Yellowstone Season 5 Finale Recap: “Life Is A Promise”

Here are some random thoughts prompted by “Life is a Promise,” the Season 5 finale of Yellowstone. Warning: There will be scads of spoilers here so proceed at your own risk.

• • Well, that certainly looked like a series finale — and not just a season finale — to us. It’s been reported that Cole Hauser and Kelley Reilly have already signed on to reprise their roles as Rip and Beth in a Yellowstone spinoff. But it’s difficult to see how they can justify having Yellowstone in the title since that ranch doesn’t really exist anymore. Unless, of course, they borrow a page from the M*A*S*H playbook and call the new show After Yellowstone?

• • Can’t say it came as a shock that Beth wound up murdering Jamie (by stabbing him in the heart!) to avenge her father, much as she promised she would do at John Dutton’s memorial service. But to be honest, we half-expected her to flinch from doing the bloody deed at the last minute because, unless we’re forgetting something, Beth may be the only Dutton who hadn’t killed anyone up until now. Hell, even Tate fatally shot a guy to protect his mom.

• • Rip and Lloyd helped Beth conceal her crime by taking Jamie’s corpse on a trip to the train station and setting his car ablaze. This supports the scenario that Jamie fled after nearly killing her, and should now be considered a fugitive. If he’s even found, he likely would be charged not only with attempted murder, but as an accomplice in the killings of John Dutton and Sarah Atwood. But, of course, Beth knows he will not ever be found.

• • Quite a few other loose ends were tied up with considerably less violence. Kayce hatched an ingenious plot to sell the Yellowstone Ranch to Chief Thomas Rainwater at a price way below market value, thereby enabling the surviving Duttons to avoid having the place seized because of their inability to pay humongous taxes. Beth agreed to the deal, but only because Rainwater agreed that he and his people — the original owners — would be good stewards for the land. “There may not be cows on it,” Beth noted, “but there won’t be condos either.” There won't be any more Yellowstone signage on it, either, but Rainwater promised that the Duttons already buried there would continue to rest in peace.

• • Rainwater also agreed to let Kayce and his family keep a relatively small patch of land in a far-flung corner of Yellowstone, where he could operate a ranch of his own. Kayce indicated — no, actually, he came out and admitted — that he was glad to have the weight of the Yellowstone Ranch off his shoulders. But we couldn’t help noticing that maybe, just maybe, he wasn’t entirely unhappy that his father was no longer around.

• • Remember in last week’s episode when Rainwater admitted there was “nothing legal” he could do to stop Market Equities from constructing a pipeline on what once was considered Native land?  Thanks to a little help from Mo and other allies from the Broken Rock Reservation, he was able to illegally halt progress on the pipeline by sabotaging the construction site (and dumping pipes into water too deep to be salvaged). All in all, a great way to start this instant-classic episode.

• • With no more ranching to do at Yellowstone, the cowboys moved on to other jobs. (We were never told how they explained the Y brand on their chests to their new employers, but never mind.) While Rip and Beth established their own spread in a part of Montana where tourists and developers are not allowed, Teeter landed a gig at Travis Wheatley’s Texas ranch, Lloyd went looking for work closer to home — and Ryan (Ian Bohen) gives up cowboying for good to reunite with country singer Abby (Lainey Wilson) and tag along on her tour bus. Don’t you just love a happy ending?

• • Here is something we did not seeing coming: Elsa Dutton (Isabel May) of 1883 returned from the dead as an unseen voiceover, as she occasionally has in 1923, to draw down the curtain in eloquent fashion: “One-hundred-and-forty years ago my father was told of this valley and here’s were we stayed, for seven generations. My father was told they would come for this land, and he promised to return it. Nowhere was that promise written. It faded with my father’s death, but somehow lived in the spirit of this place. Men cannot truly own wild land. To own land you must blanket it in concrete, cover it with buildings. Stack it with houses so thick, people can smell each other’s supper. You must rape it to sell it. Raw land. Wild land. Free land can never be owned. But some men pay dearly for the privilege of stewardship. They will suffer and sacrifice to live off it and live with it, and hopefully teach the next generation to do the same. And if they falter, find another willing to keep the promise.”

• • And then, to put a cherry on it, Willie Nelson’s “My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys” swelled on the soundtrack as we bid adieu to the Yellowstone mythos. (For now.) Nice touch.