Blyth is good as the stoic youngster hardened by great loss and hardship, but he’s growing into the classic cowboy mold, with little to really set him apart. Most of them are old ones it has borrowed from elsewhere, and even after the five-year time skip it feels as if it’s cantering across very well-worn ground. Quite how the show’s exploration of secret societies will dovetail with its story of Billy’s growth into an outlaw remains to be seen, but it isn’t a bad idea, really.īut Billy the Kid doesn’t exactly have an abundance of good ideas, either. The point is obviously to paint Billy as a sympathetic figure, driven to wrongdoing by his circumstances, and while one could quibble with the historical accuracy of that approach, it makes for a more interesting, sympathetic protagonist. The Santa Fe Ring was a real group of attorneys and land speculators who accrued great influence and fortune through political corruption and fraudulent land deals, and a lot of Billy’s story has been filtered through this lens, with many incidents that Billy is known for – such as the attempted burglary of a Chinese laundry and a prison escape – being framed as punishment for his relationship with Upson. The promised utopia of the unsettled West turns out to have been a con, and while Kathleen works herself to death while Joe hacks his lungs up with tuberculosis, Billy begins to get involved with gambling dens, cattle rustling, and a conspiracy explained to him by a journalist named Ash Upson (Ryan Kennedy) about several secret cabals known as “rings” puppeteering the development of the frontier.Ī lot of this version of Billy the Kid plucks from real history, albeit with some necessary tweaks. It’s midway through the second episode when Billy telescopes up into Tom Blyth, a much more compelling figure molded by his experiences, which include every man they meet in the intervening five years trying to rape his mother. Before long, young Billy has lost everything – and almost everyone – he loves. Swollen rivers collapse their convoy and send all their worldly possessions bobbing away, errant shots from horse thieves pick off their companions, and McCarty Senior develops a deep depression. Billy (played by Jonah Collier as a kid) moves from the slums of New York with his Irish mother, Kathleen (Eileen O’Higgins), his father, and his brother, Joe (Leif Nystrom), finding passage West on the rickety wagons of a one-eyed horseman. It’s bookended by its only interesting scene, in which a more grown-up Billy confronts a bounty hunter who is trying to cash in on the price on his head, but the rest of “The Immigrants” is like watching a lesser version of 1883 on fast-forward.
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