Viewers got an update on Zane Davis (Brian Geraghty) and his family’s fate in the second episode of 1923‘s second season. The episode, which came out on Sunday, March 2, on Paramount+, revealed that Zane hadn’t received any proper medical attention following the beating he received at the end of Season 1, his wife, Alice (Joy Osmanski) was still imprisoned, and their children were remanded to the state custody.
Jacob Dutton (Harrison Ford) went into Bozeman with Sheriff McDowell (Robert Patrick) to negotiate Zane and Alice’s release and the reunion of their family, ultimately convincing a judge to let the Davis family be remanded to the Dutton’s home on the ranch (Kevin Costner‘s John Dutton arranged the same deal for Piper Perabo‘s Summer in Yellowstone Season 5). Zane and Alice were separated and arrested for miscegenation, a racist crime that made it illegal for people to marry outside of their race in the US. The law didn’t apply to white people marrying Native Americans, which is why the judge in this episode’s marriage wasn’t illegal. Jacob caught the judge with illegal liquor in his office and used that as blackmail to make the judge comply.
They met Zane in a clinic, where he had been bedridden and immobile for weeks due to a head injury that no one would treat. Jacob and nephew Jack (Darren Mann) gathered Zane, Alice, and their son and daughter and began the trek home via carriage. Zane’s head injury made it hard for him to walk, which caused problems when a blizzard became too dangerous to travel through. They let the horses go and tipped the carriage over to ride out the storm. Geraghty tells TV Insider that filming this scene did, in fact, remind him of that scene in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back when Han Solo and Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) sheltered in place from a blizzard in the body of a dead animal.
That thought “definitely came up,” he says with a laugh. “But I wasn’t going to be the one to bring that up to Harrison and in the middle of the scene, be like, ‘Hey man, you remember that scene in Star Wars? Remember that time, dude?’”
Once the storm settles and they’re back home on the ranch, what will Zane be focused on? Does he want revenge against Donald Whitman (Timothy Dalton), the evil capitalist who caused the arrests and his family’s separation as part of his plotting to take down the Duttons? Geraghty says that they might not have that luxury.
“I think that there’s a little part of Zane that wouldn’t mind a little revenge, but I don’t think that’s our sole purpose,” he shares. “I think it’s living in peace and realizing that the time might be up. They may have to find another way to live.”
Fighting Donald is made all the more difficult by having to brave the brutal Montana winter. In just two episodes so far this season, there’s already been a mountain lion, a wolf attack, and a dangerous blizzard. Geraghty says the natural disasters “just ratchets up the whole season.” But the Davis family and the Duttons are “all resilient, strong people” who survive by working together, he says. “They’re like a little platoon trying to fight an entire army.”
