‘Yellowstone’ Season 5B Premiere: The Duttons Are Back, But at What Cost(ner)?

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It's not the axe that chops the tree. It's the man who desires the tree to be chopped.
And whether

that man chops it himself or hires others, the result is the same. And it all begins with one

person's desire. You have a desire.
Only thing I need from you is permission to record. You'll need

Thank you. result is the same, and it all begins with one person's desire.
You have a desire. Only thing I need from you is permission to record.
You'll need to say it. You have my permission to record.

Hello and welcome to the Prestige TV podcast on the Ringer Podcast Network. I am Ben, the Livestock Commissioner Lindberg, joined by Van the Ranch Hand Lathan, who is wearing a cowboy hat for this occasion and also most other occasions.

Van, you look like you're dressed for a bar fight in Bozeman. Can I be the conductor of the train station? Oh, sure.
What's up, man? I love this show. I love you.
I'm so happy that it's back. Me too.
Me too. Did Yellowstone influence your fashion makeover? I know you had the cowboy hat before Cowboy Carter, but post Yellowstone, was this part of the decision? You know what's funny is that it's not not because of yellowstone let me tell you what i mean by that is this is people don't believe this but this is a part of my family's lineage and heritage the cowboy hat i come from a long line of cowboys and i've been turning away from the cowboyness of everything but But seeing Yellowstone, seeing all of the stuff when I started watching it seriously during the pandemic, it reminded me of my youth and the fact that I shouldn't be running from the cowboy hat and brace it like my fathers and uncles and cousins do.
Well, if Ripper were here, he'd say, you know, 30 years from now, nobody is going to be wearing that hat. When Van's gone, we're all out of legends.
I am wearing a straw boater basically, which is as close as I could come to a cowboy hat on short notice. This is probably my heritage too.
So you look like a cowboy and I look like a member of a barbershop quartet, but I'm making do with what I had much as Taylor Sheridan was when he sat down to write the episode of Yellowstone that we are discussing today. We have gathered around the podcast campfire to talk about Sunday's momentous series return.
Desire is all you need directed by Christina Voros and written by who else? Taylor Sheridan. It's been almost two years since the show went on break.
Tate Dutton's voice is an octave deeper than it was when we last heard him, but this is the same season, the fifth and probably final one, so spoiler warning, we will be discussing the events of season five, episode nine, and anything that's happened up to this point is also fair game. Van, there are two things the American public has strongly supported this month, Donald Trump and Yellowstone.
You have talked about Trump on Higher Learning. You're here today to talk about Yellowstone, which returned to record ratings.
An estimated 16.4 million people watched this episode on Sunday. That is roughly twice as large as the same-day audience for the finales of The Last of Us or House of the Dragon.
So even after all this time, America is still Yellowstoned. Did the long layoff and all the offscreen drama surrounding Kevin Costner make you more or less hyped for these final six episodes? I have to say more.
I wish I could say that it made me less hyped that it was

all about the show and the narrative arc of the show. But the reality is that Kevin Costner himself is such an intriguing American figure to me.
If you've been with Kevin Costner for as long as I've been with Kevin Costner, since I was a kid, since Silverado, since Dancers with Wolves, the goddamn postman

goddamn water world

if you've been with him for as long

as I've been, Wyatt goddamn Earp, if you've been with him that long, seeing him and Tom Cruise in a way as well be this powerful and this consequential leading up until the present day is really interesting. So knowing that there was a power struggle there, knowing that John Dutton is kind of a real interpretation of Kevin Costner.
He's like the closest to Costner that I feel like a character's ever been. And that he was going to have to say goodbye to that.
They got me. I wanted to see what was going to happen.
I didn't think it would happen this soon, to be honest with you, but I wanted to see what would happen. Yeah, I like the Costner-Cruz comparison because Cruz keeps running it back.
He's just, you know, make more Top Guns, make more Mission Impossibles, which is fine. But Costner, he's kind of doing his own thing, right? He's not just returning to old franchises.
He's starting his own new franchise, which is what got in the way of Yellowstone. And of course, he's kind of embodying former roles that he has done.
So he brought a lot of eyeballs to Yellowstone just by being in it. And now that he is not on it anymore, he also encouraged many millions of people to tune in to see what happened to John Dutton.
So we started this podcast with a cold open. The episode itself started with one.
Sheridan did not waste any time addressing John Dutton's fate. As the episode starts, Beth and Casey are racing to the governor's mansion in Helena where something horrible has happened to John.
As we soon learn, the formerly indestructible Dutton has evidently died by suicide, though we know that the scene was seemingly staged to make a murder look like suicide. And just like that, John Dutton is dead in the bathroom like Mr.
Big. Beth and Casey are beside themselves.
Jamie is distraught and also feeling a little guilty. Beth, as always, vows revenge.
Then we get an extended flashback sequence where we see Sarah, the brunette Beth, order the hit from the hipster hitman Agent 47. This very fashion forward contract killer meets McKenzie type explains the plan to take out John.
We also take a trip to Texas where we reunite with Jimmy. Been a while.
We go spur shopping. We get the obligatory Taylor Sheridan cameo, SpawnCon for his four sixes ranch.
No one does self-promotion more than Taylor. And then we return to the present where Sarah and Jamie and Beth and Casey plot their next moves and Rip returns home in time for Beth's second grief-stricken whale of of this episode.
So let's start at the top. We more or less knew that John was going to get written off somehow because Costner announced that he wouldn't be in these episodes due to scheduling conflicts with his Horizon saga.
What did you think about how it was handled? I was shocked. I was shocked.
when Logan Roy ends up dying on Succession it was more

more I was shocked. I was shocked.
When Logan Roy ends up dying on Succession, it was more of a piercing pain. Like, oh my God.
It felt dull. It was very close to reality, watching him go.
It felt like... This one felt...
I felt like Beth's scream. I'm like, oh my God, right away they did it.

