‘1923’ Episode 6 Is an Absolute Slaughterhouse Lauren Smith
Well, goddamn folks! Taylor Sheridan must’ve taken it to heart last episode when I asked him to pick up the pace. If you thought 1923 season 2 has been a tad slow at times, the Yellowstone prequel series certainly isn’t inching along anymore.
This week, Sheridan flipped the script and escalated one of Banner Creighton’s (Jerome Flynn) henchmen up to public enemy number one. You might know him as Clyde (Brian Konowal), the Scottish shepherd who tricked the Duttons into giving him a badge to join the Livestock Commission in season 1. I’ve never seen a background character vault to one of a show’s best villains this quickly, but you just never know with Sheridan. The bodies are stacking up now. But I don’t want to get too ahead of myself. Let’s rewind to the beginning of the episode and lasso this wild steed up right.
Episode 6 begins with Sheriff McDowell (Robert Patrick), who is the only pacifist in the entire series. He hightails it over to the Dutton-family ranch after hearing from Spencer (Brandon Sklenar), because Jacob (Harrison Ford) and Cara Dutton (Helen Mirren) do not own a telephone. This show may be 1923, but the Dutton couple are still living like it’s 1883.
Spencer finally arriving in Montana will be huge news for Yellowstone fans—if it even happens— but McDowell believes that it’s worthy gossip around town as well. He says that “switchboard operators heard every word, and those are very loose lips.” Sad. Everyone knows that a gunfight is imminent, and yet no one is willing to gather a citizen-led militia large enough to shut it down without violence.
So Harrison Ford channels the Red Hulk gamma radiation that is still in his blood from Captain America: Brave New World and yells, “IT AIN’T PREVENTABLE!” It’s easily Ford’s best line delivery yet. “It’s what he wants, what he needs, to take this place from us!” Jacob tells the sheriff about the impending war. “If Whitfield finds out, he will kill him. And I swear to God … if I find out, I will burn his fucking house to the ground with him in it!”
Jacob promises Cara he’ll come back alive—not a good sign!—and rides out to meet Spencer at the train station. The train-yard finale is setting up a Once Upon a Time in the West scenario for Spencer’s arrival. Maybe the Dutton war hero will even pick up a harmonica on the way.
Someone Should Have Read Our Dutton Family Tree
At the local saloon, one of Banner Creighton’s boys proves that the sheriff was right about switchboard-operator gossip. The villains know all about Spencer, including his time in Africa. “This is Jacob’s son?” Banner asks. His henchman responds, “Nephew, I think.” It sounds like someone should have brushed up on our Dutton family tree before waging war on the Yellowstone ranch.
Banner orders Clyde and the gang to meet Spencer at the train station and put a hole in him. “After you kill the nephew, we kill the whole lot of ’em,” he says. Just another day of planning mass murder with the boys.
The message moves up the chain to Whitfield, who hasn’t been concerned with the possibility that the Duttons may win this war for a single second. He’s spent almost his entire time on screen kidnapping and sexually torturing women around the town. “You know, that’s someone’s daughter,” Banner tells him. Whitfield replies: “And if her mother were here, I’d do the same to her.” I just can’t see how any of this is necessary—and from what I’ve read from fans, no one even enjoys watching it. Banner, you should consider killing this guy instead.
Clyde?! Christopher Saunders/Paramount+ – Paramount
The Day Clyde Shot Me Down
Jack (Darren Mann) spots Clyde on his way to the train station. Banner’s henchman announces himself as an agent of the Livestock Commission, so Jack mistakenly trusts him. Clyde asks the Dutton rancher about Spencer, and he tells him that there’s no one better with a gun. “Well, I’m a close second,” Jack boasts. Suddenly, Clyde shoots him in the chest. “If you’re a close second, I’m not much worried about the first,” he says, standing over Jack’s body. Then he fires again. Folks, Jack Dutton is dead.
