Coming into the third season finale, Dark Winds had a list of questions to answer: Who killed Halsey, and why? What’s going to happen to Bern, now under the custody of the murderous Budge? What, if anything, will Agent Washington find? Will George survive? Will Chee and Bern rekindle their short-lived love story? Is there any connection between Spenser’s drug trafficking operation and Reynolds’ fraudulent research?

In a departure from the two previous open-ended season finales, “Béésh Lii” works diligently to tie most of these loose ends into a bow. It opens with Reynolds cleaning up the wounds he sustained during his confrontation with Joe in the desert, which, at this point, seems like it happened 100 years ago. He finds a distraught Teddi in her hotel room, and she can’t contain herself: it’s impossible for her to pretend she doesn’t know what Reynolds did, especially after dedicating so much of her own career to his project. When she threatens to call the police, Reynolds tries to stop her, and in the process accidentally shoves her into a sharp table corner where she hits her head and instantly dies. Reynolds looks disturbed and regretful until he doesn’t. He still has one George Bowlegs to catch.

At the train station, the whole NTP and part of the Scarborough PD is in position, waiting for either George or Reynolds to appear. My wish for a buddy-cop moment between Joe and Gordo comes half-true: they talk about their marriages. Joe tells Gordo about how he met Emma in college, in a club for Native American students she’d started. “The war had pretty much beat the Navajo out of me,” Joe says, and spending time with Emma helped him reconnect. This moment foreshadows the realization Joe will have much later on in the episode that his marriage is not just about him and Emma, but about opening himself up to connecting with others. Emma was, it seems, the person who first allowed him to be so vulnerable.

Before their conversation can get any deeper, though, Joe spots Reynolds driving a car. He and Gordo follow him, but by the time they get to his Plymouth, Reynolds has already split, leaving behind Teddi’s corpse shoved in the trunk. From there, everything happens at the same time: Natalie spots George, who is pursued by Chee, who is behind Joe and Gordo as they get their next glimpse of Reynolds.

A train chase ensues: it’s like Skyfall, but only we’re inside the train, and the stunts aren’t as insane. Reynolds gets to George first, but Joe ultimately catches up with them. On the train’s outer platform, Reynolds and Joe standoff with guns pointed at each other, Reynolds using George as a human shield. “This petulant little truant,” he yells, “he’s ruined everything for me, everything I’ve worked for.” When Joe reminds him that George is just a kid, a brief clarity descends on Reynolds. He lets George go. As he hesitates with his gun, I thought that he was going to raise it to his own temples, but he aims it at Joe instead. Chee shoots him twice in the chest before he can pull the trigger.

It’s a neat end to this saga: we know that Reynolds won’t be back to terrorize the reservation. But it still left me wanting. The exchange between Joe and Reynolds doesn’t have the same emotional heft or momentum of the final confrontation between Joe and Vines, and the brief moments of consciousness that we see Reynolds experience — right after accidentally killing Teddi, and when he decides to let go of George — come and go without much pause. At the end of the season, we don’t know this villain as intimately as we did others in the past. The most insightful interpretations of Reynolds’s crime were given to us in Joe’s voice-over last week, when he put the pieces of the puzzle together, which didn’t leave the finale much to work with.

Even then, it’s nice to see Joe have a paternal moment with George, who is seriously shaken by the whole thing. He blames himself for Ernesto’s death because he was the one who wanted to go to the dig site that fateful night, and it was his idea to steal the arrowhead. But Joe reminds him that Ernesto didn’t die because of George’s decisions; he died because a bad man took his life. And it’s not just Joe who has a touching moment with George: I was moved by Chee’s gentle banter with him on the way back to the reservation. George’s own father, Shorty, is relieved to have him back, and though he’s not very talented at demonstrating it, it tugs at the heartstrings to see him try. Shorty can’t really get himself to thank Chee, either, but he can give him an honest look; Chee will take what he can get.

So that’s the end of the Reynolds story, but what about Bern’s investigation into the Spenser Ranch? After being sold out by Eleanda and taken by Budge, Bern wakes up in her own car with a bag over her head, her hands cuffed to the steering wheel, and Budge in the passenger seat. As he walks around the car to push it off a ridge and into a hole, he tells her it’s all her fault for sticking her nose where she shouldn’t have. At first, I was horrified that he was going to push her off a canyon, but here we are reminded of Budge’s signature techniques: just like he did with one of his chums at the beginning of the season, he plans to bury Bern in the desert.

It was looking bad for Bern. I was already wondering how the show would change without her when she found a wrench under her seat and managed to bust her cuffs free. Coming around the car, she struggles with Budge briefly before stabbing him in the neck with the feather Joe made for her. It’s pretty badass. Muños arrives about 10 minutes too late, and at first Bern is too suspicious to put her gun down. But he swears that his involvement begins and ends with his bribes, none of which he has spent. He convinces her to go back to the ranch to finish what she’d started and get the evidence she needs to finally nail these people.

