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Spoiler Alerts Abound!: Written as usual by Taylor Sheridan, the long awaited final half of Yellowstone’s fifth season with Beth Dutton (Kelly Reilly) pulling up to the governor’s mansion to see all hell has broken loose with emergency vehicles flashing everywhere. It isn’t much suspense that her beloved father, John Dutton (Kevin Costner) lay dead inside.
She’s held outside by police, but brother Kayce (Luke Grimes) pulls up, flashes a badge and tells the lawman to piss off. And their worst nightmare is revealed. We don’t see John Dutton’s face, but the wall in the bathroom is painted with blood from a single gunshot to the head. If there was any question what happened, the next scene sets that to rest, as Jamie confirms a COD bill for a murder made to look like a suicide.
As Jamie, in his duty as Montana attorney general, announces Dutton’s death and calls it a suicide, Beth and Kacy hear it over the truck radio, and she makes him pull over. Telling her brother Jamie did this, she said he has “killed everything our father’s ever done. Then she calls Rip, whose loyalty to John Dutton is perhaps even strong than hers. As is his willingness to dump bodies at the Train Station, that ravine between jurisdictions where bodies – and the secrets they hold – are stacked up like cordwood at the bottom.
In the scheme of seismic TV show character deaths, Costner’s exit brought none of the surprise of James Evans (John Amos) on Good Times, Ed Marinaro’s Officer Joe Coffey on Hill Street Blues, even Brian Cox’s Logan Roy on Succession and McLean Stevenson’s Lt. Col Blake in MASH. Those were real surprises, with little telegraphing.
Costner’s exit is perhaps closer to the surprise exit of David Caruso after one season of the inventive ABC series NYPD Blue. I broke the story that Caruso was leaving, back in the day, with all the backstory, and so the question became how Stephen Bochco and David Milch would script his exit.
And Deadline was the first to tell Yellowstone fans that things had hit the rocks between Yellowstone’s Dutton family patriarch played by Kevin Costner and the series co-creator and creative architect Sheridan, and that it would lead to Costner’s exit and the end of the series, save for spinoffs.
At the time, Deadline reported Matthew McConaughey was in talks to lead the new series, but that since cratered and they’ve lined it with a strong cast including Kurt Russell and Michelle Pfeiffer. Aside from ending the stalemate with Costner, starting a new show will make room for recurring characters like Cole Hauser’s Rip Wheeler, Kelly Reilly’s Beth Dutton, Luke Grimes’ Kayce Dutton and Wes Bentley’s Jamie Dutton, if he were to survive the wrath of his half-sister Beth. There is a coterie of other supporting characters including Gil Birmingham, Jefferson White, Kelsey Asbille, Forrie J. Smith, Mo Brings Plenty and several others who figure to resurface in an immediate spinoff, and a much discussed future spinoff taking place at the 6666 cattle ranch in Texas, where they planned to take their cattle away from signs of Brucellosis, a deadly and highly contagious bovine disease.
That split the Dutton resources, and in the waning moments of the last episode of Yellowstone’s half season, A Knife and No Coin, Jamie conspired with Sarah Atwood. She’s played by Dawn Oliviieri, who played Faith Hill’s doomed prudish sister in 1883 and resurfaces her as a hellcat lawyer/lobbyist for the Dutton clan’s arch enemy Market Equities. She soon cast her seductive spell on the black sheep adopted son of John Dutton, and the family’s weakest link. Their bedroom banter ended with her suggesting, and Jamie agreeing, to discreetly hire a hitman to kill his father and position Jamie to take over the Montana ranch John Dutton spent five seasons trying to protect.
The episode swings between present and recent past, as Beth and Rip, and Kaycie and wife Monica (Kelsey Asbille) and son Tate (Breckin Merrill) make plans for their futures.
Cut to Sarah Atwood, who is doing the same when she meets with an operative and gives her “permission to execute” a plan that will kill John Dutton and make it look like a suicide. To those who know Dutton, suicide would seem impossible, given all of the attempts on his life he has survived, to keep a promise to his dying father to keep the ranch from being sold off. But there it is.
Beyond the stalemate between Sheridan and Costner, ending Yellowstone and starting anew makes financial sense. It undoes the unwise streaming deal that cash-starved Paramount made before the studio knew Yellowstone would grow to be basic cable’s biggest show, a juggernaut whose streaming home is Peacock and not Paramount+. The new show would go no further than Paramount+, same as other Sheridan show creations that include 1883, 1923, Lioness, Tulsa King, Mayor of Kingstown and the newest launch, Landman starring Billy Bob Thornton, Jon Hamm, Demi Moore and Ali Larter.
Costner surely deserves a tip of the cowboy hat as he focuses on the uncertain future of his quartet of Horizon movies. When Costner signed on to Yellowstone because he knew a great script when he read one, there was not a lot of interest in a TV epic Western. It surely helped to have the Oscar-winning Dances with Wolves star as the show patriarch, to go with his work in Westerns from Silverado to Open Range and Wyatt Earp.
While the marriage was never an easy one, Costner and Sheridan grew together, and the latter got to show off a cowboy life that most people never imagined. As proven by the advertising, Yellowstone has become symbolic of a lifestyle more than just a show, and it has made everyone a fortune. Sheridan might seem a tough nut, but if you look at some of the moments in this episode that feature long in the tooth non-pro actors, you can bet they are people that Sheridan collected along the way, accomplished craftsmen of a cowboy past.
It just seems somehow a shame that Costner went out so meekly.
Back to the present. Jamie comes home, breaks into tears and is met by his femme fatale girlfriend, scantily clad and ready to celebrate. Jamie seems a broken man, but she gives him a pep talk about the young lion taking out the old lion, and junior stops whimpering.
Beth is sorting over the future of the Dutton ranch with Kayce, a killer who doesn’t seem like he wants to believe Jamie could do something so unspeakable. He uses his connection to search for surveillance, and it sold that the transponder failed around the time Dutton died.
She encourages Kayce to visit her brother, because then he’ll know.
“Look him in the eye Kayce, then come home and help me decide how to kill him,” Beth says. Then Rip pulls up after racing home from the 6666, and Beth collapses in his arms.
Coming attractions indicate that the rest of the season is about payback. There will be blood.