Like right away they did it. And then they didn't leave us any mystery.
They did it. And then they let us know exactly why it happens, exactly how it happens, who's responsible.
There's no great mystery surrounding it. And so you kind of just got to sit with it and then watch how the characters deal with it.

In many ways,

I felt like if they ever

did kill John or whatever happened to him, that it might be anticlimactic because of all of the off-screen drama. But it actually wasn't.
What about you? It wasn't anticlimactic at all. I felt like I was supposed to feel.
Yeah. I was wondering, would they drag it out? Would they just have him be off screen, conspicuously off screen, just doing government business for a few episodes and kind of build up to this? But instead, no, just pull the rug out from under us.
Just he's off immediately. And then that makes the focus of the rest of the episode and the season on the reactions to that and all the ramifications to that.
And John was always going to die. It seems like, and Taylor Sheridan, he talked to the Hollywood reporter and he said he was disappointed that Costner wasn't coming back.
He said, it truncates the closure of his character. It doesn't alter it, but it truncates it.
So he hinted that Dutton was never going to be around to the end of the show. even going back to when Yellowstone was a movie in its original form.
John was always going to die. Maybe the conclusion was always going to be the same, but this was abridged.
This was pretty abrupt, obviously. So I don't know that there was a better way for him to handle it because he was just kind of boxed into a corner here, but it does bum me out a bit that we don't get to see the original vision

for how this saga was going to play out.

Because I think even if you make the best of it,

it's still not ideal to have the star of the show

not get any closure,

not get to have a last scene with his kids and his enemies,

just not get to see the original plan, right?

So it feels like we're not getting

the best possible version of Yellowstone.

I agree.

I will say this. The push-pull of Yellowstone for me has always been whether or not the show is about the people or the land.
That's always been the thing that I've been asking myself. is this show about the duttons is it about uh their family drama is this king lear right or is this more like that movie that roberts and meckes has coming out here yeah where the people surround the scene and we track their lives through this one place.
And either way, the show is pretty intriguing. But if you oriented the show around this gigantic plot of land and what the changing realities of American life mean for it, what it means to the family, we go way back to the beginning of the Duttons and just how this anchors them.
I think there is fertile ground for someone, for a lot of story, for someone to take up John Duttons' place and for there to be a lot of story moving forward, which Succession was actually able to do. However, the charisma and the magnetism that Kevin Costner has played this character with, oh my God, this had my mama going.
You know, black women love Kevin Costner, this is the thing. Right, they do.
You know, he's in love with Whitney Houston. She was his great love of his life.
He said this. And that strikes a chord with them.
So it's, my mother is like, the show is dead. It's over.
The show's dead. There's no more show.
She doesn't get to see him ride a horse anymore. She's out.
And so I'm just wondering how they'll be able to go forth and whether or not they'll be able to make the case throughout the rest of this season that this is really about the ranch, that the ranch is the main character here and everybody else is kind of in that orbit. We'll see if they can do it.
I think women of all race, creeds and colors love Kevin Costner. Also men, we like Kevin Costner too.
It's really sort of a universal high approval rating for him. Yeah.
That reminds me of when he gets inaugurated as governor, when he's given that speech about how he opposes progress, which seemingly is actually a pretty winning campaign slogan in real life, as well as in fiction. He's talking about what's the greatest resource of Montana.
Is it the water? Is it the air? Is it the trees? And he says, it's the people. And so you could ask that same question about Yellowstone.
And I guess if you've dipped into the Duttonverse, I don't know whether you have. I know you've explored the Taylor Sheridanverse and Lioness and everything.
But if you watch the whole sweeping scope of the Dutton story in 1883 and 1923 and 1944 and everything else that's coming, then it does sort of seem like it's about the land and everything revolves around that. And you get constant callbacks to, you know, my great-great-grandfather bled for this land.
And it really is about that land. So that's almost the main question for me is what's going to happen to this land more so than what's going to happen to Jamie or Beth or Casey or any individual character.
But I will feel the absence of Costner just because he brought a grounded, something resembling reality to this show, which tends to be pretty over the top. I think especially as it's gone on where Beth and Jamie are just like this Shakespearean mortal enemies, right?

Just constantly swearing that they're going to kill each other and Beth's going to kill Jamie's kid who we haven't seen for a really long time. So maybe she did for all we know.
But Costner just, you know, sitting out there on the porch with a drink, just reflecting in the early morning. All those scenes, those kind of tie this back to something more resembling a regular like prestige drama more so than like this is super soapy some of the scenes between kevin costner between dutton and beth were some of my favorite scenes where he just realized that she was unbridled she she was wild, and there was nothing you could do.

God damn it, Beth.

Some of my favorite scenes were between those two,

and I'm going to miss some of that stuff.

It's not going to be a particularly long season.

What is it, five more episodes?

Five more.

So they don't have to hold things together

for an extended amount of time,

but he will be missed.

