Tonight’s episode was a tale of two halves. The first – exciting, compelling and intense. The second – slow, plodding and anticlimactic.

Poor Ellsworth. After a humorous scene where he seeks marital advice from a dog, one of Hearst’s henchmen sneaks up on him in his tent and shoots him in the head. Just like that, one of the show’s most admirable, upstanding characters is dead. The news of this shooting sends the camp into a flurry of activity as Swearengen and his men circle the wagons.

Trixie’s reaction when she saw his body was both surprising and courageous. I’ve said all along that for a man with so many enemies, Hearst doesn’t surround himself with enough protection. It was true earlier in the season when he didn’t have any henchmen around and now that he does, they don’t do a very good job of watching his back. Trixie opened up her blouse and walked past six guns in the downstairs of hotel while carrying her small pistol in her right hand.

She got a clear shot at Hearst, but she was only able to hit him in the shoulder. I’m more than a little surprised that she was able to get out of the hotel alive. After the shot was fired, I assumed she would be stopped and searched coming down the stairs. Certainly the guns had to consider her arrival and the shot to be more than idle coincidence, right? Maybe they were too busy staring at her rack to see the smoking gun in her hand.

Regardless, she wasn’t able to finish the job and she rushed to Sol for help. He took her to Swearengen’s, which says something about the man’s reputation of strength and cunning. At this point in the show, I thought all hell was going to break loose, but things became oddly calm.

Bullock was in Sturgis campaigning for Sheriff and had to ride back to camp once news of the shooting reached him by telegram. He rushed back to Alma and the child’s side and eventually escorted her back home. And that’s all he did.

I’m not sure why Hearst hasn’t yet dropped the hammer. It seems like his attack on Ellsworth was just the beginning of his assault on the entire camp, but he seems hesitant for some reason. At one point, he’s watching the camp’s activity and he says to one of his bodyguards, “I was not born to crush my own kind.” Is the magnate having second thoughts after his brush with death?

Meanwhile, Al has made a deal with Wu that would bring Chinese reinforcements to camp. He had to make this deal due to his lack of confidence in Hawkeye, who telegrammed Al too quickly after receiving instructions to hire guns in Cheyenne. Al is usually right, but this smells like a setup and I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if the infamous Hawkeye showed up.

The news has spread that this is the show’s final season, but the network is calling next week’s episode the “season finale,” when the term “series finale” is usually used in such cases. On last week’s blog, one of the readers commented that the cast and crew didn’t know about the show’s cancellation so that there’s a distinct possibility that the series could end unresolved. There are also rumors of a mini-series to allow creator David Milch to finish the series the way he originally envisioned. Obviously some sort of conclusion would be better than a cliffhanger for a finale. Here’s hoping that HBO shows the same intelligence in ending the series as it did in greenlighting it in the first place. It’s bad enough that “Deadwood” is going off the air, it would be a tragedy if it ended abruptly.