Summary
Yellowstone Season 5 was always going to suffer for John’s absence, but Episode 10 is a real mess on every level.
“The Apocalypse of Change” is exactly the kind of episode you get when you have to kill off a show’s main character over a contract dispute. It’s glacially slow and nonsensically structured, wasting time on scenes that were presumably committed to some previous version of Season 5’s story. Yellowstone is the worst it has ever been here in Episode 10 of its final season, which is a worrying proposition.
Some hurdles were to be expected when John Dutton was killed off in the midseason premiere, but one hoped they wouldn’t persist the way they are doing. This entire episode felt, to me, like a medley of disconnected scenes tying up loose ends in the most unceremonious way possible, trying to crowbar in some cowboy solemnity where possible just for good measure. The scant highlights – Beth confronting Jamie, and Kayce showing some signs of life – suggest there might be some good stuff coming this season, but I, for one, am concerned about how much we’re going to have to slog through to find it.
A Confusing Start
Things begin… weirdly. Despite the fact that Rip quite clearly returned to the Yellowstone ranch at the end of the previous episode, “The Apocalypse of Change” opens with him and the other Texas ranchers waking up on the plains and discovering they’ve made camp on a rattlesnake nest. This scene is fine, in and of itself, but it has nothing to do with anything; it’s set before John died.
When Beth arrives having driven to Texas to check herself and Rip into a swanky hotel with a hidden speakeasy accessed by pulling the Pall Mall lever on the cigarette machine – yes, we get it, we’re in the Lone Star State – we’re touching 20 minutes of an episode that doesn’t have the time to spare. We could have deduced that the 6666 Ranch had its own line of liquor, or that Rip had never left Montana and had no interest in doing anything other than being a cowboy. Why are we wasting time on this?
Tying Up Loose Ends
Things are no better in the present day. Rip and Lloyd are left idling, unsure of whether to look for alternative employment or who to try and take revenge against. The former ends up busying himself with making Carter feel better about John’s death and then giving Summer a ride to the airport because with John dead she has no plot utility. Beth nastily and unceremoniously throws her out of the ranch and indeed the show. Farewell, Summer!
Likewise, Kayce is left to speak with Tate about his potential future. It’s worth noting that he, Monica, and Tate all get a little sequence in the pre-“suicide” timeline where they happily fix up their new house, and when Kayce returns there all sullen it’s supposed to sting a little more because his idyllic future has been upended by his father’s murder. But I mostly just felt impatient that we weren’t hurrying along to something meaningful.
Luke Grimes in Yellowstone | Image via Paramount
Jamie Is The Worst
Thank goodness for Beth, then, who turns up at Jamie’s office and slaps him repeatedly – in full view of his secretary! He’s Montana’s attorney general! – to persuade him to tell the truth about his involvement in their father’s murder. He doesn’t, but his silence and his unwillingness to meet Beth’s eye tells her all she needs to know, and Sarah’s sudden, smug arrival is the nail in the coffin. Beth knows Jamie was involved, so all bets are off.
Jamie’s yellow belly is on full display in Yellowstone Season 5, Episode 10. Once Beth is out of the way he promises Ellis from Market Equities that he’ll reinstate their lease on the Dutton land so they can continue planning their projects while he drains the estate’s financial reserves on a costly legal battle. This is perplexingly naïve from Jamie. Beth was just in his office pimp-slapping him all over the place and promising to smile at him as he dies, and now he thinks she’ll bother going through the rigmarole of court proceedings? Nonsense.
But Jamie is a slave to Sarah. You can tell that he believes her when she tells him he’s the king now, and that kings “feast on the bounty of their conquests”, clearly unable to see that he’s getting completely mugged off. When this guy inevitably dies before the season’s end, I will not mourn him. He’s an idiot.
And he will die, almost certainly. Beth, now surer than ever that Jamie and Sarah were responsible for John’s death, relays the news to Kayce. It takes an effort to remember this, but Kayce is a former Navy SEAL and was for a couple of seasons the show’s deadliest character, so he has some contacts – one in particular, played by Jake McLaughlin and introduced as he fills up his gun safe, just for good measure – who can look into the kinds of companies taking on very lucrative assassination contracts Stateside. All he needs is a target.
I don’t know about you, but I hope he finds one soon.
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