Beth is one of the all-time let her cook characters in recent memories. Just let her cook.
It doesn't matter if she's actually in the show that is being produced or if she's in another more drastic on 11 show. Just let her cook.
You have to let her cook. Now though, I think things get a little bit more intricate.
You have to care a little bit about some of the positions that like Jamie's in. Jamie's a pretty feckless character to where half the time you're feeling sorry for him.
The other time you're like, Jesus Christ, he has no backbone and he's nothing. Like he's the one guy you can't trust and he seems to be pernicious in every way, both emotionally and structurally to the Duttons, who are his family.
But now with him being almost inadvertently responsible for his father's death, it actually puts a little bit of spice into that character who had become sort of a nuisance to me like i'll be honest um so giving him some agency whether or not casey can take up the mantle rip has been orphaned yeah again yeah so like all of these characters and how things are are going to play out for them um john's absence almost like lights a fire under all of that. So we'll see if they can pick up the mantle together.
They're all going to have to pick it up and hold it together. Yeah.
So Jon joins Stannis from Thrones and Gomez from Breaking Bad and Charlie from Two and a Half Men and Poochie from The Simpsons on a long list of characters who get killed off screen. And that seeds the spotlight to everyone else.
Jamie, as you said, now he's kind of killed a dad for a second time, his second dad, because he killed his adopted dad. He's killed his bio dad, even if the adopted dad was a semi inadvertent.
And so now it seems like we're setting up this showdown between Jamie and Beth, which we've been building up to now for several seasons, right? Do you have a horse in this race, so to speak? Are you rooting for Jamie or Beth? Is there a lesser evil here? I bet. You think I'm rooting for Beth for sure.
Really? Yeah. Yeah, I guess Beth has not actually murdered anyone yet, whereas Jamie has.
But she has certainly intended to and aspired to murder people. I don't know.
I don't feel super sympathetic toward either of them. You don't feel super sympathetic towards Beth after what Jamie did towards her all of these years ago? Yes.
What are you talking about? A great wrong committed. Yes.
But, you know, Jamie's had a hard time too. He's always been on the outsides looking in, right? He's never felt like a real Dutton.
They're always making him jump through hoops and perform and be a good boy. And it's just never enough.
He can never really earn his family's respect. And I'm learning so much about you right now, brother.
I'm learning so much about you right now, brother. Jamie's a goddamn weasel.
Beth is a fantastic character who's up against it. Has one of uh, outstanding natural bodies I've ever seen on television.

But so, so she represents this cause she,

she can be too much.

Right.

But she represents this,

uh,

unchained trauma,

this raw,

emotional,

uh,

unhinged, um, she's like a force of trauma. And everything that she does, everything she does that takes a little bit of heart seems like it has to wade up through all of this gunk and all of this muck.
And so through Beth's character, you can search for, I guess, trying to get through your own trauma. You can say, look, Beth is, she's decent in spite of the fact that she was hated by her mother, right? She's decent in spite of the fact that she was betrayed by her brother, that no one thinks about her taking over the ranch because she is essentially the queen who never was from Game of Thrones.
A woman couldn't do it, right? But yet she still finds time to love honestly. If not, it's a flawed love, but it's an honest love.
She still finds time to take in a wayward kid. Jamie has none of that shit.
Jamie's a fucking Decepticon. And he only goes in the way that he's programmed to go, and it don't take much to program him.
It's true. Decent is a stretch for Beth.
I'd say that's generous. Really? It depends.
You don't think Beth's decent? With Rip, she is in certain company. I guess once she beats your ass, then she'll be nice to you after that.
But you have to roll around in the grass for a while and kick and punch each other. Then you earn her respect and then she'll be decent to you.
But it's tough. You try to pick her up at a bar, she will have a withering put down for you right away.
But that's fair. It's just, you know, you comp this to succession and Logan Roy dying off fairly early in the last season.
And it's similar in some ways, in the sense that you could say everyone's horrible. You know, that was kind of a common refrain about succession.
I'm not rooting for everyone. All these people are terrible, right? But you couldn't help but watch and maybe feel some sympathy toward them at times.
And also just the quality of the writing and the production on that show, the dialogue, the script was, I think we can say a level above Yellowstone in its current incarnation, right? I still, I love Yellowstone. It's one of the shows I enjoy watching most on TV, but this current season, I'd say it's been a bit of a step down quality wise.
And, you know, it's understandable because Taylor Sheridan's working on 18 other shows at the same time, but I don't know that I get the same pleasure just from the repartee from the just like well-drawn characters in Yellowstone as I do in Succession, where in a way, Logan being off the board made that show more interesting. Now, okay, it's all about the kids.
It's all about the fight for the titular Succession. And now I'm feeling the absence of Costner, of John Dutton already, we'll see how the series proceeds from here.

But this feels like a bigger blow to me.

Like Logan was not as central.

He was, he was the guy that, that everyone was damaged by and everything revolved around

him, but we didn't spend as much time with him.

He wasn't quite as central to the series as John Dutton has been.

