Summary
Yellowstone’s penultimate episode is a woeful mess, as Season 5 continues to steadily euthanize a once-great series.
It’s easy to forget how good Yellowstone was at its peak because Season 5 is euthanizing it in record time. I suppose that’s grimly ironic given this final season is about the erasure of John Dutton’s name and legacy, not to mention the gradual erosion of cowboy culture in general, since Episode 13, “Give the World Away”, sells off the few remaining positive qualities at a steep discount. There’s almost nothing left.
At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if the entire finale was devoted to John’s much-talked-about funeral, with all the core cast staring contemplatively off into the middle distance and a handshake deal or two to clarify the financial side of things. What else is there to cover? Jamie is clearly going to pin John’s assassination on the now-deceased Sarah Atwood, Kayce has scared off the murder-for-hire firm she used to kill him, and it seems like there’s a cheekily obvious solution for the ranch’s exorbitant tax bill.
“Give the World Away” is supposed to feel like goodbye. It feels more like good riddance.
Travis’s Ranch Is A Sickeningly Obvious Meta Flourish
The stakes are so low in this final season that almost half of the penultimate episode is devoted to stroking Taylor Sheridan’s ego. After Rip entrusted him with selling off the ranch’s most expensive horses, Beth decides that she can’t trust him to do the job properly, so she flies off to Texas to supervise the sale. And it only gets more ridiculous from there.
All these scenes are set on Bosque Ranch, which is Sheridan’s own, and it’s so flagrantly a branding exercise that I felt a bit queasy. More so than that, though, Travis is suddenly reinvented as a kind of bohemian ladies’ man who’s half-naked constantly, is dating a guest-starring Bella Hadid for no reason at all, and is somehow irresistibly attractive because he runs an extremely simple con driving up prices at auction. It’s preposterous.
Travis has never been depicted like this before, and the ease with which Beth, of all people, falls for his bullshit is amazing. She’s so taken with his very easily replicable auction strategy that she insists he simply must be present for the upcoming Yellowstone auction in person, and because she wants him to do it pro bono, he tricks her into a game of strip poker that she knows is rigged – it was established earlier that there were five Aces on the table and Travis’s supermodel guests were too stupid to notice – and is for some reason willing to go along with it anyway. She even laughingly threatens Travis with Rip, and he isn’t remotely worried.
Who are these people and what have they done with the regular characters?
The Big Sale
Almost all the remaining runtime of Yellowstone Season 5, Episode 13 is devoted to that aforementioned auction at the Yellowstone, which pulls triple-duty as a kind of funeral for John and Colby, a grieving exercise for Teeter, and an excuse to bring as many surviving characters back into the fold as possible, including Jimmy and his wife Emily, Governor Perry, and Walker’s girlfriend Laramie.
There’s some okay stuff here. The horse displays are cool, I do think Teeter’s grieving process is well-handled (her scenes with Beth are surprisingly good), and there is a feeling of grand finality to it all that is in keeping with a beloved show in its final season. But it’s a long time to spend doing basically nothing with only one episode remaining, which really brings into focus the idea that there’s barely any more story to be told here.
And I think all this might be pointless anyway. Beth later tells Kayce that the auction made about $30 million, which should be enough to keep things going for another year or so, but as she explained to Monica earlier, it’d only be biding time. With everything that wasn’t nailed down having been sold, there’s no way for the ranch to turn a profit. It’s a Band-Aid over a festering wound. But it’s only after the auction that Kayce implies he might have a plan to save the whole place. Wouldn’t he have been better mentioning that earlier?
Mo Brings Plenty and Gil Birmingham in Yellowstone | Image via CBS
Jamie’s Gambit
Following Sarah Atwood’s death and the reopening of the John Dutton case as a murder inquiry, Jamie is shocked to find his name all over the news, with his and Sarah’s sexual relationship being discussed, and his opposition to his father’s public policies being framed as what is quite clearly a motive for murder.
Who else would Jamie turn to in such a crisis? Yes, that’s right, his estranged baby mother who birthed his son off-screen a couple of seasons ago and hasn’t been seen since. Christina essentially gives Jamie the play-by-play of how to handle the situation politically, including a near-word-for-word speech to give to the press.
Do you remember when Jamie would have come up with all of these really obvious strategies himself? It’s all framed like Christina is some kind of political genius, but what she’s proposing is the only version of the story that makes any sense in Jamie’s position. Of course he’s going to deny he was involved in his father’s murder! Of course he’s going to pin it posthumously on the person who was actually involved and is now too dead to defend themselves!
The only upside of this is that Jamie going public is more likely to bring him into contact with Beth, and their eventual showdown is teased a little bit in “Give the World Away”, so it’s probably still on the cards. I can’t wait for him to die, and I don’t even like Beth all that much.
Kayce Dutton, Financial Genius
I mentioned above that Kayce has a plan. As for now, we don’t know exactly what he’s doing, but there are enough hints dropped throughout Yellowstone Season 5, Episode 13 that we can piece the gist together.
The giveaway, for Beth if not for us, is Kayce pointedly asking his sister about tax law with a really obvious example. The general idea is you get taxed based on what you paid for something, not what something is worth. So if the land was sold for a dollar, it wouldn’t owe tens of millions of dollars in tax. There’d be nothing to pay.
This just means finding the right buyer. Remember when Thomas Rainwater turned up in Episode 11 for no reason at all other than to remind us he existed? A similar scene in this episode does the same thing. So, the Natives seem like the likeliest buyers, and you know what, that’d make a great deal of sense. In 1883 there was that whole bit about the Natives reclaiming their land after seven generations. What better way to do it? And, perhaps more to the point, what better way to finally put this show out of its misery?
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