Yellowstone’s Newest Episode Promises An Endgame for the Dutton Ranch

The latest episode promises a way to save the ranch—but it comes at a cost.

With just one episode left in Yellowstone‘s fifth season and the prospect of a late-game renewal for season six looking increasingly unlikely, the Western drama brought us an outing that felt an awful lot like goodbye this week.

Some faces from the past made a reappearance, many pieces were taken off the board, and the prospect of exactly how the Dutton’s ranching legacy could be wrapped up has finally begun to take shape. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t any new business to attend to, though, and if next week’s season finale is truly the show’s last-ever entry, there’s still going to be quite a few plotlines to tie up.

Here’s how things shook out this week:

The Travis Show

The looming finale of the series adds weight to everything that happens on screen at this point, which makes the decision to spend a significant portion of this week’s episode on horse trainer Travis an unexpected swerve. Then again, considering that the character is played by none other than Yellowstone creator and writer Taylor Sheridan, maybe that one’s not so hard to figure out after all.

Much of the episode’s first 30 minutes are spent on Beth’s whirlwind visit to Travis’s compound. It also happens to be Sheridan’s own Bosque Ranch, which serves as his Texas-based production hub for shows like Yellowstone and, purely by coincidence I’m sure, gets ample brand time on screen (“Of course he has his own flag. Asshole,” Beth gripes in one of the episode’s better meta moments.)

She finds the trainer at home playing strip poker with his girlfriend Sadie (played by supermodel Bella Hadid) and a group of other young… horse enthusiasts? Bikini models? It doesn’t really matter because all they’re there to do is prove to us that Travis is both a misogynistic jerk and also, somehow, irresistibly virile. “You are such a fucking asshole it’s almost attractive,” Beth quips, shortly after Travis tricks some wealthy Brazilians into paying $3 million for one of the horses her ranch is selling (and also shortly before he beats her at a forced hand of high-stakes strip poker.)

Despite all of the quick-draw banter, Travis ultimately agrees to help Beth get the best prices at Yellowstone’s big upcoming auction pro bono, because deep down he’s a good guys (I guess?)

The Auction Block

Speaking of auctions, the centerpiece of this week’s episode is the fire-sale style one held on the ranch for, as Rip notes, pretty much everything that isn’t nailed down. Farm equipment, horses, even a carriage or two (a nod to 1883 and 1923?) are all put on the metaphorical chopping block in an effort to raise funds. Exactly what the point of those efforts are is an issue all of the denizens of the ranch were debating, with Rip telling his righthand man Lloyd and the stable boy Carter that they can stay on with only menial tasks to carry. The other ranch hands have to prepare to find new jobs.

Beth even admits to Monica ahead of the auction that the sale wouldn’t put a dent in the financial burden of the estate. ““There is no solution,” she says, “we’re just buying time while we look for it.”

That statement doesn’t quite seem to jibe with her assessment at the end of the episode that the $30 million they raised would allow them to keep operating for a while. Perhaps her assertion at it, “Buys us another year, longer if the rates comes down,” was a hint that season six isn’t totally off the table yet?

Whatever else it does, the auction provides a nice opportunity for the Yellowstone crew to kick back for a while, and a few familiar faces like Walker’s buckle-bunny girlfriend (played by actor Ryan Bingham’s real life wife, Hassie Harrison) and former governor Perry (also a former lover of John Dutton’s) to return to the fold. Even Jimmy and his wife get to come back to the ranch one more time, making for a fun little goodbye tour ahead of what seems likely to be a packed episode next week.

Fighting Back

Last week’s episode was light on Jamie, but the black sheep of the Dutton family is back this week and preparing to make some major moves. After Beth apparently leaked information about Jamie’s dealings with Market Equities (who find themselves raided by the police this episode) and his relationship with Sarah to the press, Jamie tries to get ahead of the scandal by consulting with another former paramour—Christina!

Remember Christina? She had Jamie’s baby offscreen a couple of seasons ago and then was barely mentioned again? Well, she’s back just in time to tell him to get his political ass in gear and throw Sarah under the bus for John’s murder. “If she did it then it died with her,” Christina advises, telling Jamie to align himself with his father’s memory by announcing an investigation into Sarah’s connection to John’s death.

“John Dutton’s murder was more than just the murder of the man, it was the murder of the citizens of Montana’s right to choose their representative and for them to freely execute the will of the people. It was a murder of their freedom and you will avenge them,” she warns somewhat hyperbolically, telling Jamie that his whole political future is riding on this, and maybe more. “This speech will determine the course of your life, Jamie.”

Given that next week promises to finally bring the Beth-Jamie smackdown that’s been brewing for five seasons to fruition, that statement just might be more prophetic (and potentially fatal) than she knows.

Kayce’s Plan

Last week, Kayce told his son Tate that the ranch wasn’t their home anymore, and this week it seems he’s begun setting a plan in motion to make that literal. While he refuses to reveal the details of his idea to Monica, the show lays out plenty of hints to make it clear what’s afoot. As he says after asking Beth a few thinly veiled questions about tax law, “The only way to save this place. You gotta give it away.”

Considering that the Duttons already attempted to put the land into a conservation easement in the first half of season 5, this doesn’t feel like quite the revelation it should be, but we’re operating at a break-neck pace to pull everything together for the finale, so perhaps we can forgive a certain lapse of innovation.

While Kayce hasn’t made it clear exactly how he means to give the ranch away or who to, at this point my bet is on the reservation. Thomas Rainwater only makes a brief appearance in this episode to suggest sabotaging the pipeline under construction on tribal land, but given that Kayce has always had a closer connection with the local Native population than the other Duttons, that seems like the obvious choice. It also harkens back to a prediction made on the prequel series 1883, in which the Duttons took over their land with the forewarning that in seven generations (AKA the present for Yellowstone) the tribe would rise up and take it back.

Of course, if nothing else Yellowstone has always been unpredictable, so a much bigger twist is far from out of the question. We’ll just have to tune in next week for the (probable) ending to find out!

Assorted musings:

• Teeter’s storyline gets a bittersweet denouement this episode as she deals with her grief over the sudden death of her boyfriend Colby. I appreciated her quiet moments of coping, but the real showcase came (of course) with Beth. In what may in fact be the longest scene between two female characters in Yellowstone‘s history, she joins Beth at a bar in town for a round of Beth’s Olympic sport—verbally eviscerating tourists. It was nice to get one last good old fashioned takedown from the razor-tongued Dutton, since next week will probably be too busy to give us any of her zingers.
• That said, Beth definitely could have come up with a better insult to save as Jamie’s name in her phone. (I won’t reprint it here, but if you saw it, you know.)
• This show has a very strange relationship with adoption that’s once again emphasized this episode when Beth tells Jamie that ‘Dutton’ is not his name. She hates him, we get it, but it’s still a weird hill to die on.
• Jamie’s son finally has a name! While we learned previously that he was named after his father, this is the first time anyone’s actually said it onscreen. Welcome to the dysfunctional family, James!
• Break out your black cowboy hats, because John Dutton’s body has finally been released from the coroner, just in time for a big finale funeral!