This week’s episode of Chief of War tells much of its story without saying a word. Co-creators Thomas Pa’a Sibett and Jason Momoa and their co-writer and showrunner Doug Jung repeatedly leave space for pure sound to do the talking, from the ebb and flow of the tides to the ebb and flow of Hans Zimmer and James Everingham’s score.

When Momoa’s refugee character Ka’iana returns home to the Hawai’ian islands, the music swells as he drops to his knees, smiling, and grabs fistfuls of his native land’s familiar sand. When he is reunited with his family — his brothers Nāhi and Namake, his wife Kupuohi (who’s been chastely cultivating a budding romance with Namake under the mistaken belief that her husband Ka’iana is dead), and her sister Heke — the bittersweet moment drops all diegetic sound; their faces tell us all we need to know about their joy and pain. In the silence, Namake hides the necklace Kupuohi gave to him to bind them together in his brother’s absence; the act is buried beautifully in the quiet.

Ka’iana’s fellow voyager Vai, whose Hawai’ian name is Waine’e, has an even more fraught reunion with her family. As she explains to her war-chief friend — an unlikely relationship in and of itself, given that he’s a male aristocrat and she’s a female commoner — she ran away from home after a lifetime beaten down by Hawai’ian patriarchal socio-religious culture. Could her son ever understand why she had to leave, much less forgive her for it? We don’t find out, not in this episode anyway: She approaches him in wordless silence, he stares back at her squinting through the sun, and that’s that. This lack of resolution is remarkable in today’s second-screen television landscape. 

(Of course, so is a show that’s in eighty percent Hawai’ian. Can’t look at your phone when there’s subtitles in play!)

Vai’s plight is kind of the inverse of Ka’ahumanu. In the episode’s cold open, she watches as Kamehameha delivers a lesson in agriculture to the children of his village, which he expands into metaphor: Both the people and the taro they eat spring from the same land, and are tied to its fate, and thus must take care of it for the future. And just as the taro has offspring, so do people. Ka’ahumanu marvels at Kamehameha’s almost Christlike knack for parable, but winces because she knows she can’t bring him the family he sees as so fundamental to all Hawai’ian society.

But in my favorite wordless passage, Namake excuses himself from the reunion festivities to make an offering to the gods in honor of Ka’iana’s safe return. I don’t doubt that’s part of it: For all that his feelings for his returned brother’s wife complicates things, he’s clearly deeply gladdened to see his brother alive and well again. But he must cleanse and purge himself of the painful emotions that roil within him. So as he bathes nude in the ocean and sings to greet the rising sun, Kuopohi and Ka’iana make love, again in wordless silence, sensual and playful and ultimately passionate. 

This sequence ends with the sound of Namake’s singing. It’s an echo of an earlier one, in which the mother of the jilted King Keōua, whose late father refused to bequeath him the kingdom’s war god in favor of Kamehameha, sings to her son’s good fortune while he braves the scalding heat of a volcanic field. Music can be used for either healing or hatred; from “Y.M.C.A.” as a gay anthem to “Y.M.C.A.” as a fascist anthem, it’s always been that way, all around the world.

Ah, all around the world. When Ka’iana and Vai compare notes about their experiences, or when Ka’iana explains the rapacious cruelty of the white man’s world to his old friend turned war chief’s wife Ka’ahumanu, they acknowledge it’s a terrible place. Not without its beauty, though: while Paleskins come in many different shades thanks to the weakness of the sun in their respective climates, Ka’iana explains, there also exist men like his friend Tony — blessed by the sun to have skin that’s black and beautiful. 

Ka’iana’s real contribution from the outside world isn’t wisdom, or even pants, which he hilariously explains stem from foreign men’s neurotic desire to hide their genitals. (How can the women tell who’s packing, his brothers wonder, aghast. It hardly seems sporting!) His real contribution is “the red-mouthed weapon” — guns, and lots of them. With his ability to keep both wary travelers like Captain Meares and equally wary local bigwigs like Moku from going off half-cocked, plus his command of both his own language and the paleskins’, he’s an invaluable negotiator.

