Editor's Note: The following contains spoilers for the Prime Video series, The English.

Created by Hugo Blick, Prime Video’s The English is a western like no other, though, at first glance, it might not look like it. Over the course of six episodes, the show tells the story of an unlikely pair crossing the American West in the late 19th century, each in search of their own form of retribution. Lady Cornelia Locke (Emily Blunt) has crossed an ocean and half a country to find and kill the man who took the life of her son. Recently discharged Pawnee scout Eli Whipp (Chaske Spencer), on the other hand, is riding up to Nebraska to claim a piece of land that used to belong to his people. However, as we are told right in the show’s first episode, what you want and what you need are two different things, and Cornelia’s and Eli’s journeys change drastically from the moment they cross paths with each other.

Yeah, judging from this short synopsis, The English doesn’t seem all that different from other Westerns. Of course, it has a woman and a Native American man as its protagonists, which is, in itself, a huge deal. This allows the series to tell stories that aren’t usually featured in movies and TV shows of the genre, shooting the Old West through entirely different lenses. But The English’s main story is still one of revenge filled with bandits and crooked lawmen, with a body count that could give any season of Game of Thrones a run for its money. When it comes to its male lead, things can seem even more “same old, same old." Eli is a brooding, sullen, and sometimes morally questionable hero — everything we have come to expect from a male Western protagonist. But the similarity between Eli Whipp and his fellow genre leads ends right there on the surface. Unlike your run-of-the-mill lone gunman, Eli’s stoicism isn’t just for show: his personality and demeanor are essential to the plot and to his own survival in such a violent world.

The Classic Western Hero Is Frequently Just Brooding for Brooding’s Sake

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The Searchers’s Ethan Edwards, the Dollars Trilogy’s Man With No Name, The Outlaw Josey Wales’, well, Josey Wales… In our minds, the quintessential western hero usually has the face of either John Wayne (Edwards) or a young Clint Eastwood (No Name, Wales). He’s a man of few words, always frowning and gazing threateningly at anyone who dares to cross his path. Usually, he is cold-blooded and not afraid to draw his gun, but every now and then, someone just gets to him, and he just knows he has to do the right thing — whatever that right thing is. Still, he never shows his true feelings. Instead, he hides them behind a facade of unwavering stoicism that suggests a tortured past.

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Said past isn’t always privy to viewers. Sometimes, audiences know quite well what happened to make our protagonist so quiet and ruthless. Josey Wales, for instance, began his life of crimes after his wife and son were murdered by Union sympathizers during the Civil War (yeah, we are not unpacking Eastwood’s politics here). Apart from all the murder and kidnapping that befalls his family, Ethan Edwards is a man hardened by war. And then there are those characters that are made interesting precisely because of what we don’t know about them. Such is the case with director Sergio Leone’s Man With No Name, whose allure as an anti-hero lies precisely on what is left to the viewer's imagination. What is he thinking? What has he done before? What does he truly want? We don’t know, and the fact that we are left wanting to know is precisely what draws us to the character.

But even if this stoic demeanor is sometimes explained or even if the lack of an explanation is precisely what makes some of these characters compelling, there are very few layers beneath this thick exterior. There is no complexity to how Josey or Ethan feel about the horrors that they endured, no boiling cauldron of mixed emotions that can only be expressed through anger because that’s the easiest feeling to resort to or because that’s what they need to survive. They simply are angry because that’s the only thing a man in their position could be. These characters are moved by a toxic masculinity — and, in many cases, a sense of white supremacy — that dictates what is the “manly” way to deal with pain, how “real men” should respond to losing everything they love. There is no room for tears or for heartfelt moments of grief in their trajectories, just gunshots, blood, and a lot of angry staring. Their journeys never lead them to a better place, in which they can finally find solace from all their pain: the end is usually just as filled with rage as the beginning, except now our so-called hero has blood on his hands. There is no place for him in society anymore. No scene exemplifies this better than the ending of John Ford’s The Searchers, in which Ethan Edwards returns his niece home and leaves without saying goodbye, framed by a door that he can’t bring himself to go through because that is not his home — no place is.

Eli’s Stoic Facade Is Necessary to Navigate a World Filled With Racism and Violence

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Image via Prime Video 

In comes Eli Whipp, riding on the back of his horse. Eli belongs to our first category of brooding Western heroes, the ones that have a pretty well-defined tortured past: not only has his family and his entire community been decimated by European colonizers, he became a willing participant in the murder of other non-Pawnee Native Americans. Alongside everything he suffered before he joined the American armed forces, being complicit in the horrors committed by his fellow soldiers left more than just a little dent on his soul. Eli carries himself in a quiet, sullen manner because he is both sad and ashamed. We see more and more traces of his sadness as he begins to open up to Cornelia, and his shame confronts him regularly whenever he runs into other Native Americans, like Kills On Water (William Belleau), who aren’t afraid to call him out.

