I just now finished watching the entire series again, as I tend to do every few years. And as my years and experience pile on, I understand and appreciate the series with greater depth with each additional viewing.
The feeling the end of this episode gave me is of a throbbing phantom limb, like a hand that expects to have a full set of five digits, and longs for the ones missing, yet was never able to gain the complete five, and was left with just three.
Some may say they feel Season 3 was the weakest portion of the show as a whole, and maybe overall that may be true, because Season 3 does feel like Act 1 of a 3 act movie. Much in the way as the end of this episode shows Hearst leaving camp, with a cliff hanger and a lot of unfinished threads, you can imagine a similar dissatisfaction if Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings ended on Frodo & Sam leaving, with a similar cliff-hanger sense of anticipation for what is yet to come, and then finding out the trilogy had been cancelled.
The Deadwood movie that came out many years later by no means delivers any sense of fulfilment or satisfaction, and I would love it if the series were simply given a green light to deliver us another two seasons of 12 episodes per season, made in exactly the same way as the original.
Sadly these days, utter garbage media is perpetuated, while genuine gold continues to elude us entirely.
