The Lackluster Ending to an Amazing Show – Yellowstone Season 5 Ends in Disappointment

Spoilers Ahead!

Television Reviews

It has been two years since season 5 of the critically (and non-critically) acclaimed show Yellowstone first aired. This has been the norm for most modern shows, and honestly, I don’t know about you, my lovely readers, but I am sick and tired of it. (Remember when we used to get seasons back to back? Pepperidge Farm remembers.) Maybe, just maybe, if television went back to filming ENTIRE seasons at a time, Kevin Costner wouldn’t have been able to delay filming for the production of his four-part film series Horizon: An American Saga (which no one watched, by the way), and we wouldn’t have gotten the completely lackluster, ego-filled ending to Yellowstone.

I honestly don’t even know where to begin with Yellowstone Season 5: Part 2. I was disappointed, but I didn’t hate it. I didn’t hate it, but I definitely didn’t love it. It just WAS. It just exists. It’s like when you get rain for two weeks straight, then a couple of days of sunshine before it rains again, and you just go, “Yep, it’s raining again,” with a shrug of your shoulders. “Meh.”

Maybe it was the two-year-long wait. Maybe it was because Season 5: Part 1 was so good (not as good as seasons 1-4, but still). Maybe it was all the drama surrounding Kevin Costner and Taylor Sheridan, who, after watching this second part, I’ve decided is a complete egotistical narcissistic moron, no matter how good his writing and shows are. Maybe it was the fact that Matthew McConaughey was supposed to take over the lead, and while he’s no Costner, it’s not a bad replacement. Spoiler alert: absolutely ZERO McConaugheys or Costners show up in Yellowstone Season 5: Part 2. I know. I was disappointed, too. The hype around this has been building and building and building, and all for… well, literally nothing.

***SPOILERS***

Okay, maybe not NOTHING; we did get a satisfying and extremely delayed showdown between Beth Dutton and Jamie Dutton. That was a fight for the ages, in my opinion. And before anyone says, “Oh, Beth girl-bossed that fight!” she absolutely did not. She got her butt handed to her five ways from Sunday and only lived because Rip showed up and pulled Jamie off of her. Honestly, I didn’t know Jamie had that in him; I was pretty impressed with his scrapping skills.

Since I’m on the topic of things I DID like about the ending of the show, I’ll just continue.

One, first, foremost, and always: the acting. I swear, if Kelly Reilley doesn’t get a dang Emmy nomination for the show after all these years, we’re rioting. The woman is FANTASTIC. Her character, Beth, drives me nuts 99% of the time, but good Lord, does she do an incredible job. Same with Wes Bentley. He’s pretty well known at this point, so I don’t need to ramble, but he also deserves an Emmy nomination. He’s fabulous in everything. As many actors know, when you’re playing the villain, it can be hard to make your character both believable and hated correctly, and Wes nailed it with Jamie. Just *chefs kiss*. As always, everyone else does a great job, too. The big standout in this was Jennifer Landon, who plays the loveable but super hillbilly Teeter. I just adore her, and this season, for unfortunate reasons I’ll get into later, she really had to put herself out there acting-wise, and she was wonderful.

Secondly: something I’ve always loved about this show is the setting. We actually went on a road trip from Texas to Idaho and back about a month ago, and on the way back, we detoured while in Montana and drove by the REAL Yellowstone Ranch, AKA the Chief Joseph Ranch. And let me tell you, she’s as gorgeous and stunning in real life as she is on the show. There is a presence about that ranch. It was good to see her again in all her glory in Part 2, even if it didn’t last. The addition of real horse trainers, cowboys, ropers, and local businesses has been my favorite part of what makes this show so special, and it was no different here. This second half pays a wonderful tribute to Billy Klapper, a real-deal, real-life Cowboy who also made cowboy gear like spurs (in the show, he gives a set to Rip) for over 20 years out of his workshop in Pampa, Texas. Sadly, he passed after filming his cameo on the show, but because of it, his and others’ legacies will live on.

And lastly: the cast dynamic. These people really feel like a family. Their chemistry is off the charts and has been for over five years. You can tell they really love each other, and it shows.

That leads me to everything that went wrong.

Since I’m on the cast subject: the obvious thing everyone knows went wrong is Sheridan not keeping Costner. I’m not a businesswoman, but losing the literal reason your show was even popular in the first place, and who you wrote it for, because you couldn’t put down your ego and work with the man is extremely baffling to me, especially when that is why Sheridan left Sons of Anarchy all those years ago. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black, buddy. They couldn’t even get Costner to come back to film John Dutton’s just-off-screen death scenes; they used a VERY obvious body double. It was so awkward, and, even though we all guessed Sheridan would probably kill him off, it took the impact of John’s death away from the audience. I felt nothing when I should have felt like Beth, Kayce, Rip, and all the others.

You know whose death I DID feel, however? Colby’s (Denim Richards). His out-of-nowhere, purely for shock value and nothing else death. Mostly, I felt anger. It was completely unnecessary. We have gone 5 seasons of Yellowstone, which has had some absolutely insane, over-the-top moments, and plenty of times to kill off characters we cared about, and nothing. Nada. Zip. Now, all of a sudden, with two episodes left in the entire show, does a Cowboy die. My eyes rolled so far into the back of my head that I could see my brain. This is where Jennifer Landon had her time to shine. Her raw grief over her lover was so heartbreaking and realistic. She did a fantastic job. Unfortunately, we as an audience were made to spend more time grieving for Colby than we did for John, and that just about sums up Sheridan’s pettiness and ego for the rest of the show.