More than just a way to deal with pain, Eli’s stoic facade is also shown to be a tool he employs to navigate a world in which his feelings and his very presence aren’t tolerated. He does his best to look unfazed by the horrors around him to better achieve his goals. For instance, when Eli runs into David Melmont (Rafe Spall), Billy Myers (Nicholas Aaron), Timothy Flynn (Miguel Alvarez), and Jerome McClintock (Julian Bleach) all covered in blood and learns of what they’ve done, it is obvious that he is more than bothered by what he sees, but his facial expression remains unchanged as he tells the other soldiers that what they did is not his business. He keeps his cool and holds his slightly threatening gaze even as Melmont taunts him by imitating a rabid dog. Had he lost his temper at any point during that conversation, they wouldn’t have allowed him to go on his way.

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Image via Prime Video

Another scene that clearly exemplifies how Eli’s demeanor is essential for his own survival and even that of others can be found in Episode 5, “The Buffalo Gun." In it, Eli and Cornelia find the young boy Cornelia had rescued from Black Eyed Mog’s (Nichola McAuliffe) home at the camp of Major MacKay (Stuart Milligan). MacKay spends long minutes telling Cornelia and Eli about his “Indian school," in which he teaches Native Americans how to be more “American” — i.e., how to be his servants. MacKay makes many attempts to get a violent reaction out of Eli, but fails every time. On the surface, Eli swallows his pride and allows MacKay’s demeaning words to wash over him. In the end, this proves to be vital to White Moon’s (Corey Bird) rescue: had Eli said anything, he would not have been able to tell Touching Ground (Tonantzin Carmelo) about her son nor leave the camp with the boy.

There are many layers to the character of Eli Whipp. And it is precisely because of them that his journey is also so different from that of classic Western heroes. At first, what Eli wants is to keep on minding his own business and get himself a plot of land. However, what Eli truly needs is to right the wrongs he committed in his past, such as turning a blind eye on the massacre committed by David Melmont and Billy Myers’ crew. Though initially he believes that he must deliver Myers and the others to their graves to make things right, murder is not what he needs to atone: much like Cornelia, he needs to see what has happened to the men he let go before, and he needs to set others free so that they can complete their own journeys. Unlike Josey Wales’ and Ethan Edwards’, Eli’s path is not one of revenge, but of reparation. And, since his journey is internal as much as it is external, he has no trouble finding his way home in the end: as he himself tells Cornelia, home was with him all along, in the memories of his family and his people.

'The English' Redefines Who Gets to Be a Tortured Hero

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Image via Prime Video 

Eli’s journey and his inner turmoil set him apart from other tortured heroes and anti-heroes of the Western genre. However, while what he carries in his heart is of the utmost importance to his character, the way he looks and the way he is perceived by others is also relevant. Eli is a Native American man trying to survive in the Old West, keeping to himself in order to avoid trouble and pretending not to care about his people’s genocide. His personal conflicts and the way he carries himself are intimately tied to his ethnic background.

The same can be said about a character like Ethan Edwards. However, saying that Ethan’s feelings, namely his rage, are tied to his ethnic background isn’t the same as saying it about Eli. When Ethan leaves home to enact revenge, he does it from a place of entitlement, not only because he feels like he has the right to avenge his family’s death, but because he is white, and the people he means to kill are not. It is hard to imagine the exact same story playing out with Debbie (Natalie Wood) getting kidnapped by a group of German settlers instead of by the Comanche.

For decades, the only pain that was acknowledged in Western movies was that of the white, male colonizers, whether at each other's hands or as a consequence of the pillaging and murder that comes with colonization. Those that had their lands taken from them, who lost their families to guns and new diseases, were relegated to background characters, with a few comedic lines at best. This, of course, changed with time: with all of its problems, The Outlaw Josey Wales at least gave a bit more personality to its Native American characters. Still, it was always the white man’s pain that was front and center. Even when he wasn’t the one that had to shoulder the brunt of the suffering, it was his story that mattered most. Debbie was the one kidnapped, and yet it is Ethan’s story that we follow. Through Eli, The English brings some of the background characters to the forefront. It centers the pain of those that used to be there just to get shot at. It redefines who gets to be a brooding hero, and what said hero’s tortured past can look like.