So it's a big loss and you can't. Secession wasn't about logan wasn't about logan roy it was about the kids this show is different because it was about john and the kids were supporting succession was about which one of these kids was going to step up and logan roy was almost like a like a foil to them like you know what i mean um but this show is the shows uh first of all's a talent gap.
I don't mean to be a dick, but there's a talent gap here in terms of, you know, like Succession has like some of the performers that are the best cast and are operating on such a ridiculous level. It doesn't really make any sense.
Like they, it was perfectly cast, perfectly played, just all meat, no fat with succession. This show has to have a little bit of fat, right? Because the show is as much about excess as it is about emotion.
So this show is as much about this pastoral scene of a horse running as it is about anything that happens to a person it's as much about a helicopter flying in and you go goddamn these motherfuckers got helicopters yeah it's as much about all of that stuff as it is about the people they have to make uh it's about beautiful overhead shots of the dunn ranch and it's about the why and it's about all of that stuff. So it can't even, it's not even as intimate as Succession is, to your point.
Yeah. Which is another reason why it might have some problems without John, because John is your anchor.
Right. And look, you could talk about, is this plausible? I'm not that interested in nitpicking plot plausibility when it comes to the show, to Yellowstone.
It's heightened, it's soapy. We like it because of that.
And so if you wanted to go searching for plot holes or wait, could they get away with killing John this way or why would they do it this way? Does this actually make sense? Is anyone gonna believe this was a suicide? Look, John probably fired his whole security detail to save Montana taxpayers some money, right? So let's just say that's what happened and that's how the assassins snuck in. I'm not too worried about that, really.
One thing that did stand out to me a little bit, it's been a while. If you can cast your mind back to episode eight, almost a couple of years ago, when Sarah and Jamie first talked about that scheme about hiring hitmen, essentially, Jamie was talking about Beth.
I think it's pretty clear in that conversation. So I don't know whether this is a retcon, whether it's just kind of, oh yeah, they were always vaguely talking about killing these people or whether this is going to turn out to be actually Sarah went above and beyond.
Jamie wanted Beth to get it, but not John. That's a Dutton too far for him.
I can't tell if Sarah is freelancing to some extent or if she is actually following Jamie's wishy-washy wishes, right? He's like know, he's like, I mentioned that one time six weeks ago. I didn't know you were serious about it, but he was serious.
It seemed like he was serious about Beth, though, not John. So I wonder whether Sarah kind of assumes the antagonist role as much as, if not more so than Jamie, because she's kind of the foil.
She's the mirror image.

As I said, she's the brunette Beth, right? Like she's just more competent, more cutthroat than Jamie is. She's more of a match for Beth.
And so I wonder if there's kind of a division between those two, Jamie and Sarah, in addition to the Dutton on Dutton crime that is sure to go down here. well he was 100% talking about Beth

because Beth

was looking to kill him. Right.
Beth was looking to kill him. Train station situation.
She just hit him with a rock in the head. Right.
She was looking to kill him. So he was definitely, definitely talking about Beth.
This is around the time though, but like Jamie has nothing. Jamie doesn't even know what's going on right now.
Like Jamie is pussy whipped to a degree that he has no clue what's going on. Sarah's played such a game with Jamie.
She's got Jamie wrapped around her little finger. Once again, I said, finger.
Oh my God. We're in the world of Yellowstone.

I said, fanger.

It's coming out. Yeah.
So, but that was a quick little press the digitation that they pulled on the audience because we know for sure that he was talking about Beth taking out John. I can make an argument

complicates things

like a little bit

because talking about, Beth, taking out John, I can make an argument, complicates things a little bit because there's some leverage issues there. And if you decapitate in that way, you never know what type of personality you're going to get that steps in for the Dunn's unless you're sure it's going to be Jamie which now obviously Jamie

