The 1923 season 2 finale is a Dutton-filled fever dream. Not just because I stared at my screen without blinking for the entire two hours, but because I never thought we would reach the end this sprawling Yellowstone prequel. After setting up a handful of disparate stories across the American West, creator Taylor Sheridan is finally ready for his characters to assemble like the Avengers and protect the Dutton family ranch.
I couldn’t trust my eyes when Spencer (Brandon Sklenar) finally landed in Montana. There he was, standing right next to Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren. If you can imagine it, they even spoke to each other. I’m not lying to you. He drove up to the Yellowstone ranch and shot seven guys like they were made of paper. I know I’m jumping the gun here, but wow! Spencer traveled so long that I started thinking he would never return home. Now that he’s here, I don’t even know what to make of it.
Let’s jump back to the start of the finale. We have two hours to cover, Duttonheads. I can’t waste any more precious time.
My Greatest Enemy: Jack Frost!
If you recall last week, Sheridan left Alexandra (Julia Schlaepfer) stranded on the side of the road during a blizzard. Elsa Dutton teased that the next Ice Age was upon us via voiceover. Alex will need a miracle to survive. She tilts her head back in the finale and begs God, A.K.A. Taylor Sheridan, to answer why he’s done this to her. “This is your plan for us?” she asks. “Let us know love, then rip it from us? Then drag me through hell to freeze here? What kind of God does that?” Truly, why did Sheridan do this to you?
Then, like magic, Spencer’s train chugs along right by her. The Dutton hero just traded away his lion’s tooth necklace to a random kid on the train, even though Spencer said he hoped to give it to his son one day. It felt like a terrible omen at the time. Maybe it meant his son was destined to die. But it doesn’t seem like his decision comes back to bite him at all.
Instead, he leaps from the train after spotting Alex on the side of the road. The lover’s finally embrace for the first time since the season 1 finale. “You didn’t have to go through all this. I was coming for you,” Spencer tells her. Alex jokes: “If you found someone else, how could I kill her from England?”
Spencer carries her back to the train, which was nice enough to stop for him. She’s inspected by a doctor, who finds that her hands and feet are black with frostbite. “She was minutes away from death when you found her,” he says. They’ll need to warm her up fast, especially if they plan on saving the baby.
“It ain’t preventable!”
Once Upon a Time in Boseman
Spencer has very little time to even celebrate Alex’s pregnancy, because he notices that there’s about a dozen guys all waiting at the train station with guns. Much like Once Upon a Time in the West, the most pressing event in Boseman is the arrival of one bad motherfucker who the villains need to kill as fast as humanely possible.
So, when Spencer’s train pulls into the station, a shootout occurs that eliminates characters faster than you can say “Beth’s ‘Two Scoops of Ice Cream, Three Shots of Vodka’ Smoothie.” Clyde (Brian Konowal) shoots at Spencer on the train and misses. Jacob nails two of Clyde’s men. The sheriff takes a bullet to the shoulder. Clyde crawls under the train about to take aim at Jacob. Banner Creighton kills Clyde! The sheriff kills Banner! The carnage reminded me of the Saturday Night Live parody of The O.C. finale. All the scene lacked was “Hide and Seek” by Imogen Heap.
When the dust settles, Spencer and Jacob are alive. Plus, the sheriff seems like he’ll pull through. Spencer’s first words to his uncle? “What was this?” I expected something a bit cooler, perhaps, but you can’t blame how confused Spencer must have been here.
“War isn’t a metaphor in this family, I’m discovering,” Alex tells Jacob. And yet, she urges Spencer to continue the fight. He kisses her, tells her he loves her, and then takes off. “I’ll meet you in Bozeman,” he says.
Trae Patton//Paramount
Good for you, Banner.
Bye Bye, Banner
Before we move on, I want to give a special shout to Banner Creighton (Jerome Flynn). He realizes this episode that he’s been barking up the wrong tree. Donald Whitfield is pure evil. Of all the men who take more than they give, at least the Duttons don’t make you suffer. Banner’s not a bad man. He just wants what’s best for his family. He thought if he could do some bad to earn some money, then it would all even out. But after his umpteenth scene being forced to watch Whitfield torture some woman in his mansion, he’s out. He tells his family to pack their bags for Portland and head to the train station.
If only he waited until the next train. The Creighton’s arrive at the station at the exact same time that his men are preparing to shoot a hole in Spencer. He knew and he still went there. Beats me! So, when he kills Clyde during the shootout to save Jacob, he proves that he never meant any malice. He just wanted his in life. Sadly, the bumbling sheriff is the person who kills him. I guess it was hard to figure out whose side anyone was on. With Banner’s dying breath, Jacob promises him that he’ll make sure his family is safe on the train. He doesn’t actually do that, though. Spencer helps them on, and that’s about it. Hopefully, they make their way to Portland. The Duttons have their own problems to worry about.
Helen Mirren’s Cara Dutton is once again a beast with a shotgun.
The Sklenenator
Back at the Dutton family ranch, Cara has little trouble sniping off intruders from the attic. “Of all the things I’ve had to do for the ranch, this takes the cake,” she says. It’s just one head shot after another for her. She’s on fire.
Twenty or so men pulled up the ranch earlier. There’s a scene where one of the cars in their villainous caravan pulls up to another and asks, “We waiting for a signal?” The other grunt responds, “No signal. Just start killing.”
