Jessica Matten says her character Bernadette gets to see what life is like outside the Native American reservation where she has always lived and worked in Dark Winds Season 3.

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"It's just a whole new world that Bernadette gets to enter," Matten told UPI in a recent Zoom interview. "It was really fun to be able to play a character who experiences that for the first time."

Released on DVD Tuesday, the adaptation of Tony Hillerman's best-selling novels follows members of the tribal police in 1970s New Mexico.

At the end of Season 2, Bernadette quits her job as a police officer because she doesn't think Indigenous people can get justice within the current legal system.

In Season 3, she goes to work for the U.S. Border Patrol.

The catalyst for Bernadette's career change was when wealthy White businessman B.J. Vines (John Diehl) appeared to get away with killing her mentor Joe Leaphorn's teen son.

In reality, Leaphorn (Zahn McClarnon) had taken Vines out into a desert at night and left him to die in the elements.

"She just kind of felt this is injustice," Matten said of Bernadette's assumptions about Vines' fate.

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"There's rules for Indians and then there's rules for the non-Indians and, so, we will never get the justice that we hope for," she added. "She was feeling like she was stuck between a rock and a hard place with her own career as a woman and that just kind of validated even further that it was time for her to get out. That this was a dead road."

Taking a job with Border Patrol was her way of creating a new path for herself, Matten noted.

"I think, as most people do when they escape from something or they run away from something, the grass isn't always greener on the other side," she added.

"That's what Bernadette experiences in Season 3. It's just the revelations of coming off the reserve for the first time, taking a job outside of what her comfort zones are and seeing all the monsters in the big world," she said. "The job is definitely fulfilling. I think it's not what she expected and, so, there's going to be a lot of shock factors that come into play."

The new job also means leaving behind her father figure Leaphorn and her fellow cop/love interest Jim Chee (Kiowa Gordon).

"Even though their characters are separated -- they're living in completely different worlds in Season 3 -- you're going to see a lot of streamline in terms of the emotions that they have to deal with and explore within themselves," Matten said.

Although Season 2 ended with a kiss between Bernadette and Chee, the pair's future is uncertain, given the great distance between them in Season 3.

"She's still dealing with the betrayal that she felt with him," she said, referring to how they previously tried to date but the budding romance was derailed when Bernadette cheated on Chee.

"So, there's still definitely trust issues," she added. "Like everything in life, it's about timing. You can encounter someone in your life and they feel right, but there's still life lessons that each person has to go on separately before they come back together. I think that's very true for Bernadette and Chee in Season 3."

Filming on Season 4 of the AMC series wrapped this summer.

No TV premiere date has been announced yet.