Summary
It’s a bit rushed despite a two-hour runtime, but the ending of 1923 Season 2 is nonetheless exciting and emotional, providing a payoff to every ongoing subplot in record time.
I can’t have been the only person who thought that the finale of 1923 Season 2 couldn’t possibly be a proper ending. Surely not! The endless frustration of Spencer never quite making it to Montana, and Alex never quite making it to Spencer, and Teonna never quite outrunning her pursuers, all of that felt like too much for a single episode, even a two-hour one, to overcome. And yet Taylor Sheridan seems to have taken that as a challenge in Episode 7, which is titled “A Dream and A Memory” and proceeds like fan-fiction, hitting the point you think it’s going to end and then barrelling right beyond that several times over.
Spencer doesn’t just make it back to Montana; he arrives in the nick of time and cleaves through Whitfield’s entire operation – and Whitfield himself – so effortlessly that you have to wonder why nobody just walked up to his front door and shot him dead in the first place. Teonna doesn’t just find some semblance of freedom, but does it with the legal backing of the U.S. government. Alex is reunited with her husband entirely by chance. It all feels too good to be true.
Which it is, in a way. I’ve made it all sound like fun, but it’s really a parade of rather miserable turns and developments. But that’s par for the course in the ever-sprawling Dutton saga. The real value of this finale is that it is very much a finale. It strains plausibility and occasionally rushes through plot points to tie them up, but when it’s finished you feel, refreshingly, like you’ve just seen the end of something. Or at least the end of this little slice of it.
A Chance Encounter
Alex’s journey in 1923 Season 2 has been fraught with an astronomical amount of suffering, and it brings me no pleasure to report that this trend very much continues here in “A Dream and A Memory”. But she’s at least granted some upsides before she shuffles off this mortal coil, and the first of them is reuniting with Spencer, whose train happens to barrel past the exact spot she was freezing to death.
There’s no point complaining about the convenience of it all. After everything she has been through – even in this episode she has to brave the elements to acquire a lighter and then burn her most beloved remaining possessions to stay alive – she deserves a break. Spencer jumping off a train and sprinting into his pregnant wife’s arms is that break, especially since the train courteously waits for them to catch up.
Aboard the train, though, things take a turn. Alex was moments away from death and her extremities are black with frostbite, which isn’t good for her or the baby. Nobody yet knows that the station platform in Livingston is packed full of goons with guns, and Spence will have all that to deal with before he finally gets to be beside his wife.
Banner Changes His Mind Too Late
One of those goons is Banner Creighton, who has had an epiphany: Donald Whitfield is a maniac sadist and it’s impossible to square working for him with what remains of his conscience. So, Banner does the sensible thing and tells his wife and son to pack their bags. They’re going to take what remains of their money and catch a train to Portland, leaving Whitfield’s murder mansion behind.
When they arrive at the train station – the literal one, not the metaphorical one where Whitfield wants him to dump the Duttons – they find it packed with Jacob, the sheriff, Clyde, and several of the goons waiting to ambush Spencer when he gets off the train. It’s a shootout waiting to happen, and Banner’s only concern is making sure his family makes it to Portland safely. I don’t know if they do, but we can safely assume so.
Brian Geraghty in 1923 Season 2 | Image via Paramount+
Banner isn’t so lucky, though. In the inevitable crossfire, he kills Clyde to save Jacob, but then catches a couple of bullets from the sheriff. It’s a shame, really. He was never a bad guy, at least not bad in the way Whitfield is. He got sick of waiting for his lot to improve and tried to speed things along. It cost him his life, but he earned Jacob’s respect in exchange. It’s a small consolation, but it’s something.
Seeing all the carnage at the station, Spencer realizes that the war his family is fighting is already well underway, and he needs to get involved now, leaving Alex to be taken to the hospital in Bozeman, accompanied by Jacob, where hopefully she and the baby will be saved.
