‘Yellowstone’ Finale, Explained: Tragedy and Hope as Ranch’s Fate is Revealed
[This story contains major spoilers from the season 5B finale of Yellowstone, “Life Is a Promise.”]
Yellowstone circled back to the beginning in order to deliver its ending.
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Heading into Sunday’s season 5B finale, the mega-hit Taylor Sheridan series had not confirmed if the supersized episode would, in fact, be the series finale. But to those who tuned into what Paramount Network described as a special season finale event, the ending certainly felt like an ending. Yet, it also set up where the Yellowstone-verse could go next.
[Major spoilers ahead…]
Directed and written by Sheridan, the one-hour-and-26-minute long episode, titled “Life Is A Promise,” revealed the fate of the Yellowstone, as the Dutton family’s ranch was sold back to the Broken Rock Reservation, finally freeing Kayce Dutton (Luke Grimes) of his father’s legacy while also giving his own family a future. Beth Dutton’s (Kelly Reilly) master plan was also revealed in the episode’s most shocking scene when she fatally stabbed the brother she has loathed, Jamie Dutton (Wes Bentley), in the heart.
“You made me promise not to sell an inch, and I hope you understand that this is me keeping it,” Beth says to the casket carrying her late father John Dutton (played by departed star Kevin Costner; who is not shown), as they lay him to rest on Yellowstone land. “There may not be cows on it, but there won’t be condos either. We won.”
She later whispers, “I will avenge you.”
Beth collected on those final words to her father by setting up a perfect murder of Jamie, who is likely to go down for the death of his father, the former Governor of Montana, and who is declared missing to end the series.
“The last thing I will ever say to my father was making this promise — I’m gonna keep it,” Beth told husband Rip Wheeler (Cole Hauser), before asking him to take her brother to the Dutton “train station,” which is when their enemies go away and are never seen or heard from again.
Beth walks away from the attack on her brother bruised, battered and concussed. But she soon heals, and the episode begins to look ahead at what’s next for the ensemble and possibly the Yellowstone-verse at large by perfectly teeing up the reported Beth and Rip spinoff (more on that, below). Beth buys her and Rip a new ranch 40 miles west of Dillon, Montana, just far enough away from the airport, tourists or any land developer’s dreams; Carter (Finn Little) goes with them. The ending also kickstarts a new legacy for Kayce, who starts his own brand and purchases 300 cattle with son Tate (Brecken Merrill) and wife Monica (Kelsey Asbille).
The former ranch hands all move on following the tragic death of cowboy Colby (Denim Richards) and the selling of the Yellowstone, including Teeter (Jennifer Landon) getting a job at Bosque Ranch, prompting another onscreen appearance by Sheridan in the finale as horse trainer Travis Wheatley, and Ryan (Ian Bohen) reuniting with the woman who got away (played by country star Lainey Wilson).
The episode concludes with the fictional Broken Rock Tribe moving into Yellowstone, and dismantling the ranch. But when they begin taking down the headstones of the Dutton family ancestors buried on the land, they are stopped by Mo (played by Mo Brings Plenty, who is also the American Indian coordinator consultant for the franchise).
That’s when 1883‘s Elsa Dutton rises from the dead — as Isabel May ties the whole series, and franchise, together in a surprise voiceover cameo. (Her “seventh generation” reveal may also answer the theory about John Dutton’s grandfather). Here’s what she says:
One-hundred-and-forty-one 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 its 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.
The final shots capture the cascading Montana land, as both Kayce and Beth are seen settling into their new lives as they seek fresh starts, with Kayce in the former Yellowstone’s East Camp and Beth with Rip in their new new home.
To understand this full-circle ending, you need context about how 1883 ended.
That first Yellowstone prequel series, which aired as a limited series in 2021-2022, featured a key conversation between an elder Dutton, James Dutton (played by Tim McGraw), and the then-Chief of the Crow Tribe, Spotted Eagle (played by Graham Greene).
The 1883-set prequel that explained how the Dutton family settled what would become their Yellowstone ranch centered around heroine and narrator Elsa Dutton (May), the daughter to James and Margaret Dutton (Faith Hill) who gradually dies over the course of a week at the end of the series, the result of a poisoned arrow. Because of her impending death, James changes course and takes his daughter on horseback West on the Bozeman trail to Montana’s Paradise Valley, telling Spotted Eagle that he will settle the family where his daughter is buried, so she can always be with them.
“The winters are cruel. But the summer’s are rich and a man who plans can thrive. And you look like a man who plans,” Spotted Eagle tells James of what would go on to become the Yellowstone ranch and heart of the present-day Yellowstone series.
“But know this,” he continues, “that in seven generations, my people will rise up and take it back from you.”
James replies, “In seven generations, you can have it.” He also promises that the Crow Tribe has the freedom to hunt his Paradise Valley, and so the relationship with the Duttons and the Indigenous people of the land they settled on was born.
