Strange Empire’s second episode demonstrates that Janestown is the Hotel California of the wild west: even those who have the resources to leave end up back at the nascent town.

The Slotter’s maid says there’s no way out of this hellhole; Ling adds the only surefire way is a hole in the ground.

The women who have been stranded there after the stagecoach slaughter are frantic to leave or to find their missing men so they can. But with civilization comes an economy, and in this empire, until the mine or the railroad become more than a Slotter man’s dream, women are the product.

The women waiting for their men or for onward passage they can’t afford are offered whoring work in the house or the lower-class “cribs,” and told stories of the Indian savages who await them if they try to leave.

Before Isabella Slotter offers a little whoring work to Mrs. Brigg’s daughter, Mrs. Fogg — she of the outfits and psychic interests to rival Isabella but without the youthful beauty or megalomaniac husband — confesses to Mrs. Briggs that she was once a lady’s maid until the lady’s husband demanded more than a little darning. The grateful expression on her face at a hint of acceptance from Mrs. Briggs is poignant.

“Buckskin Princess” opens with Kat Loving smudging in the forest, believing she sees her missing husband Jeremiah stepping out of the mist. When the figure come into focus it’s only Ling, Isabelle Slotter’s mysterious henchman.

Kat is ruthless in defending her own and in telling her truth, but she won’t believe her husband is dead like all the other husbands. And since she isn’t like all the other wives, fair enough I guess. Without a body there is hope.

So she leaves her adopted daughters — dressed as boys, knowing that Slotter will be looking for them — while she searches for Jeremiah and their adopted boy Neil so they can continue on their way to start their own ranch. What could possibly go wrong?

Throughout the episode the cinematography lingers on what should be the beautiful treed landscape, but the beauty is often marred by the threat of violence. Amid the pretty trees Kat finds more bodies, including Mrs. Briggs’ men and horse, and Jeremiah’s hat. She has money and a plan, but odds are she won’t leave without him.

The Blithelys have money too, enough to buy passage to leave, and Thomas orders Rebecca to arrange it in his usual charming way. Partway through the voyage, the driver demands more money and then a little extra — he tries to rape Rebecca in front of her injured husband. After a struggle with Thomas’s gun,  Rebecca shakily aims it at her attacker before Kat rides by to save the day, shooting the man’s hat off while declaring “I aimed high.” I believe her.

Melissa Farman plays Rebecca beautifully as a socially awkward, sheltered woman who is stepping into her own skin for the first time. The character could easily be a collection of ticks and Asperger’s cliches but in her hands she is someone learning to rely on herself instead of who she’s been told she is by first her parents, then her foster father-turned-husband.

She’s puzzling over the conflicting information she has about Captain John Slotter – did he order the attack on the stagecoach men, or are his offers of shelter a lifeline?  “You’ll end a whore. That’s all you need to know,” Kat tells her.

But what other option does Rebecca have with the rapist driver run off, an unknown route onward, and her husband incapacitated in the back of the wagon? “You able?” Kat asks before they part, the Blithleys on their way back to Janestown, and takes Rebecca’s word for it that she is. It’s a whole new world for the young Mrs. Blithely in many ways.

But it’s Kat who ends a whore first, trading herself for her girls when she shows up just in time — again — to rescue her girls from punishment for helping fix a card game, and Slotter shows up just in time to foil the rescue.

Slotter and Isabelle discuss their plan for world domination — or at least Janestown domination — which involves trying to entice a couple of investors to  back his mine so he has a legacy apart from his father’s railway.

John Slotter explains he intends to build an empire on the mining town. “Indians, Negroes and Celestials. Strange empire, yours,” replies the man. Slotter needs Isabelle’s wiles to beef up his sales proposition.

The Slotters’ discussion also involved a kiss where Isabelle looked like she wanted to crawl out of her skin. Isabelle’s social standing went up when she went from whore to wife but the transition might not have been too big a leap. Slotter even casually points out to her that Isabelle can be offered to the investors in the absence of another suitable whore.

With intel Ling gleaned from the telegraph, Isabelle conducts a seance to try to steer one of the investors to put his recently deceased father’s money into coal. It doesn’t work, but it turns out she does believe in spirits despite using the appearance of them for her own  devious purposes. “I believe there Is a world outside of this one,” she tells Ling. You’d have to, wouldn’t you, if this was your shiny new world.

The seance was just the appetizer of Isabelle’s deviousness, though. A disturbed girl left behind by her family can’t be put to work as a whore after all when it turns out she’s “already occupied.” Rebecca delivers her baby, saving her life but leaving her barren as Thomas is horrified to learn. Bad, science experiment. Bad!  He’d be even more horrified to learn she stabbed the wagon driver who’d attacked her on the way back from the birth, leaving him bleeding out on the ground. One of the Blithelys is starting to adjust nicely to their new circumstances.

When her investor plan falls through, Isabelle decides to take the girl’s baby as her own and present him to Slotter’s father as his namesake and reason to shower money on the happy family. Even babies are commodities, it seems.

Despite those demonstrations of evil power, Isabelle seems unable to exert it over Kat, even thought Kat has submitted herself to be a whore.  Mrs. Loving ends up choking her while calling her husband a murderer, which is possibly not the best negotiation strategy for a woman who could put you and your children to whoring.

Even the hole in the ground wouldn’t be an escape for Kat as long as she needs to pay off the two girls’ potential earnings. “Be informed, Mrs Loving, that if I have to bury you that’ll cost too,” Isabelle says.