The Last Stand
While all this is going on, the Dutton ranch is under siege by a seemingly endless army of goons. Since Jack stupidly got himself killed last week, it’s up to Zane, a couple of ranchers, Cara, and Elizabeth to defend the place, and to be fair, they do a pretty bang-up job. Cara especially takes an elk rifle upstairs and pops heads from the window like Bob Lee Swagger. Helen Mirren is so awesome it almost defies words.
Even Elizabeth makes herself useful after a season spent doing nothing but whining, but they’re eventually overwhelmed by sheer numbers. This is when Spencer arrives and murders everyone without breaking a sweat. His promotion in these last few episodes to mythical 90s action hero has been very funny and pretty cool, and this scene is the apotheosis of that.
When the smoke clears, someone finally realizes that Jack isn’t there. But Spencer has other concerns.
1923 Was Never Going to Give Alex A Happy Ending
Everything that has happened to Alex this season has been miserable, but arguably so miserable that it has become quite funny, like an exaggerated comedy of errors that keeps topping itself when you thought it couldn’t possibly get any worse. The choice she’s faced with in the Season 2 finale is this – either she has her legs and hands amputated, a procedure which will definitely kill her son, who is being born three months prematurely, or refuse that surgery, die, and hope that the kid survives regardless. She chooses the latter.
By the time Spencer arrives Alex is resigned to her fate. Their tiny baby is alive, somewhat miraculously, but Alex wasn’t willing to raise him with stubs for feet and clubs for hands (her words). Jacob supported that decision, and so does Spencer, in his way. He crawls into bed with his wife and his son for the first and last time. When he wakes up, Alex is dead, and Spencer has no idea what to do with a baby. I like seeing this moment of weakness in him after watching him gun down a small army of bad guys. Nobody’s perfect.
Cara to the rescue, again. She, a bottle of goat’s milk, and a lifetime of mothering are just what the doctor ordered. Spencer is out for revenge on Whitfield, the man who killed his wife. Even though he didn’t have anything to do with it. Spencer just walks into Whitfield’s house and guns him down as a lesson to anyone who might be thinking of trying to wrest control of the land from the Duttons. He barely has time to point out that he genuinely has no idea who Spencer and his wife are.
Aminah Nieves in 1923 Season 2 | Image via Paramount+
Teonna Is Free
It’s good news for Teonna, at least. 1923 Season 2, Episode 7 lets her off the hook for all the murdering because by the time she gets to court, she has murdered everyone who might have supplied any evidence. They deserved it, anyway.
This leaves Teonna somewhat adrift. She’s free, but with nowhere to go and no family remaining to her. She must settle in Montana, of course, since her descendent, Thomas Rainwater, will eventually purchase the Yellowstone. But that’s all we see of her. Ever since Alex took on her role as the season’s punching bag, Taylor Sheridan hasn’t really known what do with her.
Epilogue
As well as speeding through every remaining subplot, the ending of 1923 Season 2 even manages to give us a rundown of what happens in the future, at least for certain characters. It’s enjoyably illuminating for long-time Yellowstone fans who make a point of tracing the Dutton family tree, even if there are a few matters that provide more questions than answers.
Elizabeth, for instance. After learning of Jack’s death she finally makes good on her threats to leave the ranch for good and heads off to Boston – but she’s pregnant with his baby, which suggests that there might well be an entire clan of Duttons who grew up outside of Montana. Maybe that’s something that’ll be explored in subsequent spin-offs.
Alex’s child, meanwhile, is indeed a little boy, who she names John. That’d be Yellowstone-era John Dutton’s dad. But according to an Elsa-narrated flashforward, Spencer had another son with a widow he took to his bed and refused to marry. You just can’t have enough Duttons, I guess.
The same epilogue reveals that Spencer lived alone for the remainder of his life and died the same way, finally collapsing at Alex’s grave and joining her in the afterlife, which turns out to be a very un-Sheridan dreamscape where he and his late wife are reunited as they were when they last saw one another. It’s a bit of a silly payoff that nonetheless feels earned after the consistent emotional trauma that 1923 has inflicted on its characters and audience.
I wonder where we’re going next.
