I’ve often wondered at what point in the writing process Taylor Sheridan adds Elsa Dutton’s incongruously poetic voiceovers to his 1923 scripts. Does he fit her monologue to the story, or does he start with a kernel of an idea — something prophetic he can hear in Isabel May’s husky lilt — and build an episode to match? As much as I do like May’s husky lilt, I’ve mostly found the voiceovers to be interruptions, the forgivable indulgence of a screenwriter unwilling to kill his darlings.
But the whacky coda of “The Mountain Teeth of Monsters” worked for me. Elsa tells us there have been five major mass extinctions in the history of the planet. From her omniscient undead vantage, she confirms we’re careening toward a sixth extinction of man’s own making. Aunt Cara suspects it from her living room sofa, sitting on a ranch outside Bozeman, Montana, in 1923. After the men leave to intercept Spencer, Cara and Elizabeth sit down for one of their trademark chats — the ones in which Lizzie says something innocuous that prompts Cara to speechify about moral decay for whole minutes without pause. Tonight, Elizabeth observes how odd it is that there are armed men standing guard outside the front door. Men are covetous to their core, Cara warns her. They’ll kill and steal and ruin each other until God’s compelled to start the world over without men at all. That’s the bad news.
Sheriff McDowell arrives early in the episode to herald the long-awaited good news: Spencer Dutton — war hero of the Lost Battalion, lion hunter for the Queen and crown, heartthrob of the Serengeti, and prodigal son of the Yellowstone — is coming home. He’s on the train out of Amarillo, due to arrive at Livingston depot at some future hour no one could ever guess, because even if they had a timetable, there’s no predicting which tracks will have snow on them. Spencer could be connecting through Denver or Fargo, McDowell says, a throwaway remark that sounded so insane to me that I looked Fargo up on a map to make sure it’s still where it’s supposed to be.
Because 1923 never misses a chance to make a luddite out of a Dutton, the fact that they know for sure that Spencer’s headed into Livingston is actually bad news, too. Those sassy switchboard operators have loose lips, and their chatter is sure to reach Donald Whitfield’s ears as quickly as it did their own. The telephone didn’t turn people into busybodies, but it did make their busybodying effective. Just imagine the evil that might befall man if you could reliably track a train between its departure station and its destination.
To protect Spencer, Jacob and a few of his men join the sheriff in Livingston. Banner dispatches some of his men in their direction, too. Last week, Whitfield’s war plan was to kill all the Duttons and dump them at the other “train station.” Spencer’s arrival doesn’t meaningfully change the strategy, but it does explain to Banner why Jake has been biding his time. Back at the ranch, Jack and Zane guard the women, including Jack’s pregnant wife, but Jack doesn’t want to trot his horse back and forth. He wants to welcome his young uncle back into the bosom of this land war.
When he sets off for Livingston in his cute woolly chaps, I assumed that Jack — his beloved Aunt Cara’s “stupid boy” — would wind up a grizzly bear’s supper or, more optimistically, a bumbling accidental hero. Along his travels, though, he runs into Clive, one of the traitorous sheepherders that Cara hired onto the Livestock Commission — an event that occurred so long ago, back in the season one finale that aired in 2023, that I’d forgotten all about it. Say what you will about 1923, but the series rewards loyalty. When Jack presents himself as a fellow agent, Clive guns down the expectant dad. It happens so fast and with so little fanfare that I felt confused about whether Jack Dutton had really ever been a main character at all.
In the episode’s opening scene, as Jacob and his family and Zane and his family sit down to dinner, Jacob reflects. “This is the first time every seat at this table has been filled since before the war.” I knew instantly that someone would have to die to make space for Spencer, but I didn’t expect Jack to go. I figured it would be Zane, who shouldn’t be on a horse given the literal hole in his head. But no, it’s stupid, slow-drawing Jack. It’s no more tragic, but it is sadder because we knew him better. And poor Lizzie, who survived this brutal winter only to wind up a pregnant widow. This isn’t living, she told Cara a few episodes back. “It’s surviving.” Now, it’s less than that.
Elizabeth and Alexandra seem to occupy parallel tracks, but Lizzie has more in common with Teonna. Teonna also finds herself alone on the range, her lover dead. Marshal Kent fatally shot Pete, at the close of last week’s episode, for the crime of running away while Crow. I’ve been rooting for Kent to die a death most bloody so I was momentarily thrilled by Father Renaud’s betrayal. “Now, you go scream with the Devil,” Renaud shouts at the body of the man that used to be one of the most depraved racists in the West. This show is alive, I scribbled in my notes.
Alas, on second glance, it was only rigor mortis. Kent may be dead, but Renaud’s not done righteously crusading. Teonna and Runs His Horse find Pete’s body, which they can’t bury between trees like they would at home because there are no trees in this no man’s land. Runs His Horse suggests that Kent’s death means that he and his daughter can go home to Montana, but that’s not how this works anymore. A new US Marshal will pop up to replace Kent. Mamie Fossett has plastered Teonna’s face on lamp posts from Amarillo to Oklahoma. “Everywhere is America,” remember?
