Well, we’ve been waiting nearly two years now for Yellowstone to return and finish off its fifth and final season, but with the advanced news of Kevin Costner‘s premature exit from the series, many fans have wondered what the show would do with John Dutton. Ever since the very first episode of the Paramount Network drama, Costner’s Dutton patriarch has been the face of the entire Yellowstone franchise. It’s hard to imagine the show without him, but we won’t have to any longer. How did tonight’s Season 5 Part 2 return, “Desire Is All You Need,” answer the John Dutton problem?
‘Yellowstone’ Season 5 Writes John Dutton Off in a Brutal Way
Rather than keep audiences hanging or draw out a season-long elephant in the room, Yellowstone decides to kill John Dutton off-screen, and immediately as “Desire Is All You Need” gets started. No, we don’t see anything happen. Without Kevin Costner, we don’t even see John Dutton’s face (a body double stands in for the Western icon’s corpse). Rather, we watch in horror as both Beth (Kelly Reilly) and Kayce (Luke Grimes) arrive at the Dutton home, which is swarmed by flashing lights and emergency responders. It looks, for all intents and purposes, like John died by suicide, having shot himself in the head at approximately 3:53 am the very morning that his impeachment trial was set to start. If that all sounds too convenient — and not at all like the John Dutton you’ve been watching for the past 47 episodes — then you’re onto something.
It turns out that after Jamie’s (Wes Bentley) talk with his current lover/corporate shark, Sarah Atwood (Dawn Olivieri), at the end of Season 5 Part 1, the Market Equities stooge gets right to business. As “Desire Is All You Need” jumps between the present with John’s death and the recent past, we learn that Sarah met with a hired gun six weeks prior and hired him to make John’s death look like a suicide. Corporate espionage at its finest. To make things worse, when Jamie discovers on the news that John killed himself, he’s learning about it for the very first time. After all, when he and Sarah talked about “professional” options to get rid of Jamie’s problems, he was referring to Beth. Sarah, on the other hand, clearly had Market Equities (and their Paradise Valley development deals) on her mind. Their biggest opposition, of course, was always Governor John Dutton.
So John Dutton didn’t kill himself. More than likely, he put up some kind of fight before being executed, but right now, we don’t know all the details. And frankly, they don’t matter. John Dutton is dead. Taylor Sheridan has ushered Yellowstone, both as a standalone series and as the flagship narrative in a larger Yellowstone Universe, into a new age — and there’s no going back. Yes, Kevin Costner’s name still appears in the opening titles, but the John Dutton we know and love is long gone.
This Isn’t the First Time That John Dutton Has Been Supposedly Killed Off on ‘Yellowstone’
Of course, this isn’t the first time that we’ve seen John Dutton at death’s door. Back in Season 1, we thought that John Dutton was dying of cancer, and the main events of the first two seasons were largely driven by his desire to ensure his family legacy before he passed on. (Season 2’s “A Thundering” later reveals that he only had a ruptured ulcer, not colon cancer as he had assumed.) Then, at the end of Season 3’s “The World Is Purple,” Dutton is nearly killed again after Garrett Randall (Will Patton) orders a hit on the Dutton family to ensure his biological son, Jamie, would inherit everything he’s “owed.” After John is gunned down on the side of the road, it seems impossible that he would live on. Yet, we got another 18 episodes (and two seasons) out of him.
If this is actually it for John Dutton (and we have no reason at this point to believe that it isn’t), and if Kevin Costner doesn’t return with a surprise twist at the end to make it all right, then Yellowstone has truly entered its final form. John has joined his firstborn son, Lee (Dave Annable), and all the other Duttons before him in the afterlife, and his children are now left to decide what the future of their land, their brand, and their family name will be. With a lot to do in only six episodes, the rest of Yellowstone Season 5 will no doubt captivate us until those final credits roll.
Why Didn’t Kevin Costner Return for the Rest of ‘Yellowstone’ Season 5?
But why didn’t Kevin Costner return for the back half of Yellowstone‘s fifth and supposedly final season? Well, it’s a bit complicated. After multiple production delays, Yellowstone was beginning to interfere with Costner’s multi-film epic Western series, Horizon: An American Saga. According to Costner, it was the studios who mismanaged things, to the point where he could no longer participate. “They had me for [seasons] five, six, and seven,” the actor told Deadline in May 2024. “I agreed to do it. And then they steadily began changing their format.” Despite that, Costner maintains that he is willing to come back to Yellowstone if the circumstances allow. Could that mean John Dutton isn’t really dead? Well, it doesn’t seem likely.
According to Kelly Reilly, Yellowstone‘s last batch of episodes is going exactly as Taylor Sheridan initially planned it. “The absence was part of the ending,” the actress told Entertainment Weekly in October 2024, about a month before the series returned. “That’s not something that we had to pivot; it was already written into the tapestry of the story. It was always going to happen, it just unfolded a little differently.” Even so, Luke Grimes believes the show is on its last leg. It seems like it was always the plan for Costner’s flagship character to be removed from the Yellowstone narrative, which will no doubt leave fans wondering how that was originally supposed to come about. Nevertheless, as the Duttons reel from their heartbreaking loss — and Beth plans to kill Jamie herself — we’ll just have to wait and see what sort of sunset Taylor Sheridan paints for our heroes to ride off in.
Yellowstone Season 5 Part 2 airs Sundays on Paramount Network. Previous seasons can be streamed on Peacock.