The next thing that went wrong was, well, just about everything else. Quite a bit of season 5: part 2 was filler. They easily could have cut a bunch of stuff, including but not limited to: Lainey Wilson singing an entire song during the last episode before she reunites with Ryan (Ian Bohen), most of the flashback scenes (while it’s nice to know what exactly went down in the six weeks before John Dutton’s murder, quite a bit of it wasn’t needed), and lastly, pretty much anytime Taylor Sheridan was on-screen.

For those not familiar, Sheridan likes to write himself roles into his shows. In Yellowstone, he plays a horse trainer named Travis. We’ve seen him off and on over the years, and every single time, it’s his chance to flex his real-life horse-riding skills. His character has always had more screen time than he needed, but this was off the charts. The penultimate episode is heavily focused on Sheridan, with him quite literally flexing the entire time. I’m serious; he was shirtless for most of it. His character’s ego is flexing, too; when he’s asked for help in saving the ranch by Beth, he tells her she needs to play strip poker with him and win in order for him to run an auction for the Yellowstone for free. It’s only when she’s about to take her dress off that he stops and says, “I was just messing with you; of course, I’ll help!” The whole thing was incredibly cringe, and honestly, felt a bit out of character for Beth, who, in my opinion, gave in too easily. Also, this whole scene really sets up Sheridan’s one-of-many planned spinoff shows, this one about the Four Sixes Ranch, which, no offense, Taylor, no one is going to watch. For one, most people don’t like your character, Travis, enough to follow him around, and two, the two other characters, Teeter and Jimmy (Jefferson White), while liked, are not strong enough to hold an audience on their own. Good luck, buddy. Maybe you should have tried to keep Costner a little harder. No one is going to watch the Rip and Beth one either, for once again, while very much liked, they’re not very strong characters on their own. And also, what’s the point? The Yellowstone is gone.

But wait, Tuggs, you may be asking, back up; what do you mean “run an auction for the Yellowstone”?? and “the Yellowstone is gone”???

Ah, yes. Well, there’s no easy way to say this, but:

After five seasons and a spinoff show (1923) all dedicated to saving the Yellowstone Ranch, it’s all in vain. The show ends with Beth basically auctioning off everything she can, and I mean everything: animals, saddles, general horse equipment, ranch equipment, even the carriages from shows 1883 and 1923, were auctioned off, all in an effort to save the ranch and pay off some taxes. It’s not enough, and the ranch is going to be seized by the government in Eminent Domain so they can build condos, an airport, etc. At the last minute, though, Kayce (Luke Grimes) has the brilliant idea of selling the ranch to the Native Americans for super cheap, with a few conditions that don’t actually get honored at all.

Yes, I’m serious.

The cool part here is that we finally get to know just how big the Yellowstone really is. Kayce sells the ranch for $1.25 an acre, which is the price land was at the time the Duttons of old settled on the land the Yellowstone is on. Later, as Beth and Jamie are having their final showdown, she tells Jamie this to really make him mad, and she says that the ranch sold for $1.1 million. I had my boyfriend do the math on that: that means the Yellowstone is roughly 880,000 acres. Absolutely insane. And completely unrealistic, but I digress, as a lot of this show is pretty far-fetched.

The not-so-cool part is everything else about it. For one thing, a part of the deal Kayce and Chief Thomas Rainwater (Gil Birmingham) come to is this: “East Camp I keep for my family. And you can never develop the Yellowstone, and you can never sell it.” Rainwater promises to treat the land and the Yellowstone as sacred, but we see the Native Americans taking down the ranch bit by bit. So much for sacred. There’s also a scene where a bunch of Native American kids and teens are kicking over the tombstones of the Dutton family, which was just disgusting and unnecessarily paints the tribe in a bad light, in my opinion. Luckily, Mo (Moe Brings Plenty) stops them and fixes the tombstones, but still, it was a yucky scene.

For another, because of the way it ended, many viewers saw this ending as “woke,” since the land goes back to the Indians. It’s not woke, it’s a tie-in to the show 1883. In that show, the land is given to James Dutton (Tim McGraw) by a Native American tribe with the condition that the land will be given back to the Native Americans after seven generations, which is what happens. While this is a great tie-in, it’s under the assumption that viewers have watched the spinoff show 1883. There’s a voiceover by Elsa Dutton (Isabel May) that explains all of this to the viewer, but in my opinion, even with the explanation, relying on another show to help haphazardly bring together your main show is really lazy, and it wasn’t done well.

After everything, after all the fighting and dying and sending people to the train station, the show just… ends. Nothing fancy, nothing special, it’s just… done. That’s it. And while the film buff in me can appreciate the way everything ties together, the viewer in me is less enthusiastic about the long-awaited season 2 of 1923 next year. There’s no point; everything is gone at the end, anyway, so all the sacrificing is for nothing.

All in all, it’s such an overall depressing and empty ending to an otherwise amazing series, and I can’t help but wonder what would have been if Kevin Costner had stayed.