[Warning: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for the Yellowstone Season 5 Part 2 premiere.]
The fate of Kevin Costner‘s John Dutton was revealed in Yellowstone‘s return on Sunday, November 10, nearly two years after its last new episode. The Dutton family patriarch was taken to the train station (so to speak, not literally) by one of his own children, descending the family into a civil war that’s no doubt going to claim more lives. There are just six episodes total in Yellowstone Season 5 Part 2, which until confirmed otherwise is believed to be the Western drama’s final season. TV Insider had spoiler-free conversations with Wes Bentley, Luke Grimes, and Kelsey Asbille about the upcoming final episode, and they say it’s a “perfect ending” for the show, an ending that Asbille says wasn’t drastically changed by Costner’s exit.
Part 2 opened with tragedy. John died by a gunshot wound to the head in an upstairs bathroom of the governor’s mansion in the middle of the night. Kayce (Grimes) and Beth (Kelly Reilly) both saw his body for themselves, but it was only partially shown to viewers (his face wasn’t shown — no surprise considering Costner’s exit). Beth quickly blamed Jamie, whose first scene of the episode showed him sitting alone in a meeting room receiving a phone call from someone saying that John’s death was believed to be a “10-56,” aka a suicide. Jamie announced it as such in a press conference even after Lynelle (Wendy Moniz) told him not to, raising suspicions about Jamie’s potential involvement for viewers.
Beth didn’t believe the suicide story. She called Rip (Cole Hauser) and urged him to come home from Texas, and then the episode flashed back to six weeks earlier, just two days after the Yellowstone cowboys left Montana for their year down south with the cattle (these scenes also featured Jefferson White reprising his role as Jimmy). At that time, Sarah Atwood (Dawn Olivieri) was in New York hiring professional hitmen like she and Jamie discussed in the Part 1 finale, confirming they were the ones to kill John with this “suicide” plot. But the episode’s ending revealed that Jamie had no idea Sarah went through with their murderous idea. Sarah said he’s “completely shielded” from the fallout, but we’ll see about that, seeing as Beth and Kayce suspect them both.
The Duttons are officially at war. Where will they go from here? The details of this season were kept under tight lock and key even from cast and crew members. Only a select few cast members, like Grimes, Asbille (Monica), Bentley (Jamie), and no doubt Reilly and Hauser, got the full scripts. Everyone else’s scripts were redacted except for their own lines in their own scenes, and the episodes weren’t provided in advance to cast or press, so they’ll be watching the season along with viewers to see the final versions of what they filmed.
Asbille says that the final episode of Yellowstone will “definitely” be satisfying for longtime fans. “I really think that it’s the perfect ending for the show in every way, and I think Taylor [Sheridan, series creator] always knew the way he wanted to end it,” she tells TV Insider. “It really lives up to the hype.”
“I haven’t seen [the series finale] cut together, I’ve just read it. And even just on the page, I was a mess,” adds Grimes. “I mean, it’s beautiful, it’s heartbreaking. It just felt so rewarding. It’s what you want at the very end of a show that you’ve loved so much for so long.”
“I do hope at some point they’ll release Taylor’s scripts for the show,” Asbille says, “because the writing, all the in-between moments that are not just the dialogue are written so beautifully and capture a spirit and an emotion that I think the show does a beautiful job of conveying. I think that would be a really cool treat.”
Bentley says he “wouldn’t assume to know how people are going to feel” about the show’s ending, but “for me, it was satisfying to read. I think a lot of fans will be. Everyone’s different.”
“One of the great things about this show and other great shows is, people come from it with different perspectives and different things they like about it,” Bentley continues. “So I couldn’t begin to know what every fan’s going to think, and in fact I’m really excited to see what they have to say about it because they’ve been my barometer for the show for the whole time.
Grimes reveals why some cast members had to get the full scripts in order to pull off this final season. “There’s a few of the core family members who were going to be in enough of the end that we needed to know everything,” Grimes explains. “We got the [finale] script, so we were able to read it, thankfully, because it’s so good. We were able to see everything that happened.”
“A lot of people only knew what their lines were, their scenes were, and some of the crew didn’t get scripts, which if you know anything about how films are made it, I don’t know how you do that, but we figured it out somehow,” Grimes adds. “It was wild, and it wasn’t without some frustration by a lot of people.”
What did you think of how Yellowstone handled Costner’s departure? Was it a worthy end for the Dutton patriarch? And what do you hope will happen next? Given that Bentley previously told TV Insider that it’s “very possible” that Rip will find out what Jamie did to Beth when they were teens, we have a feeling Beth will have Rip kill Jamie, especially if they find out for sure that Jamie killed John. Let us know your thoughts in the comments section, below.
Yellowstone, Sundays, 8/7c, Paramount Network
