AMC’s Dark Winds arrives February 15, 2026, with a new mystery that connects the Navajo Nation to LA suburbs.
Joe Leaphorn has stared down gunmen, con artists, and creatures that feel like they slipped out of old stories—but the deer in the Dark Winds Season 4 trailer might be the most unsettling thing he has faced yet.
He lines up the shot, murmurs that “It knew it was its time,” and the moment lands less like a hunter’s observation and more like a confession.
Joe has been dragging the weight of B.J. Vines’ death behind him ever since he orchestrated that slow, freezing execution in the desert, and the show has refused to let him walk away clean.
Season 4 sends Joe, Chee, and Manuelito out of Navajo Nation and straight into 1970s Los Angeles to hunt for a missing Navajo girl, chasing an obsessive killer with ties to organized crime.
But the trailer makes it clear the ghosts he is chasing are not just out there in the city — they are riding shotgun.
Agent Sylvia Washington is still quietly circling the Vines case, ghost sickness and grief are closing in, and that deer feels like a warning: something out there has decided it is Joe’s turn.
Watch the Dark Winds official trailer right here:
Joe, Ghost Sickness, and an FBI Agent Who Refuses to Look Away
Showrunner John Wirth has already confirmed that Season 4 leans into ghost sickness — a Navajo belief that coming into improper contact with death can poison the living, emotionally and spiritually.
Joe is basically a walking case study at this point.
He did not just witness Vines’ death; he engineered it, dragging the man into the desert to suffer his own version of the Long Walk and then leaving him for the cold and the dark.
The body is gone, but the stain is still there. Every crime scene he walks into now is layered over that night, every corpse another reminder that he crossed a line he cannot uncross.
That is where Sylvia Washington comes in. The FBI may have sent her down as a joke assignment, assuming the Vines case was a dead end, but she turned out to be sharp, patient, and quietly relentless.
Season 3 already showed her beginning to stitch together what really happened, and the new trailer’s mood suggests she is even closer.
Joe’s guilt makes him vulnerable in ways his enemies have not managed before: he hesitates, he doubts, he sees that deer and thinks of himself as prey instead of the hunter.
Layer ghost sickness on top of that, and Season 4 is not just another procedural chase across LA. It is Joe’s mind turning into a crime scene of its own.
The missing girl, the obsessive killer, the organized crime ties — all of that is frightening on its own.
But the real question the trailer is asking is whether Joe can solve someone else’s nightmare while he is still trapped inside his own.
If the dead have finally decided to collect, no badge, no gun, and no carefully worded report to Washington will be enough to save him
The Ghostway vs. Dark Winds: How Far Will Season 4 Stray From the Book?
Tony Hillerman’s The Ghostway gives Dark Winds Season 4 its spine, but the show has never been a strict, line‑by‑line adaptation.
Earlier seasons already took big, deliberate liberties — folding multiple books together, deepening Leaphorn’s grief over his son, and reshaping Chee’s return to the reservation into something messier and more emotionally charged than the page originally allowed.
Wirth has been upfront about it: the novels provide the cases and cultural frameworks, but the series is just as interested in how Navajo characters move through a white world that keeps trying to define them from the outside.
The Ghostway centers on a teenage Navajo girl who runs away from boarding school and pulls the tribal police into a web that stretches beyond the reservation.
Season 4 keeps that core — a missing Navajo girl, routine “runaway” work that turns into something far uglier — but shifts the scale.
Instead of border towns, Leaphorn, Chee, and Manuelito spend multiple episodes in 1970s Los Angeles, facing a city that does not care about their badge, their traditions, or the living ghosts they carry.
It is still Hillerman, but pushed into a noir road story with organized crime, ghost sickness, and FBI pressure all crashing into each other.
Expect the show to stay fiercely mindful of Navajo culture — especially around ghost sickness and ceremonies — while also taking the same character‑driven liberties it has from the start.
Joe’s role in Vines’ death, Sylvia Washington’s pursuit, Emma’s grief, Chee and Bernadette’s complicated bond — none of that comes straight out of The Ghostway, but it is exactly what makes Dark Winds feel alive instead of museum‑perfect.
The trailer is basically promising that Season 4 will do what the series does best: borrow the bones of Hillerman’s story, then drape them in new sins, new ghosts, and one big, uncomfortable question.
Has Joe Leaphorn finally run out of road, or can he outrun the past one more time before the desert and the dead catch up for good?
Share your theories, book vs. show hopes, and wild guesses about that deer opening in the comments.
History isn’t meant to be liked; it’s meant to be learned from. There are seven excellent TV shows that remind us of that.
Interview with the Vampire Season 3 will be under a different name: The Vampire Lestat, a confusing move that might not work for viewers.
Interview with the Vampire Season 2 just hit Netflix, and it’s time to check in! Or start a rewatch of the best vampire show out there.
Fists, guns, swords, and literally anything. These shows relish in the violence experienced by their characters. Check them out.
While Interview with the Vampire did receive Emmy nominations, they were shut out of the acting categories. And that’s not right!
TV Fanatic is searching for passionate contributors to share their voices across various article types. Think you have what it takes to be a TV Fanatic? Click here for more information and next steps.