Gabrielle Smith
Arts & Entertainment Editor

On Nov. 22, 2017, Netflix released an original limited series called Godless. Godless is an old Western style story about a young man named Roy Goode (Jack O’Connell). Roy was once the protégé of the famous outlaw Frank Griffin (Jeff Daniels), who is known for being the fearful leader of the Griffin Gang, containing 30 men.

Roy, after disagreeing with Frank’s ways, runs from his “gang family,” but not without terrorizing them first by stealing money from them, though it was already stolen to begin with.

The beginning of the series starts off after a shoot-out between Roy and the Griffin Gang, in which he and Frank had both become injured. Roy escapes to La Belle, a town in which a majority of the men had been recently killed in a mining accident, leaving their wives widowed and making the town population mostly women.

He stumbles upon Alice Fletcher (Michelle Dockery), an outsider to the citizens of La Belle, who lives with her mixed race son Truckee, who is of Native American descent, and his grandmother, Iyovi. Alice is a strong woman who has had some disagreements with the other women of La Belle, claiming that they were the reason her husband, Truckee’s father, was killed, resulting in her distance from them.

When Roy appears to her unexpectedly in the middle of the night, she responds by shooting him, clipping his throat. Realizing that he means her no harm, she helps by nursing him back to health over the next few days.

Upon learning about who he really is, she also finds that he has a way with horses and makes a deal with him by offering shelter and his pick of one of the horses of her untamed pack, as long as he helps break them for her.

As Roy hides out in La Belle, Frank Griffin, who has since recovered from his injuries in the shoot-out, continues his search for Roy. He demands that the local newspaper editor writes about his mission so that it is well known that if anyone comes across Roy Goode, they should give him up to the gang or they themselves will be killed.

Meanwhile, the women of La Belle struggle to find new citizens to take over the men’s jobs and help restore balance in the town—all the while, unknowingly harboring the outlaw that the Griffin Gang is destroying towns looking for.

Godless is a show with a storyline so addicting that being a limited series makes it bittersweet. With only seven total hour-long episodes, the drama, the action and the characters increase the audience’s desire that the series would’ve lived on to be something bigger.

However, upon finishing the last episode, there is no way the series could continue on and have a more perfect ending. Western-based storylines needed to make a comeback in today’s entertainment world and Godless executed it perfectly. It has everything—the hero, the villain, cowboys, Native American Indians, and rather than a typical damsel in distress, there is a group of strong women who are as tough as the guys, if not tougher.