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And yet, what I find interesting about the thing is I don’t think Seth was interested in his return on investment. I do think Seth moral and centered, and I do think he believes that individual character can be influenced and altered. In that sense he’s trusting, and the reward for Seth in the deal would not have been the purse, but to let go not an innocent man, but a man who probably would never have had another run-in with Seth.

In Seth’s head, a man shouldn’t die for allegedly stealing a horse. But as a supervisor of authority, as the town’s commanding constable, Seth must see that the man’s put to death because that’s what the townies expect ought to happen.

Perhaps such senseless barbarianism is the reason Seth wants to reinvent himself in Deadwood. I mean, I can’t imagine he truly decided to quit playing marshal and pack up and move from Montana to the Dakota Territory, so he could make a killing on hip boots.

As we see in the pilot, upon reaching Deadwood Seth can’t put to bed his desires to seek social justice, at least not when it seems right. And that’s why by the end of the episode, he’s murdering a dude with Wild Bill Hickok. The dude, in their eyes, staged the murder of nearly an entire family. He hadn’t, as he had told them, merely witnessed it.

Slaughtering a family and stealing a horse are, obviously, vastly different crimes. And yet, at that time, at least to what Seth had grown accustomed, they both meant death to the accused.

So how about that cast? Hot damn, I can’t get over how much of a who’s who that pilot was for me. I don’t feel I watch all that much television, and yet I had a steady “I know that face, and I know that face” thing happening.

A handful of actors - Dayton Callie and Paula Malcomson for sure; perhaps I’ll discover a few more - later appeared on the still active Sons of Anarchy. Dexter vet Keith Carradine is the aforementioned Wild Bill, a Jack Sparrow type in hair/bandana-situation, but really a cold and reserved, ankle-biting rat. Nothing like Agent Lundy. There’s Timothy Olyphant, as I said, and Molly Parker who recurred on Six Feet Under, and of course Ian McShane.

Gosh, McShane’s Al Swearengen is a piece of work. The brand of guy who’s your friend until he’s your enemy. You cross him just enough and he’ll literally have you killed. In the pilot, he has a friend of his fatally stab another guy in the chest for, you know, nearly compromising a con game he’d set up to play on a traveling business man from New York.

If Swearengen seems at all fair, it’s an act. I don’t know that he’d ever commit to anything that didn’t benefit his interests. He’s obsessively worried, whether outwardly shown or not, about his business and his image. He even carries out steep measures - free rounds on the house; half-price sex with his prostitutes - to laboriously quell the anxiety in his beer and smut hall brought on by the guy who “witnessed” a massacre.

He’s this way, I think, for being the big fish in a small pond. He owns the business everybody knows, and wants to stake claim in. He protects his assets through sheer intimidation. Kind of representative, in a way, of this country. The kicker is his character’s a foreign-born Brit of Manchester.

That Wild Bill’s return to Deadwood seems unsettling to Swearengen is of little surprise to me. Wild Bill embodies a threat to the Swearengen establishment, the Swearengen machine.

That Bill and Seth became such fast friends - I mean, they did shoot and kill a man at the same time - makes me anxious myself about the possible implications.

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