Yellowstone’s Biggest Mistake Haunted the Show For The Full 5 Seasons (& It Means These Minor Details Make Absolutely No Sense)

The horse-wrangling, body-burying Duttons of Yellowstone have quite a family tree that’s gotten unwieldy at times. By expanding the lineage to past generations in 1923 and 1883, creator Taylor Sheridan made it just as confusing as a Targaryen family tree to keep up with who’s related to what. At the modern center of this family, though, is a simple dynamic: patriarch John Dutton III (played by Kevin Costner) and his three children: Jamie (adopted), Beth, and Kayce. Oh, and there’s also his eldest son that nobody ever talks about, Lee.

If it’s hard to remember who Lee is and how he fit into the Dutton family, don’t worry, it appears Yellowstone did as well. While he was alive, Lee was in only one episode of Yellowstone, the pilot, in which he was also killed. Despite technically being the catalyst for all the future scandals and conflicts the Duttons got entangled in, Lee is mentioned a handful of times on the five-season series. But why did Sheridan ignore such an important member of the Dutton family?

How Did Lee Dutton Die on Yellowstone?

Dave Annable, who now portrays Neil on another Sheridan series, Special Ops: Lioness, played Lee for a short while on Yellowstone. Lee was introduced in Season 1, Episode 1, “Daybreak,” as the firstborn child of John Dutton and heir to the Yellowstone ranch in Montana. He was the golden child of the dysfunctional bunch because he was the only one truly interested in continuing the family’s legacy, despite bearing no desire to marry and have a child of his own. While the other children were spread out in Montana and Utah pursuing their own careers and lives, Lee was holding down the fort on the ranch. One of his many jobs as a ranch hand for one of the most powerful properties in the Western United States is rounding up cattle for Livestock Commission operations.

However, one such operation goes sideways in “Daybreak.” Part of the cattle wander onto the Broken Rock Reservation, instigating a conflict between the Duttons and some of the Indigenous people of the reservation. Chief Thomas Rainwater refuses to return the cattle, on account that the Dutton ranch was stolen from Broken Rock in the first place (this is explored more in-depth in the prequel series 1883). It’s important to note here that Kayce is married to an Indigenous woman, Monica, and shares a son with her, and both of them reside on the reservation to stay out of the shady Dutton family business. John decides to fight back dirty, per usual. At night, Lee and other Livestock Commission agents initiate a covert operation to steal back the cattle from the reservation.

During a struggle, Kayce’s brother-in-law, Robert, shoots and kills Lee. Kayce retaliates by killing Robert. Kayce informs his family of what happened, aside from Monica. John takes his deceased son to a tree to rest with him, mirroring his great-great-grandfather sitting with his own daughter by a tree as she passed. Later that episode, the family holds a funeral for Lee and tells Beth and Jamie that he needs them now more than ever, as the future of the ranch is left uncertain after Lee’s death.

Yellowstone Neglects to Remember Lee in Future Seasons

The death of Lee triggered a chain of events that, in one way or another, led to the Dutton family’s downfall. The circumstances of how he and Robert died became the subject of an investigation that was a central plot point in Season 1. By extension, Kayce choosing to avenge his brother by killing a member of Monica’s family put him into a conflict where he felt forced to side with one family over another. Lee’s death also meant that John didn’t have an heir anymore whom he trusted to take over the ranch when he died, considering how immature and traitorous his other children were in his eyes. More so, John was dealing with cancer when this all went down, putting more pressure to get affairs in order.

This all sounds like the perfect recipe for drama on paper, but the way it was executed on Yellowstone left much to be desired. For one, Kayce’s legal matters were quickly wrapped up in Season 1, so Lee was happily laid to rest sooner rather than later. Following the conclusion of this storyline, Yellowstone didn’t try to find any other way to preserve Lee’s memory through dramatic stakes. There were a few moments here and there when John talked about Lee in passing or spoke to his spirit when cleaning out his belongings. Kayce also saw his brother in the Season 4 finale in a vision. But other than those rare moments, Lee was sorely forgotten.

The absence of Lee being mentioned throughout the series made him more of a plot device than an actual character. Ignoring him felt rather unfit for the Dutton standards that highly valued family and honored those who came before them. John’s wife and the children’s mother, Evelyn, who died years before the events of the series, was featured more prominently than Lee. What’s even stranger is that he’s not in any family portraits from their childhood, which is a pretty big oversight on Sheridan’s part. It’s almost as if Lee was never meant to exist within the show in the first place, but the death of a family member was necessary to cause subsequent conflict over the fate of the ranch. The amount of attention he received from the writing in the pilot episode also supports this theory — whereas Yellowstone introduces the viewers to the other siblings in their own world (Jamie in a courthouse, Kayce on the reservation, and Beth in a financial meeting), Lee’s first moment on-screen is shoved into a legal discussion between John and Jamie. There’s no real sense of who Lee is as a person, other than what his family barely said about him after his passing.

A Later Death Might Have Saved Lee From Being Forgotten

It’s hard to grieve or care for a character when his family hardly does. Lee being almost never mentioned could be written off as the Duttons’ hyper-masculine philosophy of bottling their feelings down to get the job done. But given how many characters rightfully can’t let go of past events (such as Beth with Jamie getting her sterilized and Jamie feeling like the black sheep of the family), it would make sense for at least one person to be gutted over the firstborn child’s death. What could have secured a softer spot for Lee, making him more of a ghost that haunts the narrative in the long run, would be pushing back his death to later in Season 1.

The death of the main character acting as a plot device isn’t unfounded in television. In fact, it’s one of the most devastatingly easiest ways to catapult a ripple effect that stays with the series until the end. The deaths of Ned Stark (Game of Thrones), Joel Miller (The Last of Us), and Jackie Taylor (Yellowjackets) changed the narrative forever, and the memory of them remained purposeful to the show. What do these deaths have in common? They either happened at the end of the first season or at the beginning of the second season. Viewers had time to get to know these characters and care for them, thus making their deaths all the more emotionally effective. That’s not to say a death in a pilot episode doesn’t work. Examples such as Six Feet Under and Silo prove it works, but only if the deceased character(s) remain crucial to the plot later on. Yellowstone just isn’t part of the batch that works.

It’s not enough for Yellowstone to briefly say in the pilot how much John depends on Lee. Viewers need to actually see it. Beginning the series with more of the family being spread out and broken, while slowly coming back together to butt heads as Lee acts as the level-headed, perfect child would’ve naturally made his death just as impactful as John’s was in Season 5. Lee could’ve had his own conflicts about being the prodigal son who didn’t want to have children to continue the Dutton name, ultimately putting him at odds with his father. But instead, Lee became the Chuck Cunningham of Yellowstone. He did his job by dying, and Yellowstone pretty much erased him from the Duttons’ history as thanks.