Rebecca is horrified at the sight of Kat in whore’s clothes and takes the money Thomas has given her to provide for their passage to Toronto and gives it to Isabelle to buy Kat back. Isabelle arranges an elaborate plan to auction Kat off to the highest bidder, preserving the illusion to the investors that they are being offered the prime whore while using the card sharp Jack to outbid them, even when they’ve surpassed Rebecca’s funds.

Are we seeing a glimmer of kindness from Isabelle? Or self-preservation? “It’s for the best,” she tells her husband when she reveals Kat has been sold. “She troubles you.”

With the sisters’ shenanigans with Jack there was slightly more levity in “Buckskin Princess” but the show’s not in danger of making me laugh just yet

The episode ends with one of Slotter’s men burying Rebecca’s attacker and Kat staring at Jeremiah’s hat while the girls sleep — an echo of the first episode’s closing scene, but even less cozy. What do they now owe and to whom, and what payment might be extracted?

Kat and Rebecca can check out any time they like, but can they ever leave?

The first episode of CBC’s newest series brings the disparate characters and story threads together into the camp-turning-town of Janestown.  Set in 1869 along the Montana/Alberta border, Strange Empire starts with two dead babies and a graveside wedding, ends with a cozy pseudo-family scene threatened by lawlessness, and in between there’s the slaughter of men.

A fun romp this is not, but it is a rich exploration of a time and place we think we’re familiar with — our own country, our own history. We’re wrong.

Some of the preliminary publicity said the men have disappeared, leaving the women to fight for survival. This is true in the sense that the cult members of Jonestown disappeared, or the Donner party got a little peckish, or the dog of your childhood went to live on a farm. Some of the men survived, some have not yet been found, but most are quite dead.

Just prior to the attack that killed the incoming men, one of the townsmen tells a story about Indian savagery. A warning about the dangers of this territory the newcomers have entered, or priming them for a certain belief? The attack itself is shot so we don’t see the attackers clearly, and as becomes clear, neither do the survivors.

Headstrong Kat Loving, herself half Indian, is convinced Captain John Slotter is behind the slaughter, while most believe Indians are to blame (and yes, in this world it’s still “Indians” and “whores” — it’ll take more than another century for our language to progress).

Cara Gee plays Kat with a fierce intensity and tenderness, often in the same glance, and she is the emotional heart of the first episode. Aaron Poole as Captain John,  then, is the emotional heartlessness, though he’s played with enough brutality, bravado and pain to allow for some doubt about where the truth lies.

It was Kat’s dead baby and her marriage in the opening scenes of the episode, and now her husband is among the missing. So are the two girls they had just adopted to prevent them from being sold as whores to Slotter. Also disappeared is one of the boys also under their protection. The other boy, the youngest, is found dead, tongue cut out, hours after he had mocked Slotter. It’s hard not to see Kat’s point that his name is written all over the tragedy.

We first encounter a disappointed Slotter after he’s received news that his father has once again not sent his mine’s payroll with the stagecoach. And yet the coaches and the men-only cull have brought him this bounty of unprotected women. Whores are as good as payroll in the town he controls, which is called Janestown because all the women are “Janes” – generic, commodities, treated as subhuman while labelled angels and whores.

Yet our three heroes have distinctive names, names with symbolic resonance – Slotter, Loving, Blithely. The names are neither descriptive nor ironic, but somewhere in between.  Did Captain John order the slaughter, and how complicit is his wife? Kat is both loving of her protectees and intent on revenge (“better to go too far than not far enough”).

Dr. Rebecca Blithely’s character is the most awkwardly introduced with exposition — “Mrs. Blithely, tell me about yourself” – though it seems fitting for such an awkward character that she blurts out all the pertinent background details after that. She can seem blithely callous but is also deeply shocked by the brutality around her.

Placed in an insane asylum by her parents before being unofficially adopted by the Blithelys, she was raised as something of a science experiment.  “Female ability is so difficult to prove,” moans her foster father-turned-husband (after the death of his wife two months previously. Ick.).

She is clearly more capable than he in medicine and in an awkward kindness, though her sheltered life has not prepared her for life in the West (or, possibly, any other direction either). Physically hampered by her formal dress and socially by her position as the young wife and student of her husband, she begins to feel her own power as the episode progresses and as her husband is incapacitated.

She overcomes intense fear to go with Kat to Janestown to rescue the girls from Isabelle and John Slotter. She uses her medical skill on both her injured husband — who unfortunately wasn’t one of the dead — and nauseated John Slotter, whose wife has secretly doused him with a little medicinal arsenic out of revenge for his callousness after the death of their baby.

Isabelle has put the two girls to work in her shabby chic mansion/whorehouse, despite her protests to her husband that they’re too young. She is a powerful woman in some ways, but power is relative in this world. Caught in the act of arranging an escape, Kat and Rebecca convince Isabelle to let the girls go with an appeal to her motherly grief … and a threat to expose her poisoning ways to her husband.

Written by Durham County’s Laurie Finstad-Knizhnik, this is not much lighter fare than that cable series despite airing on the public broadcaster. Just as Durham County used the harsh crisscross of black power lines to convey an ominous suburban atmosphere, Strange Empire uses tree branches, shooting some visually striking scenes from below and from above, and displaying a muted colour palette. The scenery is at times beautiful, at times harsh, always uneasy.

This first episode is setting up the tone as much as setting up the town. If it caught you in its spell, as it did with me, welcome to the Strange Empire — the intrigue intensifies in the weeks to come.