The Yellowstone finale showed Kayce (Grimes) fulfilling that promise made more than a century ago, acting out the plan that was teased at the end of the penultimate episode when he told sister Beth (Reilly) that the only way they can save the ranch is to give it away.
To end the season, and perhaps the flagship series, Kayce sells his family’s ranch to Chief Thomas Rainwater (Gil Birmingham) of the Broken Rock tribe, whose bloodline has been traced back in 1923, the second Yellowstone prequel series about the early Duttons, with his ancestor Teonna Rainwater (Aminah Nieves). May also narrates 1923.
Kayce sells the ranch to Rainwater for $1.25 an acre, which he explains was the price of the land when his ancestors arrived. The low offer solves their financial obstacles, since neither the Dutton family nor Rainwater could have afforded an inheritance tax on the property if it were sold at value.
“Congratulations on the worst land deal since my people sold Manhattan,” Rainwater says of the $1.1 million deal for the largest (fictional) ranch in Montana.
Kayce’s offer comes with two conditions: That Rainwater sign the deed for the East Camp back to Kayce so he and wife Monica (Asbille) and their son Tate (Merrill) have a home forever, and that he can never develop or sell the Yellowstone. Rainwater agrees. The deal is made final in a ceremonial scene that sees Rainwater and Kayce handshake in blood and Mo (Brings Plenty,) singing a song in his Native language. “I will protect this for you and for all our relations,” Rainwater promises the family.
Grimes had told THR at the start of the season he was a “mess” when he read the final script. “I saved the last one [of season 5B] for as long as I could, until I couldn’t stand it anymore. Since the very beginning, Taylor told me he didn’t want me to know how it ended until we got here, because he said that it would maybe make me play things a little differently [quoting Sheridan]: ‘Probably best that you don’t know; I know how it ends.'” he said.
Reilly, meanwhile, had teased to THR that there would be a scene in the finale that would explain the entire series, a scene that didn’t involve Beth and Rip. “The scene I’m talking about that culminates the whole series for me is a scene that has nothing to do with us in it, and it’s in the last episode,” she said, presumably referencing the scene narrated by May. “I think this scene is a reason why this entire series was made.”
All eyes have been on Sheridan to see where the co-creator, writer and director would steer his flagship Western saga and TV’s No. 1 series ever since the departure of his star Kevin Costner and the announcement that season 5B would be the final season of Yellowstone. Season 5B was announced back in May 2023 as the final season. But then, over the summer, reports surfaced that fan-favorites Reilly and Hauser were in talks to continue Yellowstone with a possible sixth season.
Then just days ahead of the finale, new reports said the pair had finalized deals for their own spinoff series. The news wasn’t confirmed by Paramount Network, as it would essentially spoil that Beth and Rip would be among the living when season 5B concluded on Sunday night.
“Taylor can figure out how to absolutely continue if he wants to. But that’s just Taylor being a brilliant writer. I’m not telling you that it is continuing, it’s just that he’s smart enough as a writer to do that if that’s something that he is passionate about,” Hauser told THR at the start of season 5B. “I trust him with wherever he takes her; whether we’re leaving her where we’ve left her, or we’re going to find her somewhere else, I trust him,” added Reilly about their possible series future.
Ahead of Sunday’s finale, Reilly took to Instagram to say goodbye to the series, while in production on her next role. “Whatever the future holds this is the ending of the show we have been making for the past 7 years,” she wrote.
Yellowstone director and executive producer Christina Voros, in interviews with THR throughout this season, has said that the season 5B finale would indeed feel like a conclusion, while still leaving the door open to continue in some form. “I think the degree of secrecy that went into it, the vibe was definitely that we were protecting a conclusion,” she said. “There’s always a weight on any show that’s coming to a conclusion. You want people to love it as much as you do. … That is what’s exciting about the end of the season — the way Taylor has kind of unexpectedly drifted into a conclusion of the show that always leaves one space to wonder, what happens next?”
After the penultimate episode, when I asked her to specifically reflect on a possible 1883 callback, Voros had gracefully teased that “Taylor has taken Yellowstone and he has turned it into an intergenerational story. There are complexities that exist by virtue of doing that that I think make the world of the Dutton story so much richer and more interesting. … The context of Yellowstone, within the historical saga that Taylor has been creating, is sort of the centerpiece. But the storylines are extending from it in many different ways.” (Read our post-finale interview here.)
Those threads will continue on in the Yellowstone-verse, even if this finale was the final-final in the flagship series. Second prequel series 1923 is set to return on Feb. 23 and present-day spinoff The Madison is currently in production.
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Here’s how to stream Yellowstone. Read where all the main characters ended up along with THR‘s post-finale interviews with Christina Voros and Gil Birmingham.
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