This article contains spoilers for last night’s episode of Yellowstone.
It was very likely that John Dutton was going to die. Kevin Costner—who starred as the Western patriarch for four-and-a-half seasons before his very public falling out with creator Taylor Sheridan—made it clear that he was never coming back to the ranch. Yellowstone isn’t the type of show to let its main character ride off into the sunset or quietly move to a new town. So it wasn’t the why of Dutton’s death that was surprising, so much as the when.
The answer, as audiences learned last night in the first five minutes of Yellowstone to air in nearly two years, was “immediately.” Instead of stretching out the mystery of John’s demise or easing viewers into its new string of episodes (bafflingly deemed season 5B instead of 6), the show cut right to the money shot: John’s children Beth and Kayce looking on in horror as the police swarmed their newly-dead father’s home. Costner’s face is never shown—no one had any allusions that the actor would return just to play a corpse—but the character’s lifeless body is shown lying next to a gun. The episode then flashes back six weeks (around the time 5A ended) to begin to show how it all came to pass.
The first time executive producer and episode director Christina Voros read the script, she “had the breath knocked out of me,” she told The Hollywood Reporter in a recent interview. “I didn’t see it coming,” she continued. “I think there are people who are anticipating the season and wondering if it could all be about solving the mystery, right? But if you lay it out straight out of the gate, then the mystery becomes: What is the rest of the show going to be, since we’ve already let the cat out of the bag, and I think it’s kind of ingenious.”
The “bold” decision was all Taylor Sheridan’s, she explained, teasing that “it has to do with Taylor’s choice to not only deal with this episode, but the entire season… there’s nothing interesting to say without talking to the greater choice as a whole of how the season is going to develop, and I don’t want to tip our hats to any of that yet.”
Other shows have grappled with the deaths of their respective patriarchs—Succession killing off Logan Roy is a notable recent example—and Yellowstone seems to be taking some cues from them despite the fact they may have had less choice in the matter. “Some of the beauty of the use of flashbacks is that it’s really juxtaposing and bringing into high relief how much is at stake—how much has been lost, how much was taken for granted, how much we all thought John would go on forever. It is shocking,” Voros said. “And so I think rather than stringing people along to get to a place everyone sees coming, the decision to just open with it is really brave and really interesting.”
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