Summary
It isn’t perfect by any means, but “Life Is a Promise” is about as good of an ending as Yellowstone Season 5 was going to be able to produce given the circumstances.
Season 5 of Yellowstone has been terrible, there’s no doubt about that. I’ve been making fun of it for weeks, and I hope that makes you a little more trusting when I say that Episode 14, “Life Is a Promise”, is about as good of an ending as we could have hoped for given the circumstances. It still has some profoundly silly elements, and the structure of the season overall means nothing that happens in it is remotely surprising, but what is here is handled really well. It feels, whatever the future of the franchise might look like with the recently announced Beth and Rip spin-off, like a proper series finale.
However, because there’s no real conflict left given Kayce scared off that murder-for-hire firm, a huge chunk of the episode feels like admin and saying farewell to each character individually. With that in mind, I’m going to format this article as a round-up of the various goodbyes, since that feels just about right.
Goodbye to… The Ranch
As became obvious in the penultimate episode, Kayce’s plan to “save” the Dutton ranch is to sell it back to the Reservation for $1.25 an acre, which is how much the Duttons paid for it in the first place. Because of the low sale price the land tax won’t be exorbitant, meaning that the Natives can keep the place in perpetuity on the condition that they never sell it and never build anything on it. Fair enough.
The changeover is pretty smooth. Rainwater promises the entire family that he’ll preserve the land for their sake, and Mo Brings Plenty is on hand to ensure that the Reservation kids don’t sabotage anything to do with the previous owners. When they start tipping over the headstones in the family graveyard he reprimands them severely: “They protected this land, they died on this land, and this land is where they’ll stay.” When he rights the headstones, we see Elsa’s for what I think is the first time.
Speaking of which, we also get a very nice Elsa narration towards the end of the episode, since this is fulfilling one of Yellowstone’s internal prophecies. As we’ve discussed, when James Dutton was originally pointed toward the land, he was warned by Graham Greene that in seven generations the Natives would take it back. And so it came to pass.
Goodbye to… John Dutton
The Dutton patriarch’s funeral takes place in this episode, though I couldn’t help but feel like Beth made it mostly about her. It’s a small ceremony attended only by immediate family, Lynelle, and the cowboys. Rip and the boys even dig his grave by hand.
Every character gets their own little farewell. Lynelle mentions that she chose the tightest skirt she had. Beth promises to avenge him. Kayce tells him that he forgives him. And so on, and so forth.
It’s a nice scene this, perhaps made slightly more resonant by the fact that it’s clearly pulling double duty as a funeral for the show itself. I genuinely feel like this was as tasteful as it was possible to be, though.
Kelsey Asbille and Luke Grimes in Yellowstone | Image via Paramount
Goodbye to… Jamie
Beth’s first act after burying her father is to keep her promise to him – while also forcing Rip to break the one he made about keeping her safe. Yes, she goes after Jamie with a giant knife and a canister of bear spray.
We don’t see much of Jamie in this episode other than when he’s rehearsing his speech about his father’s death and then when he’s giving it. He’s so weaselly and smug in these scenes that I was actively cheering for his demise, but he takes this opportunity to finally develop a spine. In fact, he beats Beth half to death and then tries to strangle her. She’s only saved by Rip arriving in the nick of time and throwing Jamie all over the house.
Beth stabs Jamie in the gut and forces him to maintain eye contact with her while he dies, as she promised. Then she instructs Rip to take him to the train station while she plays the victim and feeds Dillard a bunch of information that’ll help him posthumously take the blame for John’s death.
Goodbye to… Everyone Else
The rest of the Yellowstone Season 5 finale is devoted to various smaller send-offs, so let’s just collect those here for posterity:
- Kayce, Monica, and Tate set up a small ranch on the property they negotiated to keep in the sale of the Yellowstone. At one point they see a wolf digging outside, which Mo tells them means he wants to stay there, but he also tells them that the wolf isn’t real, and is part of Kayce’s sweat lodge vision that they’re now inexplicably all able to see. This is very stupid.
- Beth, Rip, and Carter move into their own small ranch in the middle of nowhere. There’s a hitching post outside the local bar.
- Teeter gets a job working for Travis in Texas. She still can’t speak English, at least according to him.
- Ryan goes to Texas to reunite with Lainey Wilson. She even performs a small concert. This is fine since she’s great, but it’s another indulgent Yellowstone flourish even this late in the game.
- I genuinely have no idea what happened to Lloyd.
So that’s pretty conclusive, right? I wasn’t expecting Yellowstone Season 5 to have a good ending after such a bad season, but I was surprised by how perfect a lot of this finale felt. Episode 14 has some silly stuff, sure, but all of the series has had plenty of silly stuff. More importantly, it had a real sense of dignity, and that’s what counts. It sends off a once-great show with the best possible farewell in the worst possible circumstances. For that, at least, it deserves a bit of credit.
