This post contains frank discussion up through Season 3, Episode 4 of True Detective, titled “The Hour and the Day.” Proceed with care.

When considering shows that make ample use of the cliff-hanger, True Detective doesn’t shoot to the top of the list. And yet here we are. As a pack of jeering good old boys surround Brett Woodard’s house on this Sunday’s episode, the Native American Vietnam veteran peels back the tattered American flag that serves as his curtain. A pair of detectives pull up—too late, as the screen cuts abruptly to black, just as a bomb is poised to go off.

Though filmed months ago, this explosive confrontation has eerie parallels to a video that went viral last week, when a pack of jeering Covington Catholic High School students stared down Omaha tribe elder Nathan Phillips on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Unlike Phillips, who peacefully and stoically sounded his drum, True Detective’s Woodard is amply prepared to fight back. Actor Michael Greyeyes spoke openly with Vanity Fair’s Still Watching: True Detective podcast about both the incident in Washington, D.C., and the catharsis he felt watching his fictional self take a stand.

In the podcast interview, Greyeyes—who is Plains Cree from the Muskeg Lake Cree Nation in Saskatchewan, Canada—said that both his research into P.T.S.D. and the brutality always burbling below the surface of True Detective made this week’s cliff-hanger feel almost inevitable. Everything, Greyeyes said, drives his character “further and further toward a breaking point. The violence, when it explodes, it’s not surprising. It was almost like land mines. We had a sense of foreboding.”

The Woodard story line would be hard to watch under any circumstances. The brutish racism of the townspeople, and the alienation caused by both their attitudes and his time in the war, make the character just another tragic figure in the show’s long history of battered and broken men. But in the glare of the national conversation around Phillips’s encounter last Friday, Woodard’s story becomes even more painful to watch. “The examination of violence in society toward our communities is omnipresent; it’s ongoing,” Greyeyes said. “I think the incident in D.C. recently helps clarify that.”

Greyeyes was particularly struck by how the media handled the aftermath of the clash between the high schoolers and the Omaha elder. When he spoke with Vanity Fair earlier this week, Greyeyes was audibly frustrated by Nick Sandmann’s unapologetic appearance on Today—and, chiefly, the fact that the this white student was given a national platform when Phillips, initially, was not: “They actually erased Nate’s experience. The experience of a community he represented. An elder. On multiple levels. Ageist, racist—however you want to describe it. It clarifies, in a really ugly way, our erasure.” (In the wake of a resounding backlash to Sandmann’s interview, Today booked Phillips on January 24—the day after Greyeyes spoke with Vanity Fair.)