I can’t say I was in love with Jack Dutton as a character. Sheridan didn’t write much for him in season 2, and I’ll never forget the way he just stood there in silence after Elizabeth (Michelle Randolph) blew up at him in episode 3. It’s been clear for quite some time that the Dutton legacy shifted to his uncle Spencer. He’s a war hero. He’s jacked. And his love story is far stronger than Elizabeth sticking around only because she’s pregnant again. Don’t count him out of the race for being John Dutton’s grandpappy just yet, but I’m not buying it.
Jack’s death is still a massive shock. Not that Jack couldn’t die until the finale, but that of all the characters to pull the trigger on a Dutton—he’s killed by Clyde. What a win for actor Brian Konowal! Of course, I had to talk to him about it the second I caught wind of his character’s big episode. Let’s just say, he’s ecstatic. “That’s what’s so great about Taylor, just his storytelling and his foreshadowing,” Konowal told me over Zoom. “He kills this character that everyone loves. You just never know.” Read our full conversation here.
Say goodbye to these two murderers! Lauren Smith – Paramount
Teonna Triumphant
Jack is far from the only character to bite the dust in episode 6. Following last week’s cliff-hanger, Pete Plenty Clouds (Jeremy Gauna) loses his shoot-out with Marshal Kent (Jamie McShane). The innocent man’s death is the final straw for Father Renaud (Sebastian Roché).
“All this death you make, and we are no closer to justice,” the priest tells Kent. “You have been tasked to bring justice to a murderer, but the murderer … is you! It is you who needs justice. Your path is the walkway to perdition, and I shall not walk it with you.” Good on Father Renaud for realizing he’s been traveling with a racist madman for two seasons.
The priest unloads three bullets into his partner and chides him to “go scream with the devil.” I had a suspicion that Renaud would eventually kill Kent. If he wasn’t such an awful man himself, he might’ve been a decently cool character. The killer priest—who wouldn’t like that? It’s a shame that Sheridan wrote him as such a sadistic and terrible human before this.
So he’s forced to continue down his dark path and finish his murder mission anyway. Like a ghost in the night, he kills Teonna’s father and then aims his gun at the young woman. He commands her to beg forgiveness for her sins before he fires again. Nothing happens. Lesson number one of the Wild West: Always count your bullets! Teonna stabs him repeatedly and then finishes him off with her father’s gun. She’s finally free.
Two more absolute fools for the episode 6 body count. Lauren Smith – Paramount
Road Trip!
Alexandra’s (Julia Schlaepfer) new British friends are adorable and naive. They’re so different from any character Sheridan has written before. When Alex tells them her love story, the couple agree to drive her 1,500 miles to Montana in the middle of a blizzard as if they’re children building a tree fort over summer break. “I could think of very little I wouldn’t do to be part of this small odyssey you’ve found yourself in,” the husband tells Alex. “We must pack!”
As the weather dips below freezing during their road trip, it’s hilarious how they all forgot why their train was delayed in the first place. They drive headfirst into a blizzard. “It seems we’ve hit a spot of weather,” the man says. He is truly without a brain. When Alex wakes up in the backseat, she finds the car careened off the road and the couple frozen to death. With just one episode left in season 2, she’s stranded in the frozen wilderness with no gas, no food, no warmth, and nothing but snow for miles.
As the camera pans out, Sheridan ends the episode with an insane voice-over monologue from 1883’s Elsa Dutton: “Man destroys everything. He has been at war with this world since he first entered it. War with its trees. War with its weather. So is everything else. If it was up to the wolves, it would be wolves and nothing else. Same goes for the bear, and the snake, and the spider. Nothing coexists. Life is a constant state of battle for survival—and only one thing rings victorious: the world itself. Earth is a living, evolving, interactive being capable of wiping all of existence by the simplest wobble on its axis. There have been five mass extinctions on this planet where almost all life was eradicated…. It only stands to reason that a sixth one is coming.”
Not only does Spencer need to save the ranch in the finale, but it sounds like he might have to stop another ice age while he’s at it.
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