Strange Empire’s penultimate episode “End Days” answers a couple of age-old questions. How to earn twice as much? Kill your fellow bounty hunter. How to shake an unrequited love? Literally rip out someone’s heart in front of her. Another lesson is never trust a writer: Fiona’s story set the bounty hunters on Kat’s trail and opened Slotter’s eyes to what the women knew.

The episode also explores the grey areas between violence in the service of good or evil. While Slotter’s actions tend toward the black, what of Rebecca, forced at gunpoint to do that which she longed to do: see a living heart. What of Kat, who preemptively killed a surveyor trying to take her people’s lands, when we — and her daughters — see later the aftermath of such an exodus.

So close to the season (I refuse to think series) finale, the nascent town’s fragile existence is clear. Born as a confluence of dispossessed people, whether by force or choice, Janestown hasn’t yet reached that tipping point of permanence. Slotter has brought another shipment of whores in and a militia to drive the other women and the miners out in a bid to keep hold over his empire with a more pliable population. One that isn’t armed and in possession of Sloat’s confession. Slotter confiscates the arms and the confession, leading Kat to go in search of guns for trade in Indian lands.

The Janestown residents had arrived by stagecoach to Station House in Montana before the slaughter, never expecting to stay, but this is their only home now and most are determined to fight for it, through violence or through  unusual ingredients in the stew.

Set a few years after the end of the US Civil War to the south, a couple of years after the birth of Canada to the east, this Strange Empire collects the misfits who belong nowhere else, surrounded by Blackfoot pushed into Cree territory and the cavalry who want them all eradicated.

Isabelle seems to be a victim of the slave trade, bought by Cornelius Slotter at age 12 and passed around between men. She hopes to use this truth to drive another wedge between the Slotter men — in a beautifully shot scene with her estranged husband submerged in a reflective bath — and John’s heart isn’t so black as to trivialize her story. Nor is it as black as his father’s, who is not only revealed as someone who bought and raped a child, but treats Ruby — who is attempting to take Isabelle’s place in the house and in his bed — with contempt.

Cornelius wants to team with John to “crush the seeds of socialism” (spoiler alert Cornelius: you’re going to lose that battle in the long run on this side of the border) but John isn’t ready yet to align with father or wife. As Kat says, he’s sound in his own way, still seeming confident he’ll retain control over Janestown.

With wily Isabelle grifting her way to other men’s wallets and cookie jars, Slotter fixates on  Rebecca, using scarce food as target practice when teaching her to shoot. Morgan warns her to leave, but Rebecca knows he won’t let her go without hunting her down. “I am protected,” she says when Morgan offers to stay and protect her, demonstrating her awareness that she has aligned herself with Slotter, even if she isn’t fully aware of what that means. “I am not like you” she tells him. “But you are complicit with me,” he answers.

Slotter has given her the means to protect Morgan when she is raped by the bounty hunter, and in a twisted version of Pygmalion, he forces her — gives her permission to — conduct a near-autopsy on a living man. Morgan is horrified, and so am I, but Rebecca as usual doesn’t seem to fully process the taboos of her actions.

Kat finds her missing husband’s other glove while trading with the Indians, another dead end clue in her search. Marshal Mercredi intuits her reasons for bringing arms back and implores her not to sacrifice herself, but she and the other women start the showdown at Janestown … to be continued, presumably, in the finale next week.

Chekhov is quoted as saying that if you have a gun on stage in the first act, it must go off in the second. Well, Strange Empire‘s guns are starting to blaze.

To mix my metaphors horribly, all the threads we’ve seen since the inciting incident of the show — the slaughter of the men — are coming together into what looks very much like a noose, as secrets are revealed and consequences start to unfold.

There’s a tangle of race relations in this strange empire, too. Kat is eager to see John Slotter hanged for killing the smithy, but Marshal Mercredi points out no jury will convict him of killing a black man. Justice will only be served if Kat can connect him to that slaughter of white men. And how disturbing is it to watch a scene between two half-Native characters forced to value white lives above others?  They also happen to be two very attractive characters doing that post-coitally.  At least there’s some solace.

So Kat lets Slotter free from his cage: “Let all hell break loose, I suppose.” She and Briggs plot to get Isabelle on their side to help implicate him, and Isabelle “needs pressing from within that house.”

Pressing she gets. Though Kat doesn’t make good on her promise to reveal that the baby wasn’t born a Slotter, Ruby does. She was Cornelius’ lover and the mother of his child, and exchanged blood with his son. “I will not turn on John Slotter. We are wove together.” She turns on Isabelle instead, who is brutally beaten and discarded by father and son. They in turn bond over her betrayal, cementing the Slotters as the most dysfunctional of families.

Tattiawna Jones plays Isabelle at her most regal and most fragile in this “Confession” episode. All along she has fought to maintain the standing she won by entering into the Slotter clan, and now she seems to have lost it. Kat and Rebecca come to her aid and find Jeremiah’s glove in his possession thanks to their new reluctant ally — one breadcrumb on the trail to proof leading to his confession to Rebecca. He sees in her a glimmer of his own fascination for life and death — though hers takes a slightly less murderous turn.

Robin, meanwhile, happens upon a collapsed Chase and his bag of tongue.  He’s haunted by the little boy whose tongue he cut out and through Robin’s spying, second sight and some trickery by the Janestown women, he confesses all, implicating Slotter in writing. Fiona’s fictionalized story Massacre on the Plains forces her to confront the truth of what happened that night, and the deception of Chase leads him to reveal the truth.

The deception the women act out gives us a glimpse we may have forgotten since that first episode, too, of what these women have lost and what they’ve had to do to survive since that loss — the printer’s wife, now a whore, was the most striking to me.  Jeremiah remains a mystery — a gun still to be fired — but though Kat and Briggs have found other men for their beds, they mourn still their absent husbands.

Despite the women’s desire to see Chase hanged with his master, Ruby and Robin set him free with Mary’s baby, allowing us to hope for one happy ending at least when that strange, sweet new family is reunited.

In the end, Isabelle goes to Ling. His assumption — and mine — was that she was fleeing to the protection of another man, given her limited options to not revert to the whore she’d become at 11. She dismisses that assumption with a welcome and disdainful: “I haven’t come to you. I have come to devise their downfall.”

The noose is tightening. But will John Slotter end up the one inside?