It makes no sense – spoilers

(Editor’s Note: The following review contains spoiler for “Yellowstone,” Season 5, Episode 14, “Life Is a Promise,” including the ending.)

Since the fifth season of Yellowstone resumed with the death of John Dutton, Taylor Sheridan has been trying to convince audiences that there is still a story to tell. It didn’t go well. It turns out there are few climaxes as poignant as the death of the owner of the largest ranch in Montana, when his ranch and his family needed him most. Under threat from a real estate developer, a new pipeline and even the neighboring national park, Yellowstone was in trouble, and its most loyal guardian left behind no plan to fix the problem and no easy escape for those left behind. In “Yellowstone,” John’s death was a tragedy of appropriate scale and magnitude—a loss of such magnitude that its appeal made everyone else’s stories seem trivial. John is dead. The ranch is lost. What else is there to say besides saying goodbye?

“Yellowstone” found itself in a similar situation as a show. After a two-year hiatus that saw Kevin Costner head off to less greener pastures, the Paramount Network tentpole lost its headliner before reaching a proper conclusion. Costner was unable to finish the series he had made a hit, which in turn made it harder to catapult audiences into the next chapter. Sheridan had to figure out how to turn defeat into victory, and in doing so he also tried to turn a melancholy farewell into a new beginning.

Tried and undoubtedly failed.

During the six-episode second half of season five, people mourned, investigators investigated, and murderers were brought to justice. But the further “Yellowstone” moved away from the individual engine of its story, the more obvious it became that the wheels were spinning. One episode was about a crazy horse that kicks a cowboy to death. Another was booked by Sheridan himself – as Travis, the Texas horse trainer – and played strip poker with half-naked cowgirls. As Sunday’s finale rolled around, Beth (Kelly Reilly) and Kayce (Luke Grimes) had a plan to save the ranch, but they didn’t realize the plan until the very end of the penultimate episode. It felt like the series was stalling.

In episode 14, “Life is a Promise,” the audience got to see an important map – the fate of the ranch, which I’ll come back to in a moment – and some other interesting things. Sure, Beth was at war with her adoptive brother Jamie (Wes Bentley), but they had vowed to kill each other since the first episode with no good reason not to follow through. Kayce also had personal demons to appease – a vision told him he had to choose between the ranch and his family – but it was unclear for a while whether he wanted to flee the family estate or continue building his legacy.

In contrast to these amorphous resolutions, John’s death represented an essential, if tragic, end point. John fought against the idea of ​​progress throughout his life. There was no “after” for him. He wanted to go back, and if going back wasn’t an option, he would settle for keeping what was his. The fact that he couldn’t – that corporate executives and government officials conspired to take his ranch away from him – only highlighted the harsher truth that the cowboy way of life was dying; That even a man as powerful as John Dutton, with a presence as iconic as Costner’s Western resume, couldn’t stop “progress” as he so often swore he would, well, that tells you everything you know must: The final nail in John’s coffin was also the death knell for the American dream.

And yet the “Yellowstone” finale does everything it can to convince the audience that John will emerge victorious. As if waiting for sadness, it lasts an agonizing 90 minutes. It sends the supporting characters away with a smile on their faces. It stays true to tradition by pausing the story entirely to watch country star Lainey Wilson sing a song. Even as the boards are torn from his house, the door is torn from its hinges, and the barn’s giant “Y” is lowered like the flag of the losing army, Sheridan wants us to believe that the Dutton family has “won.” Hell, Beth even says it in one of her two confessionals next to the coffin: “There may not be any cows on it,” she says, “but there won’t be any condos either. We won.”

Why then is her second message to her father’s coffin a promise to avenge his death? Do winners usually need someone to avenge them? Isn’t it enough to win?

The “Yellowstone” finale is so desperate for conflicts to win that it fails to recognize the futility of the manufactured victories it produces. Yes, Beth eventually kills Jamie, but her “plan” is so simple and sudden that it’s completely unsatisfying. She shows up at his house with a crowbar and bear spray, they beat the shit out of each other, and then she stabs him. OK. And she gets away with it because… she says He started the fight? Really? That and Rip (Cole Hauser) dumping the body at the train station is all it takes to get away with murdering the Attorney General? I guess if enough people don’t like you (especially if one of them is the cop investigating the case), they won’t worry about the details.

As the climax of a series finale (or a season In the finale, as Paramount Network still points out, Jamie’s death was too drawn out, too involved, and lasted far too long to provide any meaningful satisfaction. Kudos to Wes Bentley for realizing that for half a season (if not longer) he’s been playing a walking corpse who serves as his sister’s punching bag until she decides enough is enough and puts him out of his misery.

As for Kayce, well, he certainly seems happy – he’s cleared a small piece of the Yellowstone-Dutton Ranch for his family while freeing himself from the undue burden of a government job by giving his cattle commissioner badge to a wolf (or a ghost wolf, perhaps?). But what does his future look like? Are we supposed to believe that the secret to any cowboy who wants to keep cowboying is to simply get smaller? Start over with a smaller ranch, further away from society, and just trust that you’ll be okay this time? Like Kayce, Rip and Beth? (And how lazy Is it strange that so many characters have basically the same ending?)

Additionally, Kayce’s closure depends in part on his belief that he did the right thing for his father by selling the ranch back to Chief Thomas Rainwater and the indigenous peoples he leads. This move may make Taylor Sheridan look like a benevolent white man, but John has consistently stated explicitly that he doesn’t want his family to leave the ranch. At Costner last episodeJohn said he wanted the ranch to belong to Tate one day and defended killing people to keep them under Dutton’s control. Now he’s dead and losing Yellowstone Stadium is totally fine because the alternative was worse? John didn’t believe in compromise! He refused to give in to anyone! He would hate this ending!

Now there is an idea. What if the “Yellowstone” finale was designed to make John Dutton angry? What if we saw him as an antihero all along? What if we were supposed to be fighting against him, against his family, and against the survival of Yellowstone all the time? What if the finale was a happy ending because it would make John so unhappy?

As tempting as this interpretation may be to anyone who associates John Dutton with Kevin Costner – especially given the elevated role Sheridan has given himself on screen, as if the creator could simply step in and become the new star – the series doesn’t deserve such a meta conclusion. At best, “Yellowstone” paints a complicated portrait of a mythical American figure. It doesn’t demonize him. It doesn’t ask us to see him as Logan Roy and his children as greedy little heirs. Well, it casts Jamie in that light, but Jamie’s contrast to the others only proves the larger point: as a “victory” for John Dutton, the finale makes no sense. Would he be happy to know that his paradise won’t be turned into a parking lot? Sure, but for John progress didn’t mean one thing. The land will return to its natural state, untouched by humans, but its men, its family, will no longer be its stewards.

John Dutton’s legacy ends with him, even if “Yellowstone” has decided to move on, just as “Yellowstone” should have ended the same way John did, even if Sheridan decides he needs another five seasons to figure out how could function without him. (“Yellowstone: Beth & Rip” is coming soon, but will anyone feel like saddling up again? Is there really much more to do in this comparatively small house in the middle of nowhere, even with Kayce stopping by to help out every now and then?)

In his last appearance as John Dutton, Costner had a meaningful line. “I think sometimes God gives us tragedies so that we can pass on to the next generation of sufferers how we survived them. Maybe one day all this knowledge will lead to no more tragedies at all.”

Had Sheridan and “Yellowstone” embraced their own tragic reality, the ending might not have been so unbearable.

Grade: D

“Yellowstone” is available to stream on Peacock.