Everyone believes they’re doing what they have to do, which sometimes means hurting others who are also trying to survive.

In this episode alone, for example, Sara, Isaac, Devin, and Two Moons trudge their way through blinding snows on horseback, until one goes lame and stomps Devin’s leg to smithereens in its distress after Isaac tries and fails to shoot it to death.

This episode fleshes out the world these characters inhabit, as well as the lives some of them have led. The key figure here is Isaac, the tracker who rescued Sara Holloway and her son Devin from certain death at the hands of the Mormon militia the Nauvoo Legion and their indigenous allies.

This series continues to offer the broadest possible array of horrible things that could happen to someone in the American West.

The third episode of American Primeval makes a sharp left turn from “survival adventure” to “survival horror,” as our heroes encounter a clan of deformed, inbred, degenerate (and French) wilderness dwellers straight out of The Hills Have Eyes.

When we left it off, the first episode of American Primeval had just depicted a bloody massacre of settlers, and the second episode of the Netflix historical epic continues the violence. The series, set in Wyoming and Utah in 1957,