Whoa — time for the casting switcheroo...

Whoa time for the casting switcheroo again. New Clara. Does Joanna Going really look so much older than Rachael Leigh Cook that we needed a new face rather than some makeup? I'll say it once more: The baby powder in the hair and lines around the eyes may not fool anyone, but it's a miniseries staple we've come to accept. I mean, they stuck with Irene Bedard as Margaret Light Shines, and that works fine for me. Moving on....What can you say about the tragedy of the ghost dance? As if the Indians hadn't suffered and seen their hopes crushed enough, here comes a new hope destined to be crushed and one that'll cost lives. "You just leave it alone, and likely as not the whole craze'll just die down on its own," Robert says of it, adding that locking up Sitting Bull will create the real problem that the dance isn't. Even then, I wonder if the problem might not have been so deadly had Royer shown everyone the bullet hole he blew in the ghost shirt, thus proving it couldn't stop a gun.

"I've lost my center," Voices That Carry says. "The world has lost its center," Dog Star replies. Indeed it has, as we see when the slaughter begins anew. You'd think all the killing we've seen over previous nights might numb us a bit to the horror of Wounded Knee, but no such luck. They used cannons against unarmed women and children, and had riflemen lined up and placed to shoot those who tried to run away. Shameful and horrific. And once again, heartbreaking is the only word to describe Margaret breaking down and crying before she's able to make herself walk through the aftermath to photograph the carnage. A beautiful ending to the miniseries, though, as Loved by the Buffalo tells his people that "we live, and so we have hope." For his part, Jacob leaves a nice piece of parting wisdom, too: "We can't forget we're all part of the same wheel the hubs and the spokes and the felloes," he tells Jedediah. "You break one, you break the wheel." All too true.