The Spenser-led corruption hole, we learn, goes deeper than Bern might imagine: Ed Henry, Bern’s boss, is Tom Spenser’s brother-in-law. Ed’s sister, Charlotte, is bedridden in a care facility where Ed waits to update Spenser on the whole Bern thing. Spenser is pissed; he wants Ed to clean it all up, and fast: though he has the scheme set up to give him enough deniability that none of it will explode on his lap, the exposure of the smuggling operation will make him look like a fool who doesn’t know what happens in his own ranch. Ed tries to advise him to shut it down until things cool off, but advice is not why Spenser pays him, so he orders Ed back to work.

Maybe he should’ve listened: it’s when the drug-loaded trucks are leaving the ranch that Bern and Muños checkmate. Muños holds Ed at gunpoint as Bern intercepts the trucks. In the back of the white van trailing the oil truck is the same family Bern had found locked up in the shed — we never learn under what circumstances this family was taken, or for what purpose, but it’s a vindication of Bern’s first instinct nonetheless. Bern aims her gun at Eleanda, who immediately holds her hands up in surrender and looks sorry. But Bern will not be moved, not here and not for the rest of her forsaken time in Hachita: she puts the gun down and punches Eleanda square in the face. With both Ed and Eleanda apprehended, Bern can finally inspect the truck — though we’ve known about the Spenser operation for weeks, Bern still hasn’t seen concrete proof of the scheme. As suspected, she finds a lot of drugs hidden under a false bottom inside the truck.

Suited-up cops take Eleanda and Ed Henry, in handcuffs, from the U.S. Border Patrol station. Muños gets away scot-free. Even after he tells her he has fallen in love with her, Bern gives him a stoney look: there is no way to unsee the corruption she saw him condone. They part ways, Bern to drive home the family who’d been kept by Spenser, and Muños to God knows where, probably to look for another job. Let’s be honest: apart from losing Bern, Muños got kind of a sweet deal out of it all. To the DEA, if that’s who is arresting Eleanda and Henry, he looks like one of the good guys, and he still has all that money squirreled away.

Back at the reservation, Joe and his dad, Henry, work together to build a pen of sorts, though Henry grills Joe about who it is supposed to keep in. “You don’t need to let her go to let it out,” he advises, referring to his son’s broken marriage. Joe argues that Emma is the unfortunate price he has to pay for his choice — it’s the consequence he has longed for, the punishment he believes he needs. But Henry, wise as ever, pushes back: he never had to give up his wife in order to come to terms with his own act of Indian Justice all those years ago. As if on cue, Agent Washington drives up. Her investigation has failed to bear fruit: she’s returning to Washington with no way to prove in a court of law that Joe left Vines to his death, though she knows as well as he does that he did. She leaves him with a brown envelope, which she hopes will help him “find a way back.”

It’s the tape of Emma’s interview from last week when she talked about how grief had driven a wedge between her and Joe after J.J.’s death and — she implies — how that gap widened after Joe decided to seek justice on his own terms. As he listens to it, we see images of other characters’ restored family dynamics: even Spenser, with Charlotte in her bed, is in a new place by the ocean; the family that had been held at the ranch is returned to their dinner table; Shorty plays basketball with his sons; Bern — I knew it! — is back at her trailer, where she finds Chee feeding the horses. Familial bonds, connections forged by love — they’re all around Joe, but they have to be nurtured in order to be kept. The world and its injustices test them; it’s part of the work of life to make sure they persevere. When the tape finishes, Joe rewinds to something Emma said: “I hope one day I can forgive him.” He plays that sentence over and over again. That sliver of hope is what he needs to keep going.

• I thought the finale could have probed deeper into Washington’s investigation of Vines’s disappearance. After all this time and the false leads, a conclusion based on lack of proof, while logical, seems somehow too convenient. It’s clear that the writers are focused on the emotional toll of Joe’s choice more than on the real consequences he might face for it, and that is the more compelling route, but all that stuff about Emily Quinn and Rosemary Vines kind of falls flat with this conclusion.

• The question remains: Who killed Halsey? From what we learned about Reynolds and his chosen weapons, I was half-expecting the finale to provide some closure on that front. If Reynolds killed Halsey, why did he do it? Was he in any way involved with Spenser? If it was Budge who broke into the Kayenta Station Police, how would he have done it without Joe seeing him? Did he know to imitate Yé’iitsoh, like Reynolds did, in order to spook Joe?

• It seems like the thread that will carry over into the confirmed fourth season might have to do with Spenser, who managed to get away. Dark Winds has often left us with something to chew on: from the first to second seasons, it was the conditions of J.J.’s death; from second to third, Vines’s fate. Now I’m wondering: from wherever he is near the ocean, will Spenser come back to ruin Bern’s life? Just now, when it looks like she and Chee might finally get it together?