is public enemy number one, probably for a lot of these people who wouldn't believe that their father would take his own life because they know him and it's completely out of character for him. So it doesn't seem like the smartest move from Sarah to go it alone on that.
And I don't think that she actually really thought that Jamie had given her an order. I think that she's using that and she's using that to play with him.
Yeah. Yeah.
That's been the question all along. Because when she sees him at that press conference, when John just got inaugurated, she immediately's not smiling i'm gonna go after the sun and then there's the question of well does she legitimately like him or is she just twisting him around her finger or some other part of her anatomy and it seems like maybe it's the latter although there could be some genuine affection there it's hard to separate that because i think she's just like, yeah, she's so excited by the prospect of making mountains of money that that might be the closest she comes to genuine affection at this point.
There was an episode eight at the end of that exchange about hiring the hitman. There was this vague kind of, I think she says like, see if you're going to go after her, you just might.
And then he says, maybe, you know, and then, yeah, that's what I was thinking, too. I guess you could say maybe that was an unspoken allusion to actually targeting John here.
But it's not clear whether this is kind of a retcon because of what happened with Costner. And there is a callback, I noticed, because Beth says not only did Jamie kill the man, he killed everything our father's ever done, everything he's achieved, everything he left to us, every memory, he just killed them all.
And way back in season two, episode seven, this is the one after Jamie strangles the reporter and Beth tells Jamie he should kill himself. And John stops him and says, you know, the thing about suicide, you don't just kill yourself, you kill every memory of you.
This'll be all everyone remembers, Jamie. Every second you spent on this earth will be reduced to how you chose to leave it.
No one will mourn your loss, son, because this isn't losing your life. This is quitting it.
So there's kind of a callback there. This is maybe some sort of poetic justice happening here.
And also, Costner real life has been saying now he maintains he did not watch this episode. He has not seen his character's exit, although he has been told about how it happened.
And he said, I didn't leave. I didn't quit.
He's still saying he tried to accommodate the production and they just weren't able to work it out. Sarah in this episode says John Dutton is the opposite of a quitter, which almost felt to me like a little offering of peace maybe to Costner.
He's not quitting. It's not his fault that he was written out here.
But yeah, these themes, they go back a bit. So you can't recast Costner, re-Costner.
You can't do that. So they had to do what they did.
Now, do you think that there is a twist to come or are we just heading for the obvious Beth Jamie standoff at the OK Corral? Is there something that is not obvious on the surface? Are we going to look back and say, oh, he was trying to trick us here? What a good question. It's just tough because he's the governor, right? And so his death is so consequential.
His death means so much. It's the death of an American governor.
So this is everywhere, right? When you think about this, think about it in terms of the actual world. This is on CNN.
This is on Fox. Newsmax is going crazy because Duden is probably big on Newsmax, man.
Everyone is asking, what does this mean? What is the deal? So for there to be shenanigans afoot, it would be a big, big, big, big undertaking from whoever was trying to pull these shenanigans. It's a sitting US governor.
So I'm not sure about that in terms of the jamie versus beth showdown we probably are going towards that but the reality is we need more than that yeah uh we need a lot more than that we need more than that because i don't know if those two characters have enough gravitas for their showdown to be something that we can end the show on you know i'm concerned about rip what this means for my man my guy yeah yeah one of the most likable uh complicated characters on television right now so i think i'm more interested in in what this means for the individual characters i'm as interested should i say as what this means for the individual characters as I am for what this means for the Doug range. You don't think John was a never-Trumper, not a rhino guy? I don't think he's watching much cable news.
He doesn't want to have reception. I don't think he's political.
I don't think that he is part of an ideology. But I do think, though, that they probably like him.
I don't think he likes pretty much... Yeah, because he's authentic him i don't think he likes yeah because he's authentic right he's authentic i don't think he likes pretty much you know anything about that type of stuff but i think that they probably like him and by the way while we're on this um if there's one thing i would love to not ever talk about again is politics but it's like my job but i will say this taylor sheridan just go just go ahead and announce because you're going to do it.
Taylor Sheridan is running, guys. He's running.
I watch Lioness and I watch this and I've watched the history of this show. There are so many little Easter eggs in here that are letting us know about how Taylor Sheridan sees the world, what he thinks is wrong and right taylor sheridan is running it's going to happen what office has he set his sights on you think i think governor of texas probably what doesn't he own like half the state so i think like uh like governor of texas or something along those lines to where let's get let's bring let's bring texas back we Let's bring Texas back from the brink.
Let's have our morals and our values, but at the same time, be compassionate. Yeah.
You know what I mean? So I think, I think he can do that. He's going to run though.
These shows are so political once you peel off the top layer. Yeah.
I wonder what that would do to his TV production schedule. I guess, you know, John hardly has time to get back to the ranch once he's in the governor's mansion.
Might be tough for Taylor to keep cranking out 12 different series at the same time when he has those extra responsibilities. But I think if there is a twist, I don't know that there is.
Obviously, there's the possibility that this is just a total fake out misdirect like Costner in the interview he did on Monday. He said, well, they're pretty smart people.
Maybe it's a red herring. Who knows? They're very good.
And they'll figure that out. Almost hinting like maybe he's not actually dead.
Can you imagine? He's faking his own death. Maybe the whole Sheridan Costner public back and forth is a work.
They've all just worked us here and he's going to come back in grand finale fashion and John Dutton will be back again. That seems extremely unlikely.
You'd have to justify that with like his face was blown off and that's why Beth couldn't recognize him or Casey couldn't recognize him, right? But maybe more realistically, if there is a twist, I guess it could be that someone else actually killed him,

that the timing was a coincidence,

as the hit people say.

He has a lot of enemies.

He has people who have tried

to gun him down before.

It could turn out that maybe

Jamie isn't actually responsible here.

Maybe this was someone else

who had him in their sights.

Or maybe it's...

Yeah, go ahead.

Did you say hit people?

I did, I guess. Ben ben this is why we lost we you don't have to be woke about contract killers ben like it's it's like like maybe we can we don't need a gendered term for assassins anyone can be a hit person hit people this is okay democratic messaging this is the new

Latinx. I've done it now.
Oh my God. You kill people for a living, but I want to make sure that I identify your humanity.
You kill people for a living. Everyone deserves some respect for their personhood.
Just saying. Maybe the twist is not that.
Maybe it's who actually exacts the revenge here. We're all expecting that, you know, Beth claws Jamie's eyes out.
Maybe it's Casey. Maybe it's Casey, right? Yeah.
One thing I liked about this episode was that it brought Beth and Casey back together because it feels like we just, we haven't seen them together for a while. You almost forget that they're siblings because Casey's been off in his own world, understandably with Monica and Tate and everything they've been through.
And then Beth is just wilding out constantly and Rip is restraining her. Right.
But you almost remember, oh yeah, like these, these two are brother and sister. They're suffering the same loss here.
They're kind of consoling each other. And you don't think of Casey as the guy who's just going to go off half cocked the way that Beth does and just take out Jamie.
But if he becomes convinced that Jamie is responsible

for their dad's death,

then maybe he's the one

who delivers that justice.

So John Dutton is LeBron.

Okay.

Trying to give his kids things

they don't deserve.

Beth is Russell Westbrook.

Just filling up the stat sheet

in all kinds of way.

But a lot of people are asking if she still has it Casey is Kawhi Leonard because honestly Casey really has all the tools necessary to figure out all of this shit. He's a dandy with a clock.
He's a natural leader. He's got all, he knows the business, uh, left and right.
This motherfucker came up one time. It was full of goddamn camouflage.
Remember that joint where he has the gun? Yes. He can do everything.
He's just never available. He's in touch with the spirit world.
Yeah. Yeah, the whole night.
He's just never available. He's just never available.
That's his thing. KK is just never around.
He's never available. He's always doing his own thing off doing something else.
He's always playing hurt. There's something going on.
He's the Kawhi Leonard of the show if he would just take the reins he knows everything that needs to be done and he could break your fucking hip in three places if he would just take the reins things would probably be fine but he won't do it he won't do it yeah yeah so jamie's getting too many minutes is what you're saying he should be in the G League. That's what I'm taking away from this.

