The Wonderfully Strange Barkskins Examines the Complications of Frontier Life

I will be the first to admit a hesitation at starting Barkskins. The National Geographic series, based on the Annie Proulx novel of the same name, focuses on a small group of settlers in “New France” (more or less Quebec) in the 1690s. The limited series, running eight episodes, looked dour, violent, gritty and all of the things I haven’t been looking for in my TV watching lately. It’s not that I want to only watch happy shows, but my personal limit on viewing mouldering corpses has been lowered in recent months.

However! Barkskins proves, fairly early on, to have just enough weirdness to balance out the darkness and keep me in its thrall. Yes, there are mouldering corpses, and yes there are lots of dirty, bearded men fighting and spitting at each other. But while Barkskins is dark, it’s not grueling. The tales it tells are worth investing in, even though the final episode hardly feels like an end.

The first herald of Barkskins’ charming strangeness is David Thewlis’ Claude Trepagny. Keep in mind, once again, that we’re dealing with New France—most of the inhabitants of the town and surrounding areas are played by British actors with French accents. Some are a little outrageous, but it’s another sign that the series has just an edge of camp to it. Trepagny, however, has more than an edge of camp; he embodies it. He lives on the outskirts of a town that barely tolerates him, in a large stone manor house with an enormous amount of land he refers to as his “doma.” More importantly, he has a cane with a tiny skull on the end of it that he wields with abandon, likes to sing as he tramps through the woods, and prays to an old log and a bowl of hair.

Barkskins begins with the eccentric Trepagny taking ownership of two indentured servants, the hardworking Rene Sel (Christian Cooke) and the rat-like Charles Duquet (James Bloor). The men’s paths diverge almost immediately, and while Rene, Charles, and their descendants are at the heart of Proulx’s novel, they are but two small parts of this story. The defining act of NatGeo’s series is the massacre of settlers near the town, supposedly by a local Iroquois tribe. The perpetrators are then hung from a tree in a nearby lake, sparking the beginning of a potential war between the Iroquois and the French. All of this unrest is, it should be said, to the benefit of the Hudson’s Bay Company, a powerful, ruthless fur-trading British corporate empire.

And yet, an agent of Hudson’s Bay Company, Hamish Goames (Aneurin Barnard), is as close as we get to a main protagonist in Barkskins. He and his companion, Yvon (the always excellent Zahn McClarnon), are searching for a missing member of the company, but soon become embroiled in the town’s other many dramas and Hudson’s Bay’s own machinations. Hamish just doesn’t look like a protagonist: he has long, dark hair, wears a black hat at all times, and wraps himself in a black cape atop dark clothing. His skin is pale and his large eyes are the only hint of an expression from him. But in this gothic garb Barnard somehow imbues Hamish with the energy of a 17th century detective who, frankly, deserves his own spinoff alongside the sardonic Yvon.