Longmire: The Complete Third Season Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.5
Video		5.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.0
Overall		4.5

Longmire: The Complete Third Season Blu-ray Movie Review

Unquiet Spirits

Reviewed by Michael Reuben March 8, 2015

(Spoiler alert: The following assumes that the reader has seen the first two seasons of Longmire and contains major spoilers for those who haven't. Anyone new to the show should go here for a spoiler-free review of the Blu-ray set for Seasons One & Two.)

The tribulations of the superb TV drama Longmire, to say nothing of its eponymous hero, reflect the troubled state of series television today. Consistently the most popular scripted series on the A&E network, Longmire was nevertheless canceled after its third season, either because A&E didn't own the rights or because the audience, while substantial, didn't skew toward the younger demographic coveted by advertisers (or possibly for both reasons). But that wasn't the end of the story, because cable and broadcast networks are no longer the only game in town. Production company Warner Horizon successfully shopped their prestige product to Netflix, home of House of Cards and Orange Is the New Black, which is expected to release the fourth season of Longmire later this year.

Good thing, too, because the show's third season ended on a stunning cliffhanger that, depending on how the Longmire creative team chooses to resolve it, could take the contemporary Western in a variety of new directions. The only certainty is that Netflix will need all the bandwidth it can muster as soon as the new season becomes available, because Longmire fans are desperate to know what happened in the final moments of Season Three's last episode.

Like the first two seasons, Season Three is being released through the Warner Archive Collection ("WAC"). While there are no extended episodes in this set of ten, the audio and video quality remains consistently fine, and the production team has included a superior featurette examining the season's unifying themes.

The fierce mountain storm through which Wyoming Sheriff Walt Longmire (Robert Taylor) battled his way in the opening episode of Season Two had expanded into a spiritual gale of epic proportions by the season's end, sweeping all of the characters helplessly before it. By the season conclusion, Walt had discovered that the Denver meth addict, Miller Beck, who had murdered the sheriff's wife three years earlier, was not a random mugger but a paid assassin, who was then killed to conceal the identity of whoever hired him. The Javert-like police detective, Fales (Charles S. Dutton), who was determined to tie Walt to Beck's murder, had just arrested the sheriff's best friend, Henry Standing Bear (Lou Diamond Phillips), for the crime, after finding damning evidence at Henry's bar and restaurant, the Red Pony. And Walt's daughter, Cady (Cassidy Freeman), was still recovering from the traffic accident that nearly killed her while she was providing rides to senior citizens on election day, when her father was re-elected sheriff against a challenge from his own deputy, Branch Connally (Bailey Chase).

But that's not all. Branch, who is still in love with Cady, even after she ended their affair, had discovered that Cady's car was deliberately sabotaged. Fingerprint evidence led him to David Ridges (David Midthunder), an employee of budding casino magnate, Jacob Nighthorse (A Martinez), the financial backer of Branch's unsuccessful campaign for sheriff. But when Branch and Walt went to Ridges' home, they found a suicide video in which Ridges announced his intention to leave this life so that he could travel in time as a "shadow warrior". At a funeral pyre on the "rez", where Ridges' body was ritualistically cremated, Branch tried to take samples for DNA testing—and that is where Walt found him on the ground, bleeding from two bullets in the gut, gasping that he'd been shot by a dead man.

As for Deputy "Vic" Moretti (Katee Sackhoff), she perched vigilantly on her stairway facing the front door, pistol in hand, awaiting the next attack from an obsessed stalker, Ed Gorski (Lee Tergesen), a former colleague from the Philly P.D. who can't decide whether he's in love with Vic or wants to ruin her life. (For Gorski, there may be no difference.)

Longmire's third season is a master class in sophisticated narrative construction, equal in that respect to another tour de force of episodic TV, Breaking Bad, as the writers interweave multiple strands of overlapping plots. As the Absaroka County Sheriff's office continues to manage its daily responsibilities, Walt must now begin to reevaluate incidents he thought he understood. His wife's murder, his daughter's near-fatal accident, Henry's arrest and incarceration and Branch's shooting now appear to be the work of a single mastermind whose intended victim is Walt himself. Since the villain apparently wants to make Walt suffer by targeting those around him, Walt focuses on criminals he has pursued or put away. Who is currently free? Who has the intelligence, patience and resources to conceive and execute such a devious plan?

An obvious candidate emerges in the person of Malachi Strand (Graham Greene), the former Cheyenne reservation police chief whom Walt arrested and saw convicted for transforming his position into an extortion racket. (The prickly Mathias (Zahn McClarnon), with whom Walt routinely locks horns, is Malachi's successor.) As soon as Henry arrives in prison, Malachi ensures that he is regularly beaten and harassed by the Native American inmates. He offers to stop Henry's abuse if Walt will testify favorably at his upcoming parole hearing. Malachi's access to money and power seems only to have grown inside prison, and it doesn't take long for Walt to discover a connection between Malachi and Jacob Nighthorse. But Malachi seems more focused on Henry and the Red Pony (which he wants to buy) than on Walt.

