See you down the dusty trail, Yellowstone. Taylor Sheridan wrote and directed “Life Is a Promise,” the size XL “season finale event” of the series that established his small screen empire. And he appears once again as horse trainer and dyed-in-the-wool asshole Travis Wheatley, a character who always felt designed and built to represent Sheridan’s version of the male ideal. But if Travis is supposed to be the guy who commands a room with his coarse confidence, it’s Beth Dutton who was always Sheridan’s female muse. Kelly Reilly’s work as the character made Beth’s coarseness a virtue, and it’s Beth who is the emotional guiding star here, as life at the Yellowstone Dutton Ranch concludes and John Dutton’s body is submitted to the land. For Beth, avenging her father’s death was and is inevitable. But in their final act of cowboying on the ranch, she first has Rip and the Bunkhouse Boys dig her father’s grave, alongside his wife Evelyn and his great-aunt Elsa.
Even if Beth decries the very concept of ceremony, John Dutton’s funeral ends up being suitably reverent ceremony. Herself, Rip, Carter, Kayce and his family, Lynelle Perry, and the cowboys accompany John Dutton’s body from the stables to the family plot, and once everyone has made their private farewells, Rip personally lowers the coffin and grabs the ceremonial silver shovel. (“It ain’t symbolic today; today this shovel works” – classic Sheridan and Yellowstone.) It’s closure for everybody, to say so long to the man who embodied the Dutton ethos. But the finality is physical, too – everything is ending because the ranch is officially sold.
“You made me promise not to sell an inch,” Beth whispered through her father’s coffin-top. “I hope you understand that this is me keeping it. There may not be cows on it, but there won’t be condos, either.” Kayce’s plan to get out from under the fam’s staggering tax bill was indeed to sell their land for cheap. But in practice, the sale is not cheap. Chief Thomas Rainwater readily accepts Kayce’s price – $1.25 an acre, or 1.1 mil in total – to return the Yellowstone and Paradise Valley to the Broken Rock People, who were its stewards for generations before the Duttons and white people arrived. The land will not be corrupted by sprawl, converted into ski lodges, or covered in airport tarmac. It will remain pristine forever. “We are brothers now, to each other and to the land,” Rainwater tells Kayce solemnly as Mo looks on. “Your people are buried in that land, and so are mine. It is sacred. And that’s how we’ll treat it.”
Kayce, Monica, and Tate will keep East Camp in the deal, and we catch a nice scene where father and son purchase the beginnings of their own brand and herd at auction. The Hooked Rocking Y brand will be retired, but retained by Beth and Rip, who have purchased their own ranch outside Dillon, northwest of the Yellowstone. It’s good country out there for cattle and yearlings, Rip likes the quality of the grass, and best of all, “ain’t nobody from the city gonna wanna put up with the winters.” Is this the ranch where we’ll find Beth, Rip, and their de facto son Carter in an upcoming Yellowstone spinoff? We shall see. For now, it’s vengeance time.
Minutes after his pompous, sanctimonious statement to the press – “blind scales of justice,” “the mettle of our Constitution,” “the murder of your freedom” – Beth appears in Jamie’s house with bear spray, a tire iron, and an old dagger. (For what she’s got planned, a gun would be too simple.) Jamie will not rise to power on the back of his father’s murder, and he won’t reveal 150 years of dark Dutton fam secrets, because once Beth attacks, Jamie retaliates just as pompously as his speech sounded. “You’re about to become another one of this family’s secrets” he says with his hands around a bloodied Beth’s neck. Which is right around when the second part of her plan kicks in. Rip arrives, holds Jamie up, and Beth drives her blade deep into his guts. Beth kept her promise. John Dutton is avenged. And Jamie’s dead ass is on its way to the Train Station, courtesy of Rip and Lloyd. There is definitely no ceremony as they dump his corpse in the Duttons’ trusty death receptacle.
With a punctured lung and a few other scrapes, Beth is victorious as Detective Dillon arrives. Offshore accounts are how he will track down her father’s killers. Sarah Atwood is who paid for the hit. Jamie was complicit in its planning. “And I am what he is willing to do to prevent someone from looking into it.” Beth will recover for a bit in the hospital, pouring Tito’s into her smoothies. But killing Jamie will have no further consequences. And Beth, who was the centerpiece of Yellowstone even when John Dutton was still alive, begins her happily ever after with Rip and Carter on their smaller but still substantial new ranch. Cue the Willie Nelson and “My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys.”
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.