Zane (Brian Geraghty) and Elizabeth (Michelle Randolph) hold their own a little until Spencer arrives. This is the scene I mentioned before, when Spencer kills seven men in quick succession like he’s The Terminator. He hugs Cara for the first time in the entire series. Then, Elizabeth finally asks, “Where’s Jack?” I believe we’re about an hour and a half into the finale now. I don’t mean to dog on Jack any more than I already have, but that’s cold.
Lauren Smith//Paramount
clubs for hands!
“They Want to Take My Legs and My Hands”
Maybe this is cruel, but I was dying laughing every time someone mentioned that Alex would need amputation. This woman really went through hell and the fact that it would’ve ended with her losing three of her limbs is so insane. She’s about to give birth three months prematurely, writhing and screaming in pain. The doctor reads the following line with zero emotion behind his eyes: “Your legs are necrotic to the shin and your left hand is necrotic above the wrist. You will not see the sunset if we do not amputate immediately.”
Alex turns to Jacob and asks, “How can I raise a child with stubs for feet and clubs for hands?” with full sincerity. Sheridan triples down. He makes the doctors look like fools. Just a scene ago, a surgeon is searching for a bullet in Jacob Dutton’s old wound, and he tells him that if he can’t find it then the lead poisoning might slowly kill him. “You think I care about the slow ones?” Jacob yells. “I’m 80 fucking years old. Sow it up!”
When Spencer finally arrives at the hospital, Alex is near death. She refuses to have all her limbs amputated. “They wanted to take my legs and my hand and take our baby and throw them all away like rubbish” she whispers. “I said no. I would never trade what we made for me.”
“Your legs are a long way from your heart,” Spencer says. She won’t hear it. They fall asleep in each other’s arms. When they wake, Alex is dead, but the baby survives. Our hero calls his aunt into the room. He’s stunned. “Cara, I don’t know what to do,” Spencer says. She takes the baby as Spencer darts out to kill Whitfield. “I want to meet the man who killed my wife,” he swears. Rough train of thought, here. Frostbite killed your wife, and it had really nothing to do with Whitfield. But okay! That man needs to die, anyway.
Spencer walks into Whitfield’s mansion and just unload bullets into him. “I plan on making such an example of you that it’ll be 50 years before one of your kind dares to enter this valley again,” Jacob tells Whitfield right before the villain dies. “I want them teaching about how you die in schoolbooks!”
Is there a spin-off in the works for Marshal Fossett?
Teonna
In the last twenty minutes or so, Sheridan also makes time to quickly wrap up Teonna Rainwater’s story. With some help from Anadarko Marshal Mamie Fossett, Teonna’s murder trial is thrown out since all the witnesses are dead. Her story felt a bit underserved throughout 1923, especially since it hit its climax in the penultimate episode. It also featured some of the most despicable characters.
Teonna is free to go wherever she pleases now. Somehow, her family remains in Montana. As Yellowstone fans are already aware, her ancestor, Thomas Rainwater, comes to own the Yellowstone ranch at the end of Yellowstone season 5.
Trae Patton/Paramount+//Paramount
Just a few days removed from brain surgery, Zane still has a decent kill count this episode.
How Many Duttons Are There?
There’s just one last thing to wrap up before we go: the Dutton family tree. The finale answers the great Dutton mystery. Spencer is John Dutton’s (Kevin Costner) grandfather. Fans believed that they had it all figured out last week following Jack’s surprising death. Eagle-eyed viewers recalled that Sheridan wrote a line in Yellowstone season 4 about John Dutton’s grandfather losing his leg. Either that was his maternal grandfather or just something the writer forgot about entirely, because there’s no mention of Spencer losing his leg. Alex almost lost both her legs, but she died before surgery.
Speaking of plots that slipped Sheridan’s mind… what happened to Elizabeth’s baby? Many fans theorized that Spencer would end up raising Jack and Elizabeth’s child instead of his own in the finale, but Elizabeth packs her bags for Boston and departs without a single mention of her pregnancy once the ranch is saved. Is there a Bostonian Dutton family out in the world somewhere?
Then, Elsa reveals in her epilogue narration that Spencer, “took the comfort of a widow, made another boy, refused to marry her, and one day, the widow was gone.” Incredibly spooky! Still, it sounds like John Dutton has a lot of uncles and cousins that we never knew about until now. Maybe we’ll meet them in 1944, The Madison, or any of the numerous spin-offs that Sheridan writes next.
What’s next for Yellowstone?
1924
At the end of the episode, Spencer falls over by Alex’s grave and wakes up in 1920s ballroom heaven. He dances with Alex as the picture fades to black and white. “Took you long enough,” she says. It’s one of the schmaltziest endings I’ve ever seen from Sheridan. At some point as a TV writer, you must see the campiness of the situation settling in.
However you may feel about Spencer walking into Whitfield’s home and shooting him without a struggle, the ending wrapped up Sheridan’s most sprawling story yet. Ballroom heaven aside, I’d say he pulled off something emotional and exciting week by week. I hope you enjoyed 1923 as much as I did—or at least laughed along when the show took itself too seriously—and I thank you again for reading. Hopefully, Sheridan’s already putting pen to paper on the next epic Dutton story.
