A British aristocrat betrothed to a fellow toff meets a dashing young American veteran on safari in 1923. She falls in love with him and breaks her engagement; he gets over his lingering post-traumatic stress disorder from World War I, with the help of her love. Sounds good so far—but this aristocrat, Alexandra of Sussex, made a crucial mistake: She fell in love with Spencer Dutton, who comes from the most cursed-to-have-ethics family in the United States, and she’s a character on Taylor Sheridan’s Yellowstone prequel, 1923, which on Sunday concluded with a two-hour finale on Paramount+.
At the end of Act I of the pair’s romance, Spencer (played by Brandon Sklenar) realizes that his aunt has been writing to him begging for him to come back to their ranch in Montana because it’s under threat of loss due to the machinations of an evil capitalist. And with that, the honeymoon becomes a nightmare. By the end of Season 1, Alex (Julia Schlaepfer) and Spencer have been marooned on a sinking boat, picked up by another, married by its captain, and separated after Spencer kills Alex’s ex-fiancé. (It’s a justifiable homicide, of course; as another character says of Spencer’s uncle, Jacob, you know he’s not truly evil, like his rival, because even though he will “take,” and doesn’t care much if you suffer from it, he doesn’t enjoy your suffering. This is the narrow, American virtue of the Dutton family.)
Season 2 of 1923 sees the start of Alexandra’s true trials, as she embarks on a game of solo boats, trains, and automobiles. Alex becomes determined to reunite with Spencer when she discovers—while being kept prisoner by her family in England—that she’s pregnant. She takes a transatlantic trip in steerage class, talks her way past the gatekeepers at Ellis Island, gets robbed before getting on a train west, must temporarily work as a server on the train to pay for food, gets molested by a guest, is stymied by a snowstorm that blocks the tracks, connects with an English couple who volunteer to drive her to Montana for the lark of it, and is stranded in their car in a snowstorm after they run out of gas. In Sunday night’s final episode, “A Dream and a Memory,” Alex gets rescued by Spencer, who happens to spot his wife from a passing train. She finds out her hands and feet are black with third-degree frostbite, delivers her baby at six months’ gestation, and then dies in Spencer’s arms, having refused an operation to treat the gangrene that’s set in because she doesn’t want to be disabled (to have “stubs for feet and clubs for hands,” as she puts it) and wants to spend her precious remaining time holding her baby, to give him a chance at life.
Yes, this is the whole story of what happened to Alexandra Dutton. There are more plotlines in 1923’s second season beyond the Spencer and Alex romance—back on the ranch, Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren, playing Spencer’s uncle Jacob Dutton and aunt Cara, are holding things down; Crow teenager Teonna Rainwater (Aminah Nieves) is out on the range, trying to escape marshals determined to arrest her for the killings of the nuns who abused her at a boarding school; Donald Whitfield (Timothy Dalton), that evil capitalist with his eye on the Dutton ranch, tortures prostitutes in his mansion and lectures banquets full of fellow industrialists about how tourism is the next big moneymaker for Montana—but “will Spencer and Alex reunite, and will Alex ever see the ranch” was the most entertaining and motivating storyline of this particular prequel. Whether or not you like the answers—respectively, “briefly!” and “nope!”—seems to be driving most people on Reddit who hate this outcome, and most people on IMDB who love it.
Like any Taylor Sheridan product, this final episode of 1923 contains some indelible moments. I will never forget the reveal of those frostbitten extremities as a doctor pulls off Alex’s fancy stockings and gloves, or the birth scene, where the smallest CGI baby I’ve ever seen comes squirming out of this poor suffering lady. Jacob Dutton, who’s also in the hospital because some of his partially healed gunshot wounds from earlier in the show have opened back up in the course of a train-station shootout with Whitfield’s goons (of course!), shrinks against the wall, staring at the preemie infant with a mix of sadness and horror. (For once, a scene in 1923 actually required Harrison Ford’s talents.) This was before the widespread adoption of infant incubators, so everyone involved except maybe Alex believes that this baby won’t last long.
But “the mother who would choose herself over her child is no mother at all,” says Alex. The way she describes what the doctors want to do—“take my legs, and my hand, and my baby, and throw them away like rubbish”—continues the antiestablishmentarian, anti-expertise, and, dare I say, anti-abortion politics that emerged earlier in the series, when Alex was talking her way through Ellis Island. We see that Alex’s choice is the choice of a Dutton when Jacob stands up for her to the doctors, commanding them to do as she says. He later describes her admiringly to Cara, who never gets to meet her, as “mustang wild,” like “if a shooting star could talk.”
One reading of what happens to Alex is that Sheridan likes to build up strong female characters only to make them suffer. 1923 is narrated by Elsa, Spencer’s older sister, who dies at the end of the previous prequel, 1883. And Teonna, whose plot line meanders this season and gets wrapped up head-spinningly quickly when a judge dismisses her case, loses everyone—father, lover, home—before finding freedom. “You were right to fight back,” a Native deputy marshal who helps her with a horse and supplies says to her. “Maybe. But it cost me everything,” she says. “Always does,” he replies. I have come to think, over too many years of watching the Sheridanverse, that he truly believes he is honoring these women by letting them undergo these trials—and shows that those women will bear up, stubbornly, even unto death. His icon is Cara Dutton, sniping Whitfield’s approaching shooters from an upper window of her house, muttering, “Of all the things I’ve done for this ranch, this takes the cake.”
As Teonna’s hasty wrap-up shows, the edges of the 1923 finale betray the fraying of a television show written by one guy who insists on doing it alone. Would gangrene really kill Alex that fast? Why did the Duttons need to wait for Spencer to get back to defend the ranch from Whitfield? (He’s handy with an elephant gun, and maybe they needed the person who killed Whitfield to be a Dutton, for reasons of cosmic justice, but the climactic shootouts are over so soon after he arrives, it feels like a real letdown.) Why, when poor Jack Dutton (Cara and Jacob’s great-nephew, played by Darren Mann) is killed, does Cara send his wife Elizabeth (Michelle Randolph), who is pregnant with his child, off to the city, and command her to fall in love with someone else? What is going to happen to Alex and Spencer’s baby—who will become John Dutton, grandfather to Kevin Costner’s character in Yellowstone—when Cara, who has to be 80 if she’s a day, can’t care for him anymore?
Some of these things will likely get addressed in 1944, the next prequel in the Yellowstone universe, which might—given the timelines—give us another look at an aged-up Spencer and a twentysomething version of that shockingly small baby. (I am betting he will not suffer overmuch from the circumstances of his birth; such bodily weakness wouldn’t be very Dutton of him.) One thing we found out last night, in a hasty voiceover wrap-up from the ghost of Elsa: Spencer will never marry again. He will “take comfort in a widow” and father another son, because Taylor Sheridan wouldn’t want to leave a hero sexless for his whole life, but he will pine so hard for Alex that he will never be happy again. Well, this love cost Alex everything. It’s only fair.
Get the best of movies, TV, books, music, and more.