But the gods must have their say, and this they do when Kamehameha challenges Ka’iana to a sled race down the side of a volcano. Now, I’m going to state up front that this sequence, while thrilling, does not look particularly realistic. I’m also going to say who cares. We’re too many years past “Is the podracing sequence good?” discourse to relitigate it here. And besides, did you think anyone was gonna let Charlton Heston get killed in that chariot, or Anya Taylor-Joy blown up in that truck? Let your imagination do a little work for a change, you’ll be better for it!

At any rate, the issue is this: Ka’iana, the war chief who helped the brutal King Kahekili sack O’ahu, has returned, and he’s declared his intent to rebel against Kahekili to repent for the crime of supporting him in the first place. But as a semi-foreigner, a resident of Maui, and a guy willing to turn on his own king, however horrible said king may be, he hasn’t exactly endeared himself to Moku, foremost among Kamehameha’s sub-chiefs.

Moreover, Kamehameha hasn’t exactly endeared himself to Ka’iana, either. Though renowned as a warrior, he’s a farmer by nature and by trade, and he’d rather explain the life cycle of the taro to the village schoolkids than make a preemptive strike against King Keōula, his chief rival within the Kingdom of Hawai’i proper. Everyone from Moku to Ka’ahumanu tells Ka’iana that this guy’s the Prophesied One, but didn’t Kahekili say the same thing about himself? The Chief of War is all prophesied out.

But that doesn’t take into account this episode’s other chief weapon, besides strategic silences and dramatic editing that frequently juxtaposes long shots and closeups, human and nature: camaraderie. Simply put, this episode shows people who care about each other, or who have suddenly realized they’re worth caring about, showing each other how they feel. Ka’iana and his family, embracing as one on the beach. Long believed dead castaway John Young and his crewmates Tony and Captain Meares, moved almost to tears by this unexpected reunion. Ka’iana and Ka’ahumanu instantly easing back into their easy friendship.

And to top it all off, we have the resolution of the sled race. Having met Kamehameha face to face at Ka’ahumanu’s insistence, Ka’iana realizes that for all of his badass warrior reputation, this guy really is a farmer at heart, and his interest in creating a lasting peace is sincere. That’s the kind of man a warlord like Ka’iana could willingly follow, especially if it means defeating Keōula to unite Hawai’i against the coming threats of both King Kahekili and the Paleskins.

But there’s one thing left, and that’s grabbing a narrow, rickety hōlua sled — it looks like a tiny ladder on skids — and tossing yourself headlong down the loose obsidian stone of a precipitous mountain sled route that hasn’t been raced since the ancient days, against a man who’s never been beaten in such a contest. First one, then the other of their fellow competitors gets sent spinning ass over teakettle across the unforgiving volcanic stones when their sleds break apart in their grips.The only way Ka’iana wins is by ducking his head down to increase his airspeed velocity, at the expense of having any idea what’s headed his way.

In the end, he and Kamehameha float in (again) wordless silence through the air, then fall dozens of feet downward into to the beautiful water. When they surface, Kamehameha is so delighted he can barely contain himself. With a handshake Arnold Schwarzenegger and Carl Weathers themselves would smile upon, the two warriors grasp hands and hug right there in the water. 

We live in a time when the most powerful, most wealthy, most seemingly unstoppable people in the world are telling you and me and our children on a daily basis that no one else matters, no one else is real, the only thing that counts is getting what you want, preferably at the expense of others. There are certainly characters on Chief of War who’d fit right in in that world; give King Kahekili a tactical vest and a neck gaiter and he could be out there threatening Democratic politicians at gunpoint even now. What a boon to see a story in which the willingness to be open, to listen, to understand, to be honest, to be friends and family and lovers, to be a community, a people, is seen as the ultimate virtue. Other people aren’t our enemies, they’re our brothers, our sisters, our siblings. When we betray them, we betray ourselves.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.