Jamie. Yeah.
So Jamie's getting too many minutes is what you're saying. He should be in the G League.
That's what I'm taking away from this. Jamie definitely getting too many minutes, man.
Jamie for sure. Jamie like Julius Randle.
Can't win with him. Most of our minutes on this climactic opening to the episode, it's hard to focus on anything that happens after that.
This is what we've all been waiting for. There is much more to the episode, at least in terms of running time, if not necessarily in eventfulness.
And this kind of gets to what you were saying about the pastoral nature of this show, which is a selling point for some people and I think can be a source of frustration for others.

Now, for me, I'm a New Yorker. This is as close to the great outdoors as I get.
When I put on my Dutton shows, my Taylor Sheridan shows, this is the big sky country. This is like,

okay, I feel like I've touched grass, even if I haven't actually. I've at least seen some grass

on the screen. I think it's quite a tonal shift and a shift in pace when we go from

I'm not going to go see some real cowboys on the screen and we're going to ride around. I don't know whether you feel this way, but it would seem to me that if you were to time the amount of each episode on average that is devoted to horse dancing and calf roping and just people just riding out on the trail, I'm pretty sure that has escalated significantly over the course of this series to the point where I sort of suspect that Taylor juggling 17 series as he is, is maybe writing into these scripts sometimes like horse stuff, you know, like he's just doing some scenes with dialogue and then like horse stuff.
And we'll, we'll fill in 10 or 12 minutes there. So we get a lot of that.
How did you feel about coming off the emotional highs and lows of John Dutton's death to then? Ben, you don't like the horse stuff, do you? I like the horse stuff. There are times where I just want to immerse myself in the horse stuff.

I wish this were a documentary.

I've written out on the trail from time to time.

I like getting back to nature.

It rarely happens. Again, this is my connection to the natural world.

So it has a time and a place, but I think it could be a bit jarring.

Coming off the almost two-year layoff with five episodes left when we're taking a road trip to texas to tour taylor sheridan's ranch and reunite with jimmy who uh i thought wasn't in the show before they completely took him out of the show he was supposed to get his own spinoff right yeah he was only in the commercials that would come on in between the show for different horse-related products and horse clothing and stuff like that. He was in those commercials.
But he was totally off the show. And now he's back.
It's good to see him. Yeah, it's good to see him.
How did you feel about this change in gears, though? So I love that, right? I love the horse stuff. I'm, I'm completely with you on this episode though.
In this episode, I was like, okay, like, are we gonna, you know, are we gonna deal with the issue at hand? Like John's dead. So it seems like this episode should have probably turned into a procedural, right? I'm like, John's dead.
This episode is turning in, this is turned to to a procedural i want to know the ins and outs i want to know what happens where we go except we know or we think we know and so we just be retracing the steps that we've already seen or we see in this flashback right so no no no no i mean no no no i mean in terms of the aftermath fallout of it i see not so much of of what happened with John and all of that stuff. But I want to know, get deep, deep, deep into who gets what.
All of that. Just before the whole episode.
They come together. They call a meeting.
Casey fucking throws his bourbon into the fire. Like, what's going on? Like, all of that type of stuff.

And they didn't do that.

They gave us John's death, and they kind of minimized it a little bit. They kind of got back to a regular Yellowstone episode when John fucking doesn't die.
But it worked. I had a lot of fun.
I liked watching Rip sort of wax poetic about cowboyness.

Mm-hmm.

And like... a lot of fun um i liked watching rip sort of uh wax poetic about cowboyness and like where cowboyness goes and what happens to cowboyness and talking to the oldest living cowboy and from that generation and all that sadly no longer living the the late billy clapper right here in this episode but yeah i mean that's that's kind of where the show becomes a mouthpiece for Taylor Sheridan and he gets his thoughts about Brazilian beef in, right? So that's been a frequent theme of the show.
And I guess that's where I'll miss John too, where coming from him, I appreciated that like the old timer lamenting days gone by. Everyone does that.
Of course, we all think the world is getting worse all the time, even though in some ways it's getting better. But I guess if you're a rancher, maybe it is measurably getting worse.
So to have that coming from the two of them and them kind of commiserating, I always enjoyed their heart to hearts on the deck. Whereas now we just have Rip to give voice to voice to that, to, to be the old guard basically.
But I really, I root for rip. I'm with you.
Like I hope rip is the last man standing here. I mean, I don't care that much.
What happens to Beth, except for the fact that I don't want to deal. Rip's heart to be broken.
Why do you, why, why don't you fuck with her like what what what is the thing with beth man i mean she's a hard woman in in some significant ways but uh you don't think uh she has pluck you hate pluck i guess she doesn't have the kind of pluck yeah but she doesn't have that kind of pluck of pluck, really. She doesn't have that kind of pluck.
She has an edge to her.

Yeah.

One of the things I like about this show and about Succession is they are two of the least pluckiest shows that have ever been on television that have been this successful. If they see one ounce of pluck in you, they rip it right out through your stomach.
Yeah. They take the pluck right out.
Yeah. Yeah.

