The fifth season of Yellowstone is now streaming on Neon. With Kevin Costner’s Dutton clan back for more Montana-based murder, mayhem, and melodrama, Adam Fresco saddles up to assess the opening episode.
It’s back, and with season five Yellowstone is quick to assure fans that, like its lead character John Dutton (Kevin Costner), it ain’t planning on changing anything you love. No fancy-pants plot deviations. No arty-farty new narrative devices. No exorbitant experimental flourishes. No new-fangled fictive flourishes, flashy photography, or straying from a soundtrack consisting largely of soft rock classics, country and western standards, and the horses galloping across the prairie.
As John said at the end of series four, on being voted Governor of Montana: “I’m not progress. I’m the wall progress smashes up against”. Conservative with a C so big, it rivals the enormous Y plastered on the side of his family’s Yellowstone-Dutton ranch house, John Dutton isn’t about to change, and nor is Yellowstone about to veer from the vivid and wildly entertaining storytelling that has made it one of the biggest shows on television today.
The finale of the last season of Yellowstone, the fourth in the Kevin Costner-led cowboy drama, had, according to the famed Nielsen ratings, over ten million viewers on the first day of its release. Eleven million and counting if you factor in all those who watched after its initial debut. That’s more than double the five million who watched the show’s third season finale. Eye-popping numbers like that are a testament to the mind-boggling fact that, in our age of multiple streaming services, terrestrial, and on-demand TV channels, Yellowstone is the number one series across broadcast, cable, and premium platforms.
Season four concluded with John Dutton firmly back in the saddle as one of Montana’s leading cattle ranchers, presiding over his vast kingdom, with the question of succession still foremost in his mind. The burning issue looming over the opening of season five remains the same as the very first episode of season one—which of his children should inherit the family legacy? Who’s best suited to protecting John’s precious ranch from the many enemies and greedy fortune-seekers out to develop his land into a concrete-covered modern metropolis and playground for the holidaying rich? And what about the indigenous peoples’ claims to land John’s forefathers, and founders of the State of Montana, snatched more than a century ago?
At the start of the season opener, titled ‘One Hundred Years is Nothing’, the show is quick to hammer home John’s plan. No spoilers, but as his election signs proclaim, John Dutton stands simply (and in bold capital letters) “FOR THE LAND”. He’s not interested in pop politics, trendy environmentalism, media-savvy soundbites, or even being liked. As John tells his rival for Governor when he calls to congratulate him on his win, and asks that he fight for his voters too: “I fight for what’s right, no matter who supports it.”
John even tells the supporters cheering his election victory that he plans not to bring change, but to ensure that the way Montana looks today is how it will look a hundred years from now. That may sound like catnip to the wealthy ranchers and farmers John now represents, but to the corporate suits and would-be developers of New York and California planning to build an airport, ski resort, hotels, and holiday homes in Montana, it’s a declaration of all-out war.
Cut to Carline Warner (Jacki Weaver), the greedy company bigwig behind the proposed Paradise Valley Project that Montana’s freshly elected Governor has just vowed to shut down, throwing glass ornaments at her office walls, and swearing, as the shards rain down on her expensive office carpet, to grind the Duttons into the dust. It’s a brief but potent reminder that season four set up Warner, the new Market Equities CEO, as one of the biggest threats to the Dutton dynasty. But Market Equities’ pernicious plan to buy up property around the Dutton’s land, in an attempt to squeeze or buy them out and build a holiday destination for the rich, has been left hanging precariously in the wind by John’s election as Governor.
Season four went to great lengths to establish Warner as John and his daughter Beth’s arch-nemesis. It’s hard to forget Warner delivering such deliciously ominous lines as: “I am never early, and I am never late. I am the constant your time adjusts to.” But, while Warner’s immediate goal of building an airport to service her company’s proposed Montana ski resort looks like it’s now on hold, her determination to undermine the Dutton family promises to make John’s tenure as Governor about as smooth as using sandpaper on a porcupine as your outhouse toilet paper.
But fans needn’t worry that being Governor will change John’s focus one bit. As he tells his daughter, Beth (Kelly Reilly), he may love Montana, but everything he does will be judged solely on what’s good for the family ranch. So the scene is set for more classic Dutton’s-against-the-rest political maneuvering and potentially violent solutions, as John fights to protect what’s his from all threats—foreign, domestic, or family.
Foremost amongst those family-based threats is, of course, John’s weasel of a son Jamie (Wes Bentley). Jamie’s the reason John ran for Governor in the first place, in a bid to stop Jamie from betraying the family after discovering his biological father, Garrett Randle (Will Patton). John and Beth begin season five seemingly still convinced Jamie was in on his real father’s revenge plot. A scheme that resulted in season three’s explosive finale, in which simultaneous assassination attempts were made on John, Beth, and Kayce Dutton (Luke Grimes), in a failed bid to wipe out Jamie’s family and make him successor to the Dutton throne.
