Dickinson‘s Final Season Goes Big in the Service of Hope
Photo Courtesy of Apple TV+
To be honest, there’s little to say about this third and final season of Dickinson that I didn’t already cover in my reviews of the first and second seasons. Sharp and irreverent, weird and sexy, and just anachronistic enough to have something to say without getting tiresome, Dickinson has been wholly and idiosyncratically itself since the day it premiered.
Does this final season include Emily (Hailee Steinfeld) descending into hyper-realistic daydreams, Lavinia (Anna Baryshnikov) dabbling in ever-weirder performance art, and Austin (Adrian Briscoe) chafing at the disconnect between his heart and his father’s/society’s expectations? Absolutely! Does it feature some of 2021’s most delightfully weird comedians making cameo appearances as some of the late 1800s’ most delightfully weird historical figures? I mean, obviously! Does it weave today’s slang and woke af politics into the social scene of 1862 Amherst? Slay, queen! Of course it does! And so on and so forth down the line, from Emily’s passionate affair with Sue (Ella Hunt) to her parents’ stuffy domesticity to the whole series’ signature, mordant takes on the limitations of “progress” under a white supremacist patriarchy.
And yet, with the inevitable arrival of both the Civil War and Sue and Austin’s first baby, this third and final season of Dickinson nevertheless finds new ground to tread. Now, whether that ground is always emotionally consistent—well, that’s another question, entirely.
But first, the good.
On the Civil War front, we get not only the fruit of several storylines whose seeds were planted in Season 2 (Will Pullen’s “Nobody” arc as one of Amherst’s first major war casualties, Frazer Stearns, included), but also the greatest opportunity the series has given us yet to consider the Black perspective on this particular American moment. Or rather, Black perspectives, plural—a distinction which, unsurprisingly, ends up being critically important both up North (where Instagram’s favorite interviewer and new Season 3 writer, Ziwe, makes a very funny cameo as someone new to the Amherst scene), and down South, where Chinaza Uche’s Henry heads after absconding from Austin’s barn under cover of darkness before their combined role in publishing an independent abolitionist paper could be uncovered at the end of Season 2. That Henry’s lived experience as an educated, Amherst-born freeman ends up crashing into a wall as he tries (and fails) to look cool by swinging a chair around backwards to address the group of Gullah-speaking, formerly enslaved men who make up the 1st South Carolina Volunteers* he’s eventually hired to teach how to read and write is, ultimately, unsurprising. But it’s scenes like this, full of sly visual nods to Hollywood’s rocky history of white savior narratives and unsubtle acknowledgments of its own inherent storytelling biases, that make it clear that Dickinson is using Season 3 to look much deeper than Emily’s rich, white, Northern experience than it managed in either season prior.
(*Of course, having received my formative Civil War education from an American public school in the last gasps of the 20th century, neither the 1st South Carolina Volunteers nor their white commanding officer, Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higgins, played here by Gabriel Ebert, were at all familiar to me before Dickinson brought them to my attention. I didn’t know that the Volunteers were the first federally authorized Black regiment, nor that Higginson, a poet and writer who would himself go on to co-edit the first published volumes of Emily’s poems following her death, was also an activist and abolitionist, and part of John Brown’s Secret Six. That my time spent watching these Season 3 screeners ended up split evenly between taking notes and researching niche figures in American history is just one more indication that Dickinson is going out at the top of *every* game. In other words, Emily fans: Get your research muscles ready!)