As Walt revisits old adversaries, including a wild-eyed survivalist named Chance Gilbert (Peter Stormare), who has declared his land a sovereign nation, he finds himself questioning whether his life in law enforcement has been worth the sacrifice, so much of which has been borne by others. "If you do the job right, Walt", says his predecessor and Branch's uncle, Lucian Connally (Peter Weller), "by the time you put down your sheriff's badge, you're a wanted man. I always figured that I'd die by violence or die alone. That's the price we pay for our ideals." Walt's reply is a succinct expression of the guilt gnawing at him throughout Season Three. "I made my peace with that", he tells Lucian, "but everyone around me paid for those ideals."

Branch, who shared Walt's ideals, returns to work after nearly dying of his wounds, but he is no longer the same self-possessed lawman we first met when Longmire began. Haunted and traumatized, Branch is obsessed with proving that David Ridges is still alive, and that it was Ridges who shot Branch and nearly killed him. But all the evidence points to Ridges being dead, and anytime Branch thinks he's found something to the contrary, it disappears. Branch will eventually become so violent and uncontrollable in his quest to find Ridges that he crosses the line into criminal acts, shielded from arrest only by the intervention of his powerful father, Barlow (Gerald McRaney). He will alienate his friends and colleagues and even consider leaving law enforcement. He will become the very opposite of the Branch Connally who nearly beat Walt in the election campaign of the previous season.

With Det. Fales pushing for Henry to be brought to trial as fast as possible, and Cady, who is acting as Henry's defense attorney, working as hard as her father to investigate avenues of defense, Season Three of Longmire seems to be hurtling toward a resolution in its last two episodes. As one revelation follows another, as enemies finally show themselves and long-buried truths are revealed, we appear to be nearing a conclusion. And then, in the stunning final minutes of episode 10, "Ashes to Ashes", everything we thought we knew gets turned upside down in a way that makes you want to re-watch prior seasons to check whether it still hangs together. (It does.) The last thing Walt sees before the closing titles is an owl. He knows it's a bad omen.

Longmire: The Complete Third Season Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Longmire continues to be shot on the Red Epic and Red MX digital cameras. Most of Season Three was shot by series veterans J. Michael Muro and Cameron Duncan, both of whom worked on the pilot. The series continues to take full advantage of the spectacular New Mexico locations to provide both visual splendor and the larger sense of the spiritual world that is an integral part of life to so many of Longmire's characters, including the sheriff himself.

The image on WAC's three 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray discs (one BD-25 and two BD-50s) is consistent with that on the previous six-disc set for Seasons One and Two: excellent detail, deep and solid blacks, rich and saturated colors across a wide and varied spectrum. The Blu-rays of Longmire continue to rank among the best TV Blu-rays I have seen.

Also as on the previous set, the average bitrate for each episode varies from disc to disc, but WAC has maintained its practice of using all of the available space, so that the lowest average bitrate comes in at around 28.48 Mbps, which is excellent for digitally originated material.

Longmire: The Complete Third Season Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Here again, the audio mix for Season Three, presented in lossless DTS-HD MA 5.1, follows the style established in previous seasons. Sounds of nature are frequently present in the surrounds, and a number of key events provide opportunities for sonic enhancement. A scene in the season opener in which Walt informs Jacob Nighthorse that David Ridges has been seen is accompanied by the loud intrusion of floodlights being switched off, as if by unseen spirits. Sounds of prisoners menacing Henry come from a variety of directions. A sudden conflagration (about which I cannot be more specific) is loud and searing. The various phases of the Miss Cheyenne Nation pageant, with their chants and music, are especially vivid. A series of encounters (again, I can't be more specific) with Chance Gilbert and his followers are loud, aggressive and unsettling. All of this has been effectively underscored by David Shephard, who never seems to run out of ideas for mixing old-style Western guitars with modern thriller rhythms.

Longmire: The Complete Third Season Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• The Ghost in the Storm (disc 2) (1080p; 1.78:1; 30:03): Executive producers Greer Shephard, Hunt Baldwin and John Coveny discuss the underlying themes of Season Three, particularly the notion of spirits from the past that haunt our actions in the present, for good or ill. Interviews with the cast are also included. Spoiler alert: This featurette reveals most major plot developments in Season Three and should not be viewed until after the episodes.

Longmire: The Complete Third Season Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

From the beginning, Longmire was clearly something more than a police procedural in Western garb, but in Season Three it has revealed itself to be a finely wrought morality play about some of the most fundamental questions that an individual faces in his or her lifetime. During a court hearing seeking bail for Henry, Cady Longmire calls a character witness who explains to the judge that the Cheyenne define "family" based not on blood but on loyalty. As one looks back over Longmire's third season—indeed, over the entire series to date—one can see these same issues being revisited over and over by different people, in different situations, often with different results. Loyalty in Absaroka County turns out to be a rare and precious commodity, trust even more so. How much of either is left will be a question for the upcoming Season Four. Highly, highly recommended.