After years of waiting for the return of the Paramount Network’s premiere neo-Western drama, Yellowstone is finally back. As the Taylor Sheridan series comes to an end with the last batch of episodes, it’s important that we revisit where Season 5A left off. After all, a lot happened leading up to the mid-season finale, “A Knife and No Coin,” which aired way back on January 1, 2023. As the Duttons find themselves in danger of losing everything they built, there’s no time like the present to catch up ahead of the November 10 premiere date. If this is indeed the last straw for the Duttons, then we’re in for one heck of a ride.
John Dutton Is Governor of Montana, but May Not Be For Long
Season 5 begins with John Dutton (Kevin Costner) being elected and sworn into office as the new Governor of Montana. As the Governor, John makes it his mission to use his political power — which he had originally groomed Jamie (Wes Bentley) for before he could no longer trust him — to ensure the Yellowstone Dutton Ranch is protected. After signing an executive order that canceled the funding of the Paradise Valley-based airport and ski resort that Market Equities had previously established, he puts the Last Best Place at legal risk. Putting the land in a conservation easement, a “land trust” that limits the use of the land in order to preserve it, doesn’t help either, and opens the entire state up to a major lawsuit.
While John claims he’s doing what’s best for Montana, and perhaps he is, he admits to ultimately doing all of this for the sake of the Dutton Ranch. After all, his family spent over a century bleeding into the land in order to build the empire he’s inherited, and he plans on doing everything he can to preserve it for his grandson, Tate (Brecken Merrill), as well as his unofficial adoptive grandson, Carter (Finn Little). But power continues to corrupt as John also uses his governing powers to free his latest fling, Summer Higgins (Piper Perabo), from prison, now under his watch. This causes all sorts of issues between Summer and Beth (Kelly Reilly), though they seem to work it out with their fists.
In a parallel narrative set in the past, a younger John (played here by Josh Lucas) works alongside a teenage Rip (Kyle Red Silverstein) to hide a body after the latter kills fellow cowboy Rowdy (Kai Caster) for insulting Beth (Kylie Rogers in the flashbacks). The event also reveals how Rip was first branded by John and why he chose to stick around the ranch even after Beth left, considering it the only real home he ever knew. This has, no doubt, informed all of adult Rip’s (Cole Hauser) actions concerning the ranch. Around this time, John discovers that his cattle is being poisoned by the phone companies, and he and his ranch hands fight to ensure that the water remains free from future poisoning.
‘Yellowstone’ Season 5 Brings Beth and Jamie’s Conflict to a Head
Since Beth first returned to Montana, she has been at her brother Jamie’s throat. A few seasons ago, we found out that, when they were young, Jamie took Beth to get an abortion that resulted in her sterilization. Unable to have children of her own, she vowed to make Jamie’s life a living hell. Though Jamie admits that taking Beth to the clinic was the worst mistake of his life, she remains blinded by rage and, after discovering that Jamie himself has a child out there, she’s set on robbing him of any parental joy. But that’s a step too far for Jamie, who decides — with encouragement from his current bedfellow and father’s latest rival, Sarah Atwood (Dawn Olivieri) — that he needs to take the fight to Beth.
Jamie calls for the impeachment of his father from office, believing that his actions have opened up Montana to greater legal threats that they cannot win. Apparently, enough folks agree, and John’s governorship is quickly called into question. This enrages Beth to no end, and she threatens to expose her brother’s murder of his biological father, Garrett Randle (Will Patton). However, Jamie unexpectedly turns the tables on the only Dutton daughter, revealing to her the hidden secret of the “train station.” Apparently, Beth didn’t know where John and Rip hid all the bodies of their enemies, and Jamie uses that to his advantage, threatening to expose the truth if she retaliates against him.
What’s next for the Beth and Jamie rivalry? Well, if the last few moments of “A Knife and No Coin” are to be believed, they may actually kill one another before the show is over. As Jamie asks Sarah if there are ways to have his sister killed quietly (she informs him that there are people who can be hired for such tasks), Beth tells her father that she thinks it’s finally time for Jamie to be silenced for good, a notion that John is visibly uncomfortable with given his affection for his adopted son.
