When Kevin Costner declined to return for the second half of “Yellowstone” Season 5, it left a big question hanging in the air: What would happen to patriarch John Dutton? In Sunday night’s midseason premiere, we got our answer.
“Yellowstone” has never been a subtle show, but the plot of the midseason premiere took the show’s absurdity to new heights. With a frantic Beth (Kelly Reilly) racing to the governor’s mansion only to find it crawling with cops, we pretty quickly knew something bad had gone down. Once Kayce (Luke Grimes) rolled up, they headed in and learned that (supposedly) their dad shot himself in the bathroom sometime in the middle of the night. Viewers got a quick glimpse of a gun on the floor and prone Costner double in a white t-shirt and pajama pants and, like Beth, quickly inferred that no way John actually ended his own life. There’s just no way he’d go out like that, not just because it’s against his life and legacy, but also… pajama pants? Please. At the very least he’d be wearing boots and a cowboy hat somewhere out on the ranch. Either way it’s clear that “Yellowstone” needed to find a way to get rid of Costner’s character quickly and, ham-fisted or not, this is how they chose to do it.
We learn that Dutton’s impeachment trial was set to begin that morning and sometime around 3:53 a.m. a state trooper on site heard a gunshot. The cops were quick to test John’s hands for gunshot residue and look for prints on the weapon and deemed the whole thing a “10-56,” which is police code for suicide. A sad, non-believing Jamie (Wes Bentley) was then forced to announce his sort-of dad’s death to the waiting news media, which Beth and Kayce hear on the radio.
While Reilly has always been a loose cannon as Beth, the Dutton daughter was really on one in this episode. She told Kayce that she’s convinced that “not only did Jamie kill” their father, but “he killed everything our father’s ever done,” achieved, left to them and every memory he’d helped create. It’s a bit of hyperbole because everyone leaves a legacy, no matter how they die, but there’s always been a kind of “cowboy morality” undercutting “Yellowstone.” We see it here, with the suggestion that killing yourself isn’t something a man does, and we see it more crudely later in the episode with the ranch hands as they joke about slurs and stereotypes. There’a always been a suggestion that “Yellowstone” — and by extension its creator Taylor Sheridan — knows better than everyone else, that these cowboys are the truest, most intelligent Americans, despite what might be going on outside Montana. It’s grating if you’re not on board, but given how popular the show is, they’ve clearly hit on something.
And speaking of plain-talking cowboys, after catching a glimpse of Beth wailing about how Jamie “killed my daddy!”, we learn that her husband, Rip (Cole Hauser), left Montana about six weeks earlier with four or five other ranch hands to head down to the 6666 Ranch. They’ve got to graze their herd there after bison left one of their pastures full of brucellosis. They’ll be sleeping on the windy land, too, and we get a quick glimpse of former “Yellowstone” favorite Jimmy (Jefferson White), still waiting for that promised 6666 spin-off.
Later, Rip goes on a supply run to Pampa, Texas, where we go inside the shop of legendary spur maker Billy Ray Klapper, who just died in September.
He was one of the few spur makers who still used one solid piece of steel, and as “Yellowstone” almost constantly reminds us this and every episode, cowboying (and outfitting cowboys) is becoming a lost art. Klapper’s cute and looking around his shop is great, but it does feel like they’re gilding the metaphorical lily a little with the scene, and another later when Rip tells his hands that “30 years from now, nobody’s going to be doing this.”
But enough about Texas. Back in Montana we get down to the dirty details of what happened to John Dutton. It was, as Beth guessed, Jamie — or, rather, Jamie’s devil of a girlfriend, Sarah Atwood (Dawn Oliveri).
The almost cartoonishly evil character put a hit out on John via some sketchy conglomerate, and while she pushed for a heart attack — something the family might have actually bought — the mercenary tells her it would put them at the whims of a toxicologist, who might find the drugs in John’s system.
Suicide, he says, is just more sellable, especially once they leave a bunch of physical evidence around suggesting a history of mental illness. (Are cops really that gullible?)
Flash forward six or so weeks and, with John now dead, Jamie comes home shattered. Sarah meets him in the bedroom wearing next to nothing and holding champagne, but when she sees how sad he is, she’s clearly dismayed. (“Well, this is not the reaction I expected,” she quips.)
She quickly reminds Jamie that he greenlit the act by telling her he wanted his dad dead, though Jamie seems taken aback since it was never discussed after that night. It’s a big rhetorical and narrative leap, but it never pays to really ask why anything happens on “Yellowstone.” It just does, and the characters scramble to deal with the fallout.
That’s when we get Sarah’s big speech. She’s always manipulated Jamie with compliments and sex, and it’s no different here. While he’s worried about how John’s death will blow back on him legally, Sarah tells him that he’s protected, that he’s about to enter a world that he governs and controls, and that he shouldn’t “mourn a 68-year-old man that never loved” him.
“Lions don’t die of old age,” she says. “Lions die in the jaws of younger lions and you are the younger lion.” We’re not really sure how puppet masters like her work into the whole lion analogy, but we’ll let it slide.
Lions also apparently don’t die on camera, since Beth and Kayce discover the transponder went out near the governor’s mansion three minutes before their dad died, wiping out all the surveillance in and around the house.
It’s too convenient to be a coincidence and it seems clear that they’re going to take matters into their own hands since law enforcement seemed all too ready to wrap things up in a neat, self-inflicted package.
(Do cops ever really do anything on “Yellowstone” anyway? It seems like the only justice ever delivered on this show is vigilante justice.) Either way, Beth, Rip, Kayce,and just about everyone else left in Montana are about to start gunning for Jamie and you’ve got to think the rest of the season is going to get pretty wild.
No one is ever really safe on “Yellowstone” and we’re all just along for the ride.
