The eight-episode second season of 1923 gets underway as Yellowstone, its counterpart within the Taylor Sheridan series universe, heads out to pasture. Does our knowing what happens to the Dutton family in the future affect our understanding of their exploits in the past? Not really, because one sentiment stays constant: always fight to protect your own. Helen Mirren, Harrison Ford, Brandon Sklenar, Julia Schlaepfer, Jerome Flynn, Michelle Randolph, Darren Mann, and Timothy Dalton all return for Season 2 of 1923, where the stark Montana weather greets a cold reality: Cara (Mirren) and Jacob (Ford) are in danger of losing the Dutton ranch to wealthy landowner and professional son-of-a-bitch Donald Whitfield (Dalton). That is unless Spencer (Sklenar), their war hero/lion hunter nephew, can save the day. Jennifer Carpenter also joins the cast.
Opening Shot: The snow-crusted peaks of Montana in winter fade to the Yellowstone Ranch barn in silhouette, where even the Dutton fam’s iconic Hooked Rocking Y logo looks like it’s shivering.
The Gist: “Dear Spencer, we have sold the last of our herd, keeping only four bulls and one hundred heifers.” As Cara (Mirren) describes in her letters to Spencer (Sklenar), life is cold and lonely on the ranch, where Cara and Jacob (Ford), together with Jack (Mann) and Elizabeth (Randolph) Dutton, continue to survive in spite of the financial pressures and personal cruelties area rich guy Donald Whitfield (Dalton). As we rejoin their struggle, it’s with a court case looming over bullshit charges of miscegenation brought by Whitfield against Dutton ranch foreman Zane (Brian Geraghty) and his wife Alice (Joy Osmanski).
Are Clara’s letters even reaching Spencer? Because he’s currently at sea, in the bowels of an Italian merchant ship, where he feeds the boiler alongside impressionable seaman Luca (Andy Dispensa) while they steam for the port of Galveston. And what of Alexandra (Schlaepfer), who you’ll recall was separated from her husband when her previous fiancé, an English Society-type, challenged Spencer to a duel and was summarily tossed overboard? For now, Alex is locked in an estate in Sussex, trying to deal with a few developments of her own. But she’s got a plan to secure ship’s passage to America so she can join Spencer in Montana, assuming he gets there, too.
In Bozeman, there are more signs of modernity – Jacob scowls at a telephone booth – as the cowboys prepare to attend the trial and keep an eye out for Whitfield and his chief goon, Banner Creighton (Flynn). And out in the wilds of Oklahoma Territory, Teonna Rainwater (Aminah Nieves) continues to flee psychotic US marshals and the Catholic priest, Renaud (Sebastian Roché), who sanctioned her torture at the Indian boarding school. (Jeremy Gauna takes over the role of Pete Plenty Clouds from actor Cole Brings Plenty, who died last year.)
Spencer at least still has his big lion-hunting rifle with him as he makes his way solo. He’s ready for trouble, but he’s gotta reach his family first. As they wait for spring, Clara and Jacob Dutton are watching for threats both animal and human, and keeping their own guns loaded.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? A Thousand Blows, a rough-and-tumble Victorian-era series from Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight, just premiered on Hulu. And in the Netflix limited series American Primeval, the Utah Territory of the 1850s is a violent stew of Christian extremism and power struggles between whites and native peoples. (Primeval also features Jeremy Gauna, who joins 1923 in Season 2.)
Our Take: Was there a brief moment of butterflies in our stomach as the Dutton Ranch, with its white outbuildings and wood-and-stone mansion, appeared at the outset of 1923 season 2? Did we think, “Oh man, the place isn’t looking too good – kinda cold, kinda desolate; kinda like it might get bought by moneyed interests with no respect for what the land represents in human capital”? Sounds familiar, right? We did get butterflies, and we did think about all of that. And that’s because the Sheridan-O-Verse has completely cooked our brains into a fertile slurry where the legendary fight of the Duttons – in any generation, against any and all comers – will never die.
Spencer can’t make it back to Montana fast enough, if only because his romance with Alexandra undeniable, as is Brandon Sklenar and Julia Schlaepfer’s chemistry. But there is just so much trouble on the cold horizon. Because as Jacob Dutton relates in ep 1 of 1923 season 2, he paid some of the tax owed, but the Duttons are also selling off resources they haven’t replaced. In that sense, Spencer is the family’s best and truest resource, and it remains to be seen how his hunter’s mentality will match with Donald Whitfield, who as a tycoon of big business embodies a different kind of deadly animal instinct. In general, the 1920s version of the Duttons’ battle sounds like another dust-up in the war we know they’ve always been in. Instead of being left alone to make things, they were pushed by people who take things. And now that the push has become a shove, it has inspired within them the only reason to fight, when it’s all said and done: to protect and survive.
Sex and Skin: In addition to his long list of despicable qualities, Donald Whitfield is also a sexual deviant, and he continues to make ritualistic power moves over local sex workers Christy (Cailyn Rice) and Lindy (Madison Elise Rogers).
Parting Shot: With Jacob and the cowboys away in town, Clara stands outside the ranch house and listens to the wolves howl. “Winter,” Elsa Dutton (Isabel May) tells us in her disembodied 1923 voiceover, “is the time when all of nature’s failures become a meal.”
Sleeper Star: Since she appeared in season 1 of 1923 as Elizabeth, Michelle Randolph has become part of the breakout success of Landman, Taylor Sheridan’s modern-day Texas oil drama. What would Randolph’s Ainsley Norris think of Elizabeth’s life in 1920s Montana?
Most Pilot-y Line: Wise words from Runs His Horse (Michael Spears), Teonna’s father: “That’s what governments want. They want beggars. Because beggars, they cannot question.”
Our Call: Stream It! Did the final chapters of Yellowstone leave you in need of more Dutton family drama? Well here it is, out of the past, as season 2 of 1923 picks up the thread of protection around the people and the place at the center of Taylor Sheridan’s multi-generational, multi-series saga.
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.