Between Season 1 of 1923 and “The Killing Season,” the first episode of its second, we got some resolution on the Dutton family and their generational battle for land, resources, and reputation. Yellowstone, the Taylor Sheridan drama that started this whole thing, ended. The Duttons who survived secured soil and big beef ranching dreams for the next generation, while stewardship of the Yellowstone land itself reverted to the Broken Rock people, thanks to a trick of tax law to keep out rich external grabbers and keep pure the Dutton legacy, in which they had invested so much spilled blood.

But just because we’ve seen the future of the Sheridan-O-Verse doesn’t mean we’re less interested in the ongoing fights of its past. As you’ll recall from 1923 season 1, tax trouble was a toughie for Helen Mirren and Harrison Ford’s Cara and Jacob Dutton one hundred years before it became part of the solution for Dutton siblings Kayce (Luke Grimes) and Beth (Kelly Reilly). While meager cashflow has kept wealthy human leech Donald Whitfield (Timothy Dalton) from fully sucking dry the Yellowstone ranch and its iconic stone-and-timber mansion, Whitfield still inches closer, biding his time. “Winter is the killing season, when the hunters among us seek out the weak, the foolish,” goes the ghostly narration of Elsa Dutton (Isabel May), who died in 1883, Sheridan’s other Dutton prequel. On the porch of the Dutton family plot, when Jacob encounters a mountain lion prowling, it’s an omen for hunters of humans and animals alike.

It’s so cold in Montana, the kind of cold that blankets buildings and makes hope feel fallow. In her letters to Spencer Dutton (Brandon Sklenar), hero of the Great War and big game hunter in Africa, whose trek home to Montana continues, Cara describes the cattle sales that reduced the Duttons’ herd to four bulls and a few heifers, stew and stale bread to provide the “bland fuel of sustenance,” and the laws and financial “trickery” that stole the family’s prosperity. Cara holds out hope for the spring and Spencer’s return, so that they might mount a new offensive against Whitfield and his willing soldier, area sheepherder Banner Creighton (Jerome Flynn).

‘1923’ Star Brandon Sklenar Believes Spencer Dutton “Should Be Feared”: “He Has The Capacity To Be A Very Dangerous Person”

(To that point, this season on 1923, Banner could become less willing. Whitfield helped him avoid jail time for stoking range war violence with the Duttons, and elevated him from the pasture to a tony life in town. But Banner knows Whitfield is a devil. His promise to his wife – “Soon we’ll have land” – feels more hopeful than sure. And in case anybody’s still wondering about what kind of monster Whitfield is, “The Killing Season” reveals that he has turned one Montana sex worker against her counterpart, who they’ve confined in a closet as their personal sex slave.)  

Spencer’s still got a ways to go before he can help Cara, Jacob, and the Yellowstone ranch, whose residents also include young marrieds Jack (Darren Man) and Elizabeth. (Elizabeth is played by Michelle Randolph, who became Ainsley Norris on Landman between seasons of 1923.) Spencer’s journey actually took up the bulk of last season, as it evolved into romance with British socialite Alexandra (Julia Schlaepfer), almost capsized in the hold of a rusty tugboat, and included both a marriage at sea and being challenged to a duel. It seems like it’ll take a minute before we can hit restart on Sklenar and Schlaepfer’s ease and chemistry, because for now Spencer is shoveling coal into the boiler of an Italian merchant vessel while Alex is secluded – being kept prisoner – in the Sussex mansion of her former fiancé’s family. Sussex, as in the Earl of Sussex. As in Prince Arthur, third son of Queen Victoria. Who won’t let Alex leave the premises after she spurned a Society marriage to his son in favor of a fulfilling life of love and adventure with Spencer.

For her “to find my way to you,” as Alexandra writes Spencer, is long overdue. But she has an even more pressing reason to enlist her Society pal Jennifer (Jo Ellen Pellman) in the sale of aristocratic jewelry to secure ship’s passage to America: Alex is pregnant! Where will this Dutton couple’s offspring figure into the future of the family tree? We shall see – they gotta be reunited first. In the meantime, Spencer is in a familiar spot for him, which is to greet death with righteous certainty. “Come at me with that knife, and I’m gonna fucking kill you with it.” 

Even if they are US marshals and Catholic priests, the group that continues to pursue Teonna Rainwater (Amina Nieves) across the wilds of Oklahoma and Texas are actually just killers. Kent (Jamie McShane), the marshal, tramples a Native American child with his horse, and Renaud (Sebastian Roché), the spineless priest, says nothing. For Teonna, violence was a necessary tool as she escaped sexual torture at a government-sanctioned Indian school operated by Catholic nuns. That this psychotic posse continues to search for her is only because of their base desire, which remains control. “That’s what governments want,” Teonna’s father Runs His Horse (Michael Spears) says. “They want beggars, because beggars cannot question.”

Teonna’s escape from persecution and the cycles of white oppression in the American West have left her wary of the world at large. But those trials have also led Teonna to love and safety with Pete Plenty Clouds. (Jeremy Gauna takes over the role of Pete in season 2 of 1923, which also includes a tribute to Cole Brings Plenty, who died last year.) By a secluded riverbank, as she removes her disguise of men’s clothing and Teonna and Pete act on their mutual attraction, the scars are still visible from the cruelties and danger she left behind.

“Winter is the time of the wolf, the time of the lion, when all of nature’s failures become a meal.” On the porch, in the deep cold of Montana, Elsa Dutton’s narration hits home again when Cara has to shoot down the same visiting mountain lion. What else could she do? The big cat was gonna make a meal out of Elizabeth. The question now is when the Duttons’ main lion killer will finally arrive home, and what Spencer will find when he does. Cara reloads the barrels of her shotgun as wolves howl in the mountains that surround the Paradise Valley.     

Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.