Kayce and Monica Struggle to Find their Place on the Yellowstone
The most underutilized Duttons, Kayce (Luke Grimes) and Monica (Kelsey Asbille), have their own hardships this season too. After working with the Montana Livestock Commission to rescue some missing horses on the United States/Canada border, Kayce gets a call from Monica in the season premiere, “One Hundred Years Is Nothing,” and learns that she is in labor with their second child — a whole three weeks early. Unfortunately, Monica and Tate get in a car wreck on their way to the hospital, narrowly missing a bison in the road. Though the baby is born, he only lives for an hour before passing on, leaving Kayce and Monica heartbroken. They name him John, after Kayce’s father.
Because John is now Governor, he signs the Yellowstone Dutton Ranch over to Kayce to avoid any obvious conflicts of interest. Kayce spends much of the season running the ranch as Monica grieves their son. The pair wonder if this is “the end of us” that Kayce had seen in his vision back in Season 4’s “Grass on the Streets and Weeds on the Rooftops,” but Kayce maintains that he didn’t see this coming. Kayce and Monica opt to bury their son on the ranch (thus further uniting their respective peoples), and the whole tragedy brings the older John and Monica closer together. With Rip and a few of the other ranch hands leaving Montana for Texas at the end of the first part of the season, Kayce is left to run the Dutton Ranch with Lloyd (Forrie J. Smith) and any other cowboys who remain.
‘Yellowstone’ Is Setting Up a Big Texas Reunion and Other Major Plots
Yes, you read that right. In the mid-season finale, Rip conscripts Walker (Ryan Bingham), Ryan (Ian Bohen), Teeter (Jennifer Landon), and Jake (Jake Ream) to head down to the Lone Star State with him for the next year after some of the cattle are found with brucellosis, a bacterial disease that can be seriously deadly to livestock. Given that we also catch up with Jimmy (Jefferson White) and his new wife, Emily (Kathryn Kelly), in the final episode, it’s likely the Dutton crew will be setting up shop at the Four Sixes Ranch, which doubles as the setting of the long-awaited Yellowstone spin-off series, 6666. Interestingly, the ranch is actually owned by series creator Taylor Sheridan in real life.
But brucellosis isn’t the only issue that the Yellowstone is facing. In “The Sting of Wisdom,” a few of the ranch hands find a pack of wolves that had encroached on the Duttons’ land and attacked some of their stock. Defending the herd, Ryan kills the wolves, only for the cowboys to discover that they wear tracking collars around their necks, meaning they had wandered over from Yellowstone National Park, where wolves are legally protected. Hoping to get rid of the evidence, Rip attaches the collars to logs and sends them down river, but the news gets out anyhow. Yellowstone has yet to wrap up this plot (though Rip has the ground plowed to remove all evidence), so it will likely come back to bite the Duttons here pretty soon.
Lest we forget, there’s trouble brewing on the Broken Rock Indian Reservation as well. As Chief Thomas Rainwater (played masterfully as always by Gil Birmingham) and Mo (Moses Brings Plenty) are at odds with Angela Blue Thunder (Q’orianka Kilcher) over a new pipeline that is being constructed through the reservation. Blue Thunder has convinced the tribal council that this will be a good thing for their people, but Rainwater believes it will damage the land and the integrity of their people. Thus far, John Dutton has stood with Rainwater against the pipeline (he doesn’t want it running through the Dutton Ranch either), but time will tell how this event will play out in the back half of Season 5.
How Will ‘Yellowstone’ Season 5 Part 2 Deal With Kevin Costner’s Exit?
The biggest question everyone has about Yellowstone moving into the last batch of episodes is how will it explain John Dutton’s absence with Kevin Costner leaving the series ahead of Season 5 Part 2? Some have theorized that Josh Lucas, the flashback John Dutton, could take his place in the present, while others expect the Dutton patriarch to be killed off-screen. Either way, we know that Taylor Sheridan’s end goal will be met. “[John Dutton’s] absence was part of the ending,” actress Kelly Reilly has since explained. “That’s not something that we had to pivot, that was already written into the tapestry of the story. It was always going to happen, it just happened a little bit differently.” However they explain it, we can’t wait to see how the Dutton story ends, and what becomes of the Yellowstone in the aftermath.
Yellowstone Season 5 Part 2 returns to the Paramount Network on November 10. Previous seasons of the series can be streamed on Peacock.