Renaud happens upon the father-daughter team in the night and kills Runs His Horse because the priest’s no better than Kent. He just lives by a different unholy code. Kent wanted to rid this place of Indians by killing them; Renaud wants to rid this place of Indians by “saving” them and killing them. Before he shoots Teonna, he begs her to take last rites. He delivers one of those long, gratuitous preambles that allows a victim extra time to work out how she might escape, given the smallest window of opportunity.
Cue the smallest window of opportunity. Father Renaud is pure evil in the shape of a cassock, but that doesn’t mean he can count. When he runs out of bullets, Teonna overpowers her nemesis, burning his face and stabbing him to death. But what now? She’s a teenager — a child — alone in the desert with no one to help her. “Life hasn’t shown me many reasons to keep fighting for it,” she says in the brief period between discovering her boyfriend’s dead body and her father’s violent murder. Runs His Horse tells his daughter that one day the world will need people like her — people who know how to live with the earth. White men won’t survive the sixth extinction, but Indians might. If not Teonna, then maybe Teonna’s children or her children’s children. I have the terrible suspicion that Taylor Sheridan may have already impregnated this little girl with the next generation of Rainwaters, one of the missing links between this impossible moment for the Crow Indians and the glittering casinos Thomas Rainwater builds in Yellowstone.
Sadly, the good guys aren’t done dying yet. Paul and Hillary, the vainglorious dopes who rescued Alexandra, née of Sussex, from Union Station’s waiting hall are inspired by her tale of true love torn asunder and promises shouted from cruise ship to dinghy. The train might not be able to make it to Montana, but these people own a car. They vow to drive Alex 1,500 miles to the family of the father of her unborn child, which is a really nice thing to offer as, like, a gesture. But what about the terrain so inhospitable and snowdrifts so high that a coal-burning locomotive can’t push through them? Do motorcars have heating systems in the year 1923? Don’t they max out at like 7 miles per hour? (That’s 11 kph to these lovely, well-intentioned dimwits.)
What starts as a road trip comedy, with impromptu driving lessons for the women and shots of whiskey to stay warm, ends in a lethal, avoidable catastrophe. When the trio stops for fuel (petrol!) and snow chains for their tires (tyres!) in Buffalo, Wyoming, they inexplicably ignore the woman who tells them there are no more service stations between here and Bozeman. Before long, the tank is empty (nil!), and Hillary and Paul are dead of stupidity-induced hypothermia. The rapist is winter, as we already know, but luckily, pregnant women run hot.
What’s more is that if Alexandra had listened to the gas station attendant and boarded a train in Sheridan, she’d be about to see Spencer, who is two stops shy on the North Pacific Railroad. I’ve been emotionally preparing for Spencer to never see the Yellowstone again, but not for Alex to never see Spencer. She ends the episode as badly off as we’ve ever seen her — ice cold and alone in the back of a car she can’t drive in a snowstorm in velvet pumps. Unless this vehicle has expired on the actual train tracks into Billings, I don’t see how she makes it back to civilization. But you know what? I kind of think the car maybe did die on the tracks. Or really close to the tracks. It looks almost like it’s resting against a hill or an elevated piece of train line. It stands to reason that the easiest path for a locomotive to traverse wouldn’t be so different from where you’d pave a road.
For the first time all season, it feels like we may do more than limp along in the direction of an ending, which won’t really feel like an ending because we’ve already seen the ending of Yellowstone a hundred years from now and even that didn’t feel exactly like an ending. But things of poignant finality are happening all the same. Jack is dead, but his branch of the tree survives through Lizzie. Runs His Horse and Pete are dead, but Teonna, who they gave up everything to protect, is still alive.
Donald Whitfield seems invincible, but we know that’s not the case, because there are no ski bunnies in Paradise Valley now. When Banner is again compelled to walk in on Whitfield and Lindy committing their awful sex crimes, we start to see the wheels are coming off. “She’s going to be incredibly useful when I’m done teaching her,” Whitfield says of Lindy, who he’s so far taught to penetrate the new girl with her hand and beat with a whip. I can’t tell if this is some weird moment of quasi-retconning — as though Whitfield planned all along to shape Lindy into an agent of sexual espionage — or if he’s just an old man talking perverse shit.
“That’s someone’s daughter,” Banner spits before leaving her there, perhaps to die like Lindy’s last unwilling test subject. It’s another abominable moment in a punishing storyline, but it’s more backbone than Banner mustered last week when he simply agreed to dump the body and clean up Lindy’s mess. When the sixth extinction comes for him, I assume Banner Creighton will find himself screaming with the devil alongside Kent and Renaud. But before he does that, I’d like to see the sheepherder kill Donald Whitfield with his own rough hands.
