be specific about time and place. The trans-Mississippi West changed drastically over the sixty or seventy years, from the time that Americans began settling in various small outposts or traveling across it in large numbers. And the West was not some generic all-purpose little place, where cattle ranches could be found next to gold mines, next to an Army fort, next to a vista of red sandstone, with a Mexican cantina just around the corner. No, there were very specific and distinct places, as different as they could be and still be on the same continent. 1880’s Tombstone is as different from Gold Rush-era Sacramento, which is different again from Abilene in the cattle-boom years, nothing like Salt Lake City when the Mormons first settled there – and which is different again from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s small-town De Smet in the Dakota Territory – or any other place that I could name, between the Pacific Ocean and the Mississippi-Missouri. Having writers and movie-makers blend them all together into one big muddy mid-19th century blur does no one any favors as far as telling new stories.”