I could smell their fear.
They know it's our time now.
They know it's our time now.
Jeremy, a journalist of Cree descent, attends a reenactment of a 19th century-era European settler town of Cain's End, which reputedly hosted a successful white-Indian marriage. What initially seems to be a peaceful interview turns into horror when a curse wakes the spirits of the long dead settlers, as Jeremy and his friends learn that things were not really so rosy back then.
Tropes featured in this episode:
- Asshole Victim: Rosalie is outed as a racist who only used her boyfriend's reaction to the reenactment to help her podcast, and is left behind in the town, possessed by the spirit of the Sheriff's daughter.
- Blood Magic: Jeremy cutting his hand on the Sheriff's tombstone brings his spirit up somehow.
- Braids, Beads and Buckskins: Chad wears a black wig with braids as part of his Blackfoot costume.
- Brownface: In-universe. Everybody in the reenactment are played by whites, including the Blackfeet. Most prominently, the main Blackfoot star is played by the very white, very blond, and very blue-eyed Chad, donning ethnic garb and a black wig.
- Demonic Possession: The spirits of the white settlers possess the actors, causing them to begin killing each other.
- Fate Worse than Death: The people possessed by the spirits of the settlers, who are unable to leave the town because their historical clothing is cursed.
- Good Shepherd: The pastor in the reenactment acts as the peacemaker, making the Sheriff accept his daughter marrying a Blackfoot. Even in reality, the pastor tried to stop the Sheriff massacring the Blackfeet-he was then murdered for it though. The Sheriff, possessing his reenactor, murders the preacher's reenactor as well, seeing him as a traitor as he sided with the Blackfeet.
- Indian Burial Ground: Played with. The curse is activated when Jeremy cuts himself in the graveyard... of the white settlers. The spirits are all white settlers who staged a massacre of the Blackfeet in the 19th century.
- Innocently Insensitive:
- Every white person in the town, aside from Claire (who knows exactly what happened in the town). They believe the interracial romance story and are fascinated by "Indians", despite the beliefs originating from The Theme Park Version. Chad is genuinely friendly with Jeremy, even if he doesn't know that he takes offense to his stereotypical descriptions of Native Americans.
- Rosalie, who is revealed to have owned a copy of Sheriff Stone's diary, is planning to publish a book based on it. She reasons that she was doing it because she was hoping to turn Native cultures into something with more potential than "just Indian". Jeremy is so insulted by her reason that he leaves her trapped in the town, possessed by the spirit of the woman who accused the Blackfeet of raping her.
- The Savage Indian: Sherriff Stone's daughter from the real story deliberately used this tactic to distract her father from knowing about her infidelity to a (white) man, saying that a Blookfoot tried to rape her. This resulted in Stone and his fellow settlers massacring the Blackfeet and sympathetic whites.
- The Theme Park Version: Jeremy doubts that there was a successful white-Indian wedding, knowing that relationships between the two people in the 19th century were not conducive for such an event to believably occur. Claire eventually admits that it was all a fabrication, as the incident actually resulted in a massacre of Indians and whites who supported them.
- Token Minority: Jeremy is the only Native American in the cast. This is presented as an irony in-universe, since he visits a reenactment of a white-Indian settlement that logically should have a 50% Native cast, but they are all played by whites. In fact, Jeremy isn't even of the same ethnicity as the Natives portrayed in the story (he's a Cree while they were Blackfoots), but his presence alone attracts interest from the actors who want to delve into Native cultures.
