‘Under the Banner of Heaven’ Episode 4 Digs into the Tragic Origins of Mormon Polygamy

Since the beginning of FX’s Under the Banner of Heaven, we’ve been warned that Detective Jeb Pyre (Andrew Garfield) and Detective Bill Taba’s (Gil Birmingham) hunt for Brenda Wright Lafferty’s (Daisy Edgar Jones) killers would bring us face-to-face with the bleakest chapters of Mormon history. Under the Banner of Heaven Episode 4 finally cuts to the chase. We learn that Brenda’s conservative brothers-in-law found themselves caught up in Fundamentalist teachings. This extreme take on the Mormon faith uses now banned texts from the church’s early days to justify all manner of unsavory practices, including polygamy.

This week’s episode of Under the Banner of Heaven explicitly ties Mormon founder Joseph Smith’s adoption of polygamy to the tragic 20th century deaths of Brenda Wright Lafferty and her daughter.

Under the Banner of Heaven is based on the best-selling non-fiction Jon Krakauer book of the same name. Krakauer used the 1984 murders of Brenda Wright Lafferty and her infant daughter Erica to pry open the dark secret history of Mormonism in America. While most mainstream Mormons today are renowned for their wholesome ways, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints has a past soaked in bloodshed and polygamy.

Under the Banner of Heaven deals with these dark chapters in Mormon history through flashbacks. Under the Banner of Heaven Episode 4 “Church and State” not only lets us see how Mormon founding father Joseph Smith’s (Andrew Burnap) adoption of polygamy rocked his marriage to Emma Smith (Tyner Rushing), but also how learning about these early teachings led the Lafferty brothers in Fundamentalism in the 1980s.

Wyatt Russell plays Dan Lafferty, the charming second son of the family who keeps trying to live up to his father’s lofty expectations. Russell explained how a scene in Episode 3 of the series — where their father Ammon (Christopher Heyerdahl) beats him in public, in front of the family — helped him better understand why Dan would be seduced by the Mormon Church’s early, banned teachings.

“We all still want to please our parents when they’re alive. You want them to approve your decisions, you want them to approve of your life. All you’ve ever known is your parents’ approval. So when he’s being scolded for not handling something correctly in ways he believes his father taught him how to do, it’s so confusing. You’d be so utterly confused. That you’d try to find some kernel that you can hold onto, which he does,” Russell said. “His dad wants him to grab onto the faith even more, so he does. He goes down a rabbit hole that is just infinitely deep and dark. And obviously, it ends up where it ends up.”

In Under the Banner of Heaven Episode 4, Dan begins to embrace Fundamentalist teachings, which include tax evasion, blood atonement, and polygamy. The Mormon Church’s complicated relationship with polygamy is explored dramatically through a flashback showing matriarch Emma Smith’s staunch aversion to her husband’s new proclamation which would give him religious recourse to open their marriage to as many women and girls as he saw fit. It’s a devastating sequence that has to show the dissolution of a love story and the start of a major religious schism in one domestic scene.

Tyner Rushing plays Emma Smith in Under the Banner of Heaven and she told Decider that it was indeed challenging to bring such a major historic character to life.

“She’s such an iconic person and then we just get these glimpses of her and her story. So it was like how to add that richness and that depth? Can I jam it into this tiny scene?” Rushing said. “I just focused on the prep and knowing who she is. I did my research, I read all the things and talked to all the people I could. And then I just go for it.”

But that’s not the only moment in this week’s episode where we see the moment a family is irrevocably torn apart through Fundamentalist teachings. Under the Banner of Heaven Episode 4 also dramatizes the moment where eldest Lafferty brother Ron (Sam Worthington) infamously tried to convince his brother Dan to return to mainstream Mormonism, only to find himself seduced by Fundamentalist teachings in the process of their debate.

“The way I approached it was all the way through the script, Ron is on top of mountains that keep crumbling. And that was one [scene] where the mountain is crumbled by his brother’s knowledge of scripture,” Worthington told Decider. “So when you play it, it’s not necessarily a confrontational scene. It’s written that way, but I didn’t think it was. I think everyone is there to help, and unfortunately [Ron] realizes that his help is not necessary. And the mountain before he knows it is pulled away from him.”

“And then his brother is actually there to pick him back up and say, well, maybe there’s another mountain you can help build. That’s what Ron’s journey is. He is clambering to try and keep saving himself and his family. And unfortunately, you know, the consequences of his actions, which he thinks are going to lead him to a positive point of view, don’t. They lead him somewhere dark and dire.”

When asked about the same scene, Wyatt Russell said, “Any great manipulator knows how to appease the person they’re trying to bring to their side. You don’t do it with force and an iron fist immediately. Great manipulators get people to come to their side by making it think that it was their idea. And that treating them with kindness, respect, and getting them to understand their situation. Trying all these different tactics in order for them to understand it. In a way that they truly don’t feel like they’re being spoken to but they’re being supported.”

“There are great manipulators who do good. Dan really believed in that moment that he was doing good. He wasn’t going down that rabbit hole. He was letting it all be other people’s decisions. I don’t even think he really knew where he was going or where he was heading.”

The terrifying thing is we already know it’s heading to Brenda and Erica’s deaths.