Summary
Yellowstone Season 5’s midseason premiere naturally suffers a bit for Kevin Costner’s absence, but hopefully the clunky start in Episode 9 will lead to some exciting stuff down the line.
The big question looming over the back half of Yellowstone Season 5 was how the show would conclude without the involvement of Kevin Costner, who declined to return for the second half. This is a pretty big deal since Costner’s character, John Dutton, is the most vital figure in the story. Episode 9, “Desire Is All You Need”, gives it away right from the jump. He’s dead, apparently by suicide. But it wastes no time in revealing that’s not really what happened. Either way, there’ll be Hell to pay for it by season’s end.
It was important for the midseason premiere to get this out of the way quickly since it’s all rubbish. It’s clunkily handled and wildly overperformed, especially by Kelly Reilly, who is usually brilliant but hasn’t been asked to play grief yet and chooses to do it as theatrically as possible. But it’s whatever. This kind of means-to-an-end storytelling is lamentable, but it can’t be helped.
John Dutton Really Is Dead
Nobody’s buying the idea that John Dutton shot himself in the head, naturally. Beth and Kayce are the first on the scene to confirm for the audience’s sake that the double on the bathroom floor really is their father, but even they know that something’s afoot. Beth immediately suspects Jamie, and she’s right to, but Kayce reckons he doesn’t have the minerals to have participated directly, which is also true, as we’ll see.
A staged suicide is a particularly egregious form of murder in Beth’s eyes, since it doesn’t just take away her father but also damages his legacy as a proud man of the plains. The only acceptable way for John Dutton to go out was with his hat and boots on, not his pyjamas. Dying a mundane everyman death doesn’t just undermine John, but undermines the very cowboy ideals he publicly stood for.
The Cowboy’s Lament
Yellowstone Season 5, Episode 9 is obsessed with the rapid erosion of cowboy work and fashion, to the extent that it includes a lengthy six-weeks-earlier stretch following Rip and the other cowboys, horses and bison he took to Texas. Most of this has no bearing on the overarching plot whatsoever, and it’s dripping with a sense of melancholy that edges really close to being silly.
I don’t just mean Rip’s insistence on sleeping out on the land in teepees, despite literally everyone he meets warning him that in Texas that’s tantamount to suicide, and I certainly don’t mean a very sweet diversion meant to honour the real-life traditionalist spur-maker Billy Ray Klapper, who sadly died in September 2024. That scene is totally ancillary, I’ll grant you, but it’s deeply felt. I mean more stuff like Rip gazing up at the starry sky and asking Walker to play them a sad song since, “30 years from now, nobody’s going to be doing this.” Give it a rest.
Cole Hauser in Yellowstone | Image via Paramount
The Duttons Have Some Work To Do
Luckily, “Desire Is All You Need” doesn’t languish in the past for too long, save to provide us with one crucial scene in which we learn that Sarah Atwood arranged John’s murder through a shady conglomerate. Suicide was put forward as a method because it provides maximum results (death) with minimal risks (no toxicology reports implying foul play). The clear problem with this scheme is what was discussed above – nobody on earth, least of all the people Sarah most needs to buy it, believes that John committed suicide.
The cops are morons in this mid-season premiere. Most of them know John personally and would know as well as Beth that he has been murdered. Even more silly is the fact that Kayce later calls the state police and they inform him that the nearby transponder went out three minutes before John’s confirmed time of death, erasing all of the security footage, which they apparently don’t consider to be suspicious.
This leaves the usual suspects – Beth, Kayce, and now Rip, who races home from Texas to support his wife and avenge his father figure – to get to the bottom of the matter by any means necessary, which doesn’t bode well for Jamie, Sarah, or anyone else who gets in their way. That’s an exciting setup for the back half of the final season, so it’ll probably be worth all the ham-fisted storytelling that bogs down this episode when we get there.
Let’s hope so, anyway. If Beth and the remaining Duttons are feeling their patriarch’s demise, one has to imagine that the audience are suffering even more.
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