The question moving forward for me is obviously what happens to the land but is there a dudden family left everybody seems to be so in their own head about one thing or another we don't know We just saw, obviously, with Monica and Casey, we saw a generation of the Dutton family perish when she lost her infant. We've just seen so much about them that's uncertain.
What does it mean to be a dudden? Did that die with John? Like, all the history that we've seen. Harrison Ford, goddamn Faith Hill's husband.
What's his name? Tim McGraw. Tim McGraw.
All of these different people that we've seen, this rich, deep history of white people that stole land from Native Americans and what they've gone through. All of this different stuff, right? What it means, is there a future for it? And I think the future for the family is going to be in how they can come together during the absence.
In the absence, should I say, not during because he's gone, in the absence of their father and how much they can put together and whether or not they can work together, live together and love together is kind of going to be what undergirds the show moving on to its end. Yeah.
And is there an outcome where the land is preserved, but not the Dutton's ownership of it? Something about the conservation easement where the land is protected, but it's for everyone. Every now and then I find myself rooting for the Duttons to retain control of this ranch.
And then I step back a bit and think, do they need this many acres actually? Could they not maybe share this land? Why am I rooting for the people who are tossing corpses at the train station constantly? And it's the standard TV thing where you root for the antihero, right? But every now and then I kind of regain my perspective and I'm like, maybe they're the baddies and I'm the baddie because I'm rooting for them. You know, maybe like Casey and Monica and Tate, they're the more benign Duttons, maybe, you know, like maybe Jamie and Beth, they just have to like scratch each other's throats out and leave a new generation of Duttons behind.
I am rooting for Rip though. Like it's sort of like people were rooting for Cousin Greg in succession.
They're like, what if this guy actually came in from the outside and ended up holding all the cards? What if Rip ends up being the custodian here? What if we get the last will and testament of John? I guess we got some insight into that, and Casey's the executor, we didn't get like the Logan Roy underlining names and what that means. Leave it all to Rip.
I would trust Rip to hold onto this land more so than I would your adopted fail son or anyone else in your family, frankly. So that's kind of what I want to see here.
But I guess there's also like the outside the screen element of, well, what does this mean for the Duttonverse and the Sheridanverse and the fact that Paramount and Peacock, they just are relying on a steady stream of content here. And we already know, I mean, there have been some rumors about a potential season six that would center on Beth and Rip, the one true pairing of Yellowstone, which I would watch.
I'd be okay with ending things here also before we get too ridiculous, but more Rip, I'd sign up for that. But we already know we have more prequels.
We have a Yellowstone spinoff, The Madison, coming from Michelle Pfeiffer, more star power entering the Duttonverse. And this is going to be, this is made for me.
This is a New York City family in the Madison River Valley of central Montana. Carpetbaggers coming to the valley.
So I'm looking forward to this. So because you know, like, this is essentially a, you know, a universe.
This is a shared TV universe that streaming services are relying on. Then that kind of makes you think, can there ultimately be closure here? Or are we just going to be passing this land down to generation after generation because we got to keep the gravy train rolling? Yeah.
I mean, they'll find a way to milk out of it what they need. I wouldn't be against Rip being in charge of everything, too, and being the big Dutton.
The only knock against Rip is that he's killed dozens of people. And so he's the serial killer of Montana.
So if Rip, you don't want people looking too deeply into Rip, because if they start looking too deeply into Rip, they're going to find out that he's the Richard Ramirez of Montana. And that's probably not ideal.
His hands are dirty. He did it all for the brand.
He did it all for the Yellowstone. He's got to do it for the brand.
I wouldn't mind seeing a black Yellowstone, the Jenkins family. Okay, yeah.
Colby's not enough for you? Just the one ranch hand? I would like to see that because that's the type of shit I'm into. Because if my family had the land, there would be no thinking twice about it.
Be like, oh, y'all want to build something on it?

There you go.

600 million, we out. Done.
We got new land. And that land is in Anguilla and Jamaica and Turks.
We got new land. Take it.
Good. Hey, we fall for it.
Take it. But no, I'm interested to see where he takes his universe.
Now he has a very recreatable sort of premise here.

Big star, gravitas, land, horse stuff, violence, sexy people.

Let's put it on TV.

He barely misses.

Tulsa King started off and it was terrible, but now people fuck with

Tulsa King. They really like it.

Lioness is good. Lioness season two.

Lioness season two is fucking

fantastic. So, I mean, Taylor

is on a hot one right now.

And this will probably

ride this steam all the way

in to the White House

because we'll probably have another Democrat in the White House

probably like 2070.

