'Yellowstone' Recap: What Happened to John Dutton

Long time no see! A lot has gone down since Yellowstone was last airing episodes. Back in January 2023, I was excited about where the second half of this fifth season would go: Beth and Jamie’s civil war was ramping up, John faced potential impeachment, and half the cast was moving to Texas. The stage was set for an exciting conclusion when the show came back that summer.

The show did not come back that summer. In fact, two summers have come and gone since I wrote that, but we’re still on season five, and the momentum generated during the first half has totally dissipated. Outside the effects of last year’s strikes, much of the delay comes down to scheduling issues; I won’t rehash here, but the long and short of it is Kevin Costner will almost certainly not be appearing in these six episodes. Equally as important: These are the final six episodes of Yellowstone, barring some surprise renewal or new sequel series based around Beth and Rip. We’re coming to season 5B with a very different understanding of its significance.

So, this mid-season premiere has a lot on its plate. The funny thing is, though, much of “Desire Is All You Need” also just feels like another episode of Yellowstone, with its strange and singular blend of political thriller and low-stakes ranch drama. It can be exciting, it can be dull, it can be silly, it can be meditative. It’s Yellowstone.

The episode (the ninth of the season, technically) is broken into three chapters, sort of, with the middle (and longest) section taking place earlier than the other two. First is a lengthy 12-minute cold open: a flash-forward that almost immediately answers the Kevin Costner question by revealing that Governor John Dutton has been shot and killed in the bathroom of his governor’s mansion in Helena.

Beth and Kayce check out the crime scene for themselves, with the former reacting how you’d expect: screaming gutturally, sobbing, and immediately insisting Jamie was responsible. He was the one who called for John’s impeachment and wants to sell off the ranch, after all, and the trial was supposed to begin that morning. When we do see Jamie, he’s deeply distraught by the news, and he sure seems surprised. But you can never tell with Jamie — these could easily be the guilty tears of a man who just killed his second father in a row. Beth sure thinks they’re crocodile tears.

All this stuff is pretty fun, and at first I thought the subsequent flashback to six weeks ago would be exciting — we’d get to see the lead-up to the murder and confirm Jamie’s degree of complicity. Indeed, we do get one scene of Sarah Atwood placing the hit on John, meeting in a mysterious windowless room with the “professionals” who can pull it off. It’s kind of ridiculous, like something out of a completely different show, but it’s always fun to indulge in some corporate intrigue with a shadowy organization of assassins. “Grant” has plenty of blackmail footage of Sarah and Jamie fucking, and he’ll use it to throw them under the bus if anything ever goes south with the hit.

Most of this long flashback segment is pretty boring, though. Look, I’ve always appreciated this show’s focus on natural beauty, and I don’t mind its frequent languid scenes of herding cattle and then shooting the shit after a long day of work. But the momentum really slows down in the saggy middle half-hour of this episode, focused primarily on Rip’s journey to the Four Sixes ranch in Texas with Ryan, Walker, Jake, and Teeter. For one, most of the banter just isn’t really hitting. We get it: Teeter has a goofy voice, the guys’ affectionate bickering sounds gay, and Jimmy acts mentally challenged. Oh, and you can’t say stuff like that these days.

The Texas story has its moments, sure. A change of location is appreciated, and compared to the mountain life our guys are used to, the state is disconcertingly flat, empty, and indifferent — as Walker says, Texas “forgets you.” Ryan getting nipped by a scorpion is fun. And even though famous spur maker Billy Klapper wasn’t the most natural performer, I respect Sheridan’s continual efforts to spotlight these Texas legends with appearances on his show. (Klapper’s death this past September adds another poignant layer to the “When he’s gone, we’re all out of legends” line, and a card in the credits memorializes him.)

I also laughed at Rip letting a kid pet his horse at a pit stop, only to flatly reject the similar request of an approaching young couple — it’s just classic. But that scene exists to reignite Rip’s angst about the death of cowboying, which is getting pretty old at this point. Cole Hauser used to share monologuing duties with Costner, who could deliver them with gravitas and a healthy degree of grumpy-old-man self-awareness. I like Hauser a lot, but it’s not as dynamic to watch Rip grouse about solar farms and stare admiringly at one-piece spurs.

To be sure, this type of nostalgia and wistful reflection speaks to a real-life community that often doesn’t get exposure on TV, which is part of the reason this series gets such stellar (confoundingly so, to some critics) ratings. However, none of the characters here really grapple with these larger philosophical and cultural questions in any meaningful or interesting way. There’s no discernible change on Rip’s part, no concrete effort to preserve an old way of living or build a new one. This conflict has been around since the beginning, but right now it feels too abstract, too static.

Back in the present, we get confirmation that despite Jamie’s initial comment assenting to the hit on his dad, he didn’t know Sarah was behind this; for those first few hours, he was actually convinced his father committed suicide because of him. This all works decently enough as a way of writing John Dutton out of the show, and it makes sense that Sarah is still able to manipulate Jamie into viewing an act of patricide as justice.

Does it fit seamlessly with what we saw in season 5A, though? Not really. In case you’ve forgotten, Jamie did suggest placing a hit on Beth in the mid-season finale, sensing that his sister had the same thing planned for him. But any real mention of killing John was secondary and implicit, at least the way I viewed that conversation. Walking back the Beth idea and positioning John as the main (only) target feels like a retcon, or at least an event moved several episodes up due to Costner’s premature exit.

Regardless, I’m interested to see how this storyline moves forward, even if future plans for the franchise make it seem obvious which side of this civil war will eventually win out. I’m very glad to get Kayce and Beth in the same room again — the show frequently seems to forget that they’re brother and sister — and it should be interesting to see Kayce struggle with how to approach the Jamie situation.

The only concern, really, is how to fill the rest of the time. There’s not all that much reason to spend time at the ranch: The cattle are gone, and the ranch hands left behind (mainly Lloyd, Colby, and Carter) are bored shitless. Kayce, Monica, and Tate are happier than we’ve possibly ever seen them, moving into a dingy cabin they’ll fix up nicely. The most I can ask for, in these last five episodes, is some real conflict, some soapy drama and violence, likely of both a physical and emotional nature. With Costner gone, the seams are more visible than ever, but with five episodes to go, I’m in this till the end.

• It is pretty stupid to frame John’s death as a suicide, even if it’s supposedly the “cleanest option.” With the surveillance footage missing, it’s even more obvious there’s something fishy there.

• So, uh, is Summer just gone? Maybe we’ll see her at John’s funeral or something.

• Chief Rainwater and Mo are still figuring out how to handle the pipeline that will run under the lake, risking serious contamination. So watch out for that.

• Yeah, I mean, there’s no hiding Tate’s growth spurt.

• It makes sense that Beth would fall apart in Rip’s arms at the end, but her scream-crying loses some of its power when she already did it early in the episode. Afraid to say I didn’t feel much in those closing moments.