Those attacks have not been forgotten, despite Jamie’s gunshot to Garrett Randle’s temple at the end of season four. Beth still literally carries the scars of the explosion that nearly killed her. From the long scar on her cheek to the burns on her back, her barely-contained hatred for her brother Jamie oozes from her eyes in every scene they share. Frankly, it’s amazing that John and Beth allow Jamie to work beside them in the Governor’s office, let alone share the same airspace. Blood may be thicker than water, but there’s no way it’s as relentless as Beth when it comes to her desire to make Jamie suffer.
Talking of Beth, the new season sets her up as still being the rock by her father’s side. In a flashback to her teens, she informs young ranch hand Rip that she’s off to college to study finance. When the young tearaway Rip, (adopted to the Yellowstone-Dutton Ranch after Rip killed his abusive father), asks: “What’s finance?”, Beth replies: “How to make money out of money”. It’s clear that even as a teenager, Beth was set on doing all she could to protect her father’s legacy, and as his political advisor, financial right-hand and business brains, Beth’s a formidable ally to John in his quest to protect his property.
The question remains though, why is John willing to put up with Jamie? Is it a matter, as Don Corleone (Marlon Brando) advised in The Godfather, of keeping your friends close, but your enemies closer? Does John consider Jamie a son and heir? Certainly, as John makes clear in the limousine ride back from the Governor’s Mansion to his ranch, he thinks Jamie needs to swallow his ambition for political office, influence, and power, and focus on doing what’s best for the family. Or rather as John not so subtly puts it, he expects Jamie to do precisely what he tells him, when he tells him, without question. But whilst John may be willing to let the snake back into the family nest, if the look in Beth’s eyes are anything to go by in this season premiere, she’s not averse to sticking Jamie on a skewer and barbequing him alive for the cowpokes’ lunch.
Beth’s brother may bring out her dark side, but her new husband, Rip (Cole Hauser), can see that underneath Beth’s taste for bloody vengeance, and violent reprisal, what she needs is to focus on finding somebody new to fight, rather than sit around their idyllic ranch-house and regret the past. Beth’s regret is her long-held crush on Rip, who she now realizes was the love of her life all along. But whilst Beth is full of remorse and self-loathing for her past rejection of Rip, he’s dependably John Wayne about it all, claiming all that matters is that the long and winding road of the past led to their being together today.
Ahhhh, it’d be sweet and romantic if it wasn’t for the fact that Rip just told the love of his life that the best way she can process regret is to go find somebody new to focus her destructive energy on.
Judging by her father’s desire to prevent Montana, and his family’s ranch in particular, from becoming the playground of rich city folk, a showdown between Beth and those unscrupulous developers out to make Montana a holiday resort hellhole is on the cards. But those same greedy land-grabbers have their eye on John’s Achilles heel—Jamie. Of all the Dutton clan, he seems the weakest link, and the one most likely to be open to their advances. The question then, for season five, is just how much John can trust his wayward half-son to put the lid on his ambitions and focus on the good of the Dutton family over his own personal desires for power, prominence, and respect.
Elsewhere, we get to check in on Kayce Dutton (Josh Grimes) and his heavily-pregnant bride, Monica (Kelsey Asbille), and their young son Tate (Brecken Merrill). As Kayce leads a posse of Montana’s Livestock Association in pursuit of horse-thieving bandits, all the way to the Canadian border, Monica’s suddenly off to the hospital, as her baby decides to arrive three weeks early. Meanwhile, the cowboys (and girl) at the Yellowstone-Dutton ranch are dressing up in their fancy pants and smart shirts to attend their boss’s party to celebrate his election as Governor, with fan favourite Jimmy (Jefferson White) back from last season’s stint training on the famed 6666 Ranch (a slimly veiled set-up for showrunner Taylor Sheridan’s new Yellowstone spin-off series, 6666).
Watching events unfold at the new Governor’s mansion, tribal chairman Thomas Rainwater (Gil Birmingham) quietly weighs up where John’s election leaves the indigenous people of Montana. With John’s promise to prevent progress, it looks like Chief Rainwater’s hugely profitable plans for a new casino complex are off the board, so there may well be another future fight brewing between the Duttons and those who claim indigenous rights to his family’s land.
All up, in a darn entertaining special two-hour season opener, Yellowstone sets the table for what promises to be yet more riveting modern Western television drama in its new season. The Dutton clan are back, and bad as ever, returning for more Montana-based murder, mayhem, and melodrama, in a show that’s dependably not changed a bit since it first became a hit.