So he'll probably ride this theme into two everybody will be in cowboy hats for the next 15 years. Yeehaw, motherfucker.
Yeah. So I'm interested in the land.
Even aside from who dies, what other Duttons die here. There are some other subplots.
I'm more invested in some of the relationships here, some of the love stuff, some of the love stories. Jimmy and Emily, I like those two together.
I like Colby and Teeter. I want to see them get back together here.
Does Monica have another son? Can we get the ranch hands together? Because that's where I want to be. I want to be in the bunkhouse more so than I want to be in the main house.
Like this, it's like the upstairs downstairs of Yellowstone. I'm just as drawn to that.
Like, give me Lloyd over, you know, Jamie most of the time. Right.
So those little relationships I'm interested in seeing. There is the whole like Thomas Rainwater and the pipeline under the water and that character Angela who just delivers everything in the most sinister way that any character on screen has ever delivered a line.
I don't even know exactly how that is going to relate to the end game here, but there's still a lot of loose ends, a lot of threads to tie up here. And presumably, as we got a Logan Roy funeral episode, I guess we're going to get a John Dutton funeral episode, right? You think, right? Gotta send them off, yeah.
Yeah. And then does that bring all the Duttons together? Do they have to shoot deathly glares at each other during the service because they can't kill each other out of respect for their father.
They have to hold their fire until the funeral is over. And then after that, it'll just be no holds barred, right? And give John the burial here he deserves because that's another thing that's implausible about this.
If he were going to kill himself, he would not do it in his underwear in the governor's mansion. He would have gone back to his land, right? He would have ended it where it began.
So that is just a completely out of character for him. So that's what I'm thinking here.
And, you know, when the finale comes around, we can evaluate it all and see what the implications are for future Yellowstone spinoffs and the future of Taylor Sheridan's output at large. Plus, got to find out what happens to market equities.
You know, how's the market equities market cap doing these days? How, how's Caroline doing? Is she still the CEO? That's what I want to know. I think we'll find it all out.
Um, and we're going to get more Beth. We're going to, we're going to give, this also gonna give you the, your opportunity your opportunity to come to terms with your feelings about Beth.
I've never seen such a Beth hater before. You must get on the Beth train right now.
I like when Beth plays ISO ball. We got a little glimpse of her in her community service which if I ever get community service and I'm cleaning up the median, now I know what to do.
Just smoke and drink, and then you get 18 hours wiped off your record. I guess that's how it works if you're a Dutton.
So I like to see her do her thing. The American accent is not always reliable necessarily.
You know, there are certain times when those English hours come out at moments of high emotion. So there's that, but you know, I enjoy seeing her do her thing.
It's frustrating at times because you just want to say, Beth, don't break a glass over this person at the bar's head. Don't do it.
Go easy on Rip. Poor Rip.
You know? My man is just constantly just trying to chase after her and stop her from doing something catastrophic. So I'm glad.
I love that about Rip. Rip will be about, Rip will be, he's gone out, he's killed four people, he's drank seven beers, and then Beth comes in, he's like, Beth, I love you.
I love you. I love you, Beth Dutton.
I'm like, you got, hey, just let you know, Rip has somebody tied up behind the tractor. And Beth walks in.
I love you, Beth Dutton so much. Come here.
You can hear the screams off camera. I mean, that's how they bond.
They were bad for each other for maybe a couple decades, but Rip has settled down at least, and they found their way back to each other. And it's a beautiful love that we would be happy to sign up for a season six to see more of.
Any closing thoughts? Any remaining questions? Anything you're excited to see or that you want to mention about this episode that we haven't touched on? I'm happy to be back in Montana. I did not think that I was going to enjoy the show coming back as much as I did, but I'm part of the millions.
Give me more. Yes.
Give me more of the Duttons, baby. Rest in peace, John.
Yes, I'm with you. And by the way, if you want more Taylor Sheridan, I don't know that anyone has noticed this.
I think I'm writing about this for theringer.com. What a great website, but you know, the concept of a sports equinox, like October 28th was a sports equinox.
That's when all four of the major men's American leagues are in action on the same day. So you have a baseball game, you have NFL, you have NHL, you have NFL.
They're all on the same game. They briefly overlap.
This Sunday is what I'm calling the Taylor Sheridan Equinox because there are no fewer than four Taylor Sheridan series releasing new episodes on Sunday. You could just make a day of this.
You could just do a Taylor Sheridan marathon. There's a new episode of Yellowstone on Sunday.
There's a new episode of Lioness. There's the season finale of Tulsa King.
And there's the series premiere of Landman. I tried to talk to Sheridan about the Taylor Sheridan Equinox, but he declined my interview request probably because he's a busy man.
He probably had to pump out another script or two in the time it would have taken to talk to me. Yeah.
I mean, four shows at once. It's unbelievable the pace at which this guy cranks content out.
We can all look up to this and admire this. So if you're into all of those shows, then Sunday is your Superbowl.
This is your Sheridan Bowl. You can just pop yourself on the couch and you can just be in the oil fields.
You can be in Montana. You can tune in for some spy stuff.
You can be watching Tulsa King. Like there's no end to this man's output.
And so I don't begrudge him the occasional shirtless cameo on Lioness. If that's what it takes for him to put himself on screen and promote his ranch and his business interests so that we have stuff to watch and talk about, then I say, okay, keep cranking it out, Taylor.
We appreciate it. All right.
Thanks to Justin Sales for herding hosts like the Yellowstone Cowboys Drive Cattle. He oversees this Prestige TV feed.
Thanks to Bobby Wagner for producing this episode.

Thanks to you, Van, for putting on the cowboy hat and talking to me about Yellowstone. This is a dream come true.
No problem. Thank you.
Tipping my hat to the audience right there.

I feel like we could have been talking about Yellowstone for the past couple of years. I

didn't know you watched until I was trying to find someone to do a Prestige pod with.

And then lo and behold, I discover Van is into Yellowstone. Perfect.
This brought us together.

So have a great day. I didn't know you watched until I was trying to find someone to do a prestige pod with.
And then lo and behold, I discover Van is into Yellowstone.

Perfect.

This brought us together. So happy that we could do this.

Stay tuned for tomorrow's prestige pod featuring Joe and Rob discussing Say Nothing, the new

FX Hulu series.

And we think we'll be back with more Yellowstone coverage before the end of the season, as

long as no one puts a hit out on us or takes us to the train station before then.

I think he was the one leaving.

He is.

Let's go.