AMC+’s Dark Winds thunders back for its third season on March 9, 2025—eight episodes of scorched-sand suspense that have rocketed to 2.2 million premiere viewers (up 50% from Season 2), doubling subscriber surges and snagging a perfect 100% Rotten Tomatoes trifecta.

Zahn McClarnon reprises his Emmy-bait turn as Lt. Joe Leaphorn, the stoic Navajo Tribal Police chief whose haunted hunches hunt horrors in the Four Corners’ haunted mesas, flanked by Kiowa Gordon’s Jim Chee, the idealistic deputy whose cultural clashes crack cases wide open. Set in 1971’s sun-blasted Southwest—Monument Valley’s red rock sentinels standing sentinel over secrets—Season 3, inspired by Tony Hillerman’s Dance Hall of the Dead and The Sinister Pig, unravels a double murder tangled in tribal taboos: a missing Zuni boy, a slain archaeologist, and a shadowy storm of corporate greed and cultish cults that expose the “wounds of the past” Leaphorn buried with his son’s unsolved slaying.

“It’s moodier, more mystical,” McClarnon tells NYT, his Leaphorn a “quiet storm” grappling emotional eclipses amid the probe. Critics crow: Rolling Stone dubs it “the year’s best episode contender,” Vulture begs “Emmy for Zahn now,” RogerEbert.com “electrifying series best.”