YMMV / Reservation Dogs

• Complete Monster: James Minor in "Deer Lady" was once the head of a residential school. Subjecting the children there to the loss of culture and horrific torture, Minor had them starved and beaten. Choosing a child nightly to be dragged to his office to be tortured and savaged, Minor was responsible for the deaths of numerous innocent Indigenous children, which still haunts the now-supernatural Deer Lady decades later.
• Diagnosed by the Audience: Ansel's mumbly tone, lack of eye contact, tendency to randomly bring up topics without prompting, and his inability to lie or keep his mouth shut around Big implies he has some kind of disorder.
• Fridge Horror: Watching Elora and Jackie escape from the man in the car and then run from gun toting rednecks is especially disturbing knowing how often indigenous women and girls actually do go missing or end up murdered. They could have easily become part of that grim statistic.
• Genius Bonus: Being a show about Native Americans and written predominantly by them, there are a lot of jokes that only people familiar with modern Reservation culture will get.
  • The characters frequently say "mvto" when being given something, a word for "Thank you" in the Creek language.
  • Episode 3:
    • There is speculation that Uncle Brownie is a shapeshifter. While this seems like a paranoid theory, there is actually a modern belief of shapeshifters in Native reservations.
    • A wooden owl's eyes are censored in the same episode, with the Rez Dogs being scared of it. The Native fear of owls is still living on, to the point where it is recommended not to even give owl-related items to Native children.
  • The Deer Lady or Deer Woman is an actual Native American myth, and her onscreen behavior is faithful to her supposed methods.
  • The giant owl statue in "This Is Where the Plot Thickens" isn't just a call back to the previous owls in the series, but a reference to the owl state in Bohemian Grove, a place associated with numerous conspiracy theories.
• He Really Can Act: Bill Burr, known for usually playing a Deadpan Snarker with serious rage issues, brings real emotion to his role as Coach Bobson, especially the scene when he tells Elora how much he misses her mom too, and the circumstances that led to her death.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Graham Greene's character Maximus says "We are just echoes of things that came before." Greene later has a prominent role in the MCU show Echo, whose title comes from that same theme.
• Retroactive Recognition: Lily Gladstone, who would go on to famously play Mollie Kyle from Killers of the Flower Moon, plays Daniel's mom Hotki.
• Special Effect Failure: Chunk, the deer seen in Episode 6, is a very obvious CG effect that looks straight out of a hunting video game.
• Squick: In "Uncle Brownie," Bear, Elora, and Willie Jack pick up a dead deer so they can make some backstrap, but don't drain the blood and just let it fester in a car trunk all day. And then they try pulling it out...

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