1883 Episode 7 Recap: A Tornado and Multiple Gunshot Wounds Wreck the Caravan

[Warning: The following contains spoilers from Season 1, Episode 7 of 1883. Read at your own risk!] 

What's a girl to do when she's trapped in a tornado with a hot new friend? Make out with them, obviously. That was Elsa Dutton's (Isabel May) coping mechanism of choice this week as 1883 introduced a couple of new dangers to the trip west, possibly worse than those dang rivers they keep having to cross. Wind? Bad. Tornados? Bad. Cattle thieves with guns? Really bad. But a little bullet in the butt? Not too bad, apparently. 

The caravan is now traveling over land that belongs to the Comanche tribe, and that means they have to pay a tax to that tribe to graze their cattle there. One of the men (Martin Sensmeier) who comes to collect the tax quickly notices Elsa, and she notices him right back, much to the chagrin of new guy Colton (Noah Le Gros). Elsa wins a horse race against him and then learns that his name is Sam. He explains that he killed the man who killed his wife, and then took his name. Since Elsa also killed the guy who killed her almost-husband and Sam is, to put it frankly, very hot, she's intrigued. Their flirtation, however, is interrupted by the arrival of an intense storm and an accompanying tornado. Everyone is forced to abandon their wagons, their horses, and even their cattle as they head for cover, and Sam protects Elsa with his own body. She screams in terror for a sec (about the tornado, not about Sam), then rolls on top of him and makes out with him as the eye of the storm passes overhead. She's an odd duck sometimes, but I guess if you think you might die in a tornado, there's no reason not to distract yourself by making out with the nearest hot person. 

As they all regroup after the storm, new cowboy Colton is a little pissy that he lost a girl to a Comanche, but voice of reason Wade points out that he never had the girl in the first place. Sam, meanwhile, tells Elsa she is always welcome on Comanche land before he rides away, for now. 

The horses are quickly recovered and it seems like everyone survived the storm even if their supplies didn't (including Noemi's broken mirror), but then Shea (Sam Elliott) learns that cattle thieves are rounding up the herd about a mile away, so he, James (Tim McGraw), Thomas (LaMonica Garrett) and Elsa all head out to deal with them. Wade (James Landry Hebert) and Colton are then left with the no-small-task of telling Margaret (Faith Hill) that her daughter went after the cattle thieves, so she leaves them to hunt for bugs with little John (Audie Rick) while she takes a horse and a shotgun on her own. 

The thieves are obviously dealt with, but the group doesn't get out unscathed. James is shot in the butt, Thomas is shot in the side, and Shea is shot in the head, but they're almost laughing about it and musing at how their luck is running out. Elsa wins another race on her really fast horse, and Sam sweeps in at the right time to take out some of the thieves with his hatchet, while Margaret murders her own cattle thief as he tries to steal her horse. Little John Sr. is now, as Margaret says, the only remaining family member who might get into Heaven, while Elsa is pretty sure they're already both in Heaven and Hell at the same time. 

All of the events of this episode have me worried for what's to come. Both Thomas and Shea seem sure that their minor gunshot wounds are the last time they'll be so lucky, and I'm a little worried that Colton isn't the kind of guy to take rejection, or what he perceives to be rejection, very well. We also can't forget that scene that opened this series, with Elsa unleashing some fury on a group of Native Americans after what appears to be a massacre. That seems to be a very different Elsa than the one we're getting to know now, but she's definitely heading in that direction, and I'm nervous about how we're eventually going to get there. In the meantime, I'm having a great, if anxious, time. 

New episodes of 1883 are released Sundays on Paramount+.