1923 Series-Finale Recap: Meet Me in Bozeman

The final season of 1923 reeked of death. Every individual character reeked of death, even the youngest ones — the ones who appeared too vibrant to ever die at all when we first met them. By the end of “A Dream and a Memory,” though, they are all dead or widowed, motherless or fatherless or both. Setting aside the series’ heaven-set, Titanic-indebted coda, the final image we get of the Yellowstone is this: A childless 80-year old man, his body equal parts skin and scars, sits with his drolly acerbic wife on the freezing cold front porch, clutching their motherless grandnephew — a pipsqueak of a baby born three months too soon.

This is not the picture of a ranch clawed back from the brink of extinction. There’s no vitality in this valley. Just like Lizzie said so many episodes ago — on the last occasion she swore she was leaving Montana for good — “It’s surviving.” And that was before Lizzie’s husband was murdered by a double agent. Before baby John’s mother died from necrosis. An entire generation, dead or grieving, is missing from 1923’s dismal final portrait. This isn’t surviving. It’s wasting away.

No one is handed a happy ending in the series finale, but Teonna Rainwater at least gets a fresh start. Marshal Mamie Fossett & Co. come across the bullet-riddled bodies of Kent and Pete, and Two Spears immediately deduces what transpired — that Kent killed Pete before Father Renaud turned on Kent. They follow the smoke of Teonna’s smoldering fire to find the bodies of Renaud and Runs His Horse. Again, Two Spears deduces the facts — that the priest must have killed the girl’s father before the girl killed the priest in self-defense. Mamie announces that she’s content to let Teonna go free just as Teonna, spooked and scared, shoots at the party from a hiding spot beyond the ridge.

The cinematography of the ensuing horse chase is breathtaking — one of the few moments in which 1923’s two-hour finale feels like a real blockbuster and not simply two episodes hiding behind one thumbnail on the Paramount+ app. It ends with Teonna killing Marshal Clint and being hauled to Amarillo in rope cuffs. Mamie insists the courts will deliver justice, but Teonna knows better than to believe in this country’s institutions. She and her family were forced onto an American reservation. America sanctioned the school where she was abused and tormented. And America empowered the monster that pursued her from North Dakota to here, a few hours shy of Mexico, where she almost got free from American institutions for good.

What Teonna couldn’t yet understand is that America’s cruelty is so often matched by its incompetence. Though she 100 percent killed the people she’s accused of killing — plus a couple more — she goes free because the witnesses, some of whom she herself killed, are dead. The prosecutor is too lazy to collect new testimony. He files a motion to dismiss the case he’s in the midst of trying, which doesn’t feel like it should be possible, though New Yorkers are especially aware that it definitely is. Freed by a judge eager to clear his docket, Teonna wonders aloud what to do next. She’s a 16-year-old Indian girl in a world that hates Indians and girls. Two Spears gives her a horse and a rifle and some advice: “Maybe it’s time to find a new [home].” He suggests California, where there are more fruit trees and fewer white people.

On the one hand, Two Spears might be making a throwaway comment. On the other hand, detective work is one pleasure of receiving the chapters of Taylor Sheridan’s sprawling epic in reverse. Perhaps this is the showrunner seeding Thomas Rainwater’s eventual Yellowstone biography — how the one-day Chief of the Confederated Tribes of Broken Rock could be a descendant of Teonna’s and grow up not knowing it. The last time we see Teonna she’s riding west all alone, but at least she’s riding.

The remainder of the episode is dedicated to the war for the Yellowstone — the limping leviathan that will define and/or destroy every last Dutton life. Zane is in charge at the ranch, except not really because Aunt Cara will always be master of the house. For example, Zane begs her to go inside, where it’s less easy to get shot. Cara ignores him, which he finds charming. “They don’t make women like you anymore,” says Zane. Of course, Taylor Sheridan only makes Aunt Caras, and the comment is mere set-up for her pithy rejoinder: “Yes, they do. It’s the men they make different.” It’s a terrific line, but not one worth dying for. Give poor Zane a break and go inside.

Meanwhile, Jacob and the sheriff camp out at Livingston Station for Spencer’s train, watching as Banner’s men filter into the station. The double-agent Clive arouses Jake’s suspicion immediately, and Sheriff McDowell vouches for him despite being unable to distinguish an Irish accent from a Scottish one. This wouldn’t be a huge deal if this particular land war weren’t being fought across these exact lines. Seriously, someone take this man’s badge right now. NB: Herein I will refer to the sheepherders, miners, and sundry mercenaries previously referred to as Banner’s men as “Whitfield’s men” given Banner’s lame eleventh-hour defection. The series finale is an inconveniently tardy moment to spawn a conscience, though I suppose Banner, like the rest of us, believed he was living through an eight-episode arc.

After witnessing an abducted sex worker in Whitfield’s stocks and leaving her there in last week’s episode, Banner lives through the dark night of his soul to realize he’s on the wrong side. Dutton takes to survive; Whitfield takes because he relishes suffering. Banner cannot stop Whitfield, nor does he lift a finger to try, but he would like to run away from the immoral decisions he’s made since coming into Mr. Monopoly’s thrall. Maybe he could try his hand at trawling fish in Portland. Banner tells his wife to pack her bags, but we all know it’s too late to head (even farther) west.

At Livingston Station, Banner runs into Jacob, whom he knows will be there. Jake agrees to allow Ellie and their son onto the train when it passes through, but not Banner, who makes one final stab at warning Jacob off the war that’s already begun. Even if you beat Whitfield, there will be more Whitfields to follow, Banner surmises. “You get to keep your land for a generation or two.” May we all die as prophetically as a Sheridan character.

The long-delayed Battle of Livingston Station is once more delayed by a motor car that’s caught fire near the tracks. Alexandra has spent the last day sharing a cab with Hillary’s dead body. Eventually, she’s reduced to grave-robbing. From Hillary, she takes a slender pair of velvet gloves with little hope of blunting the Montana cold. She runs out to Paul’s body and steals his lighter. She builds a small fire on the floorboards of the motorcar, feeding it scraps of notebook paper to keep warm. When the notebook paper runs out, she starts feeding it Spencer’s letters. She calls to mind Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Match Girl except, of course, she’s freezing to death on account of her own stupid romantic whim and not poverty.

Alex cleverly feeds the fire what’s left of Paul’s whisky to catch the conductor’s eye, but the train doesn’t stop for her. Where are we? Mussolini’s Italy? Spencer, bound for the ranch on the same train, spots his wife from the window and jumps off the moving locomotive to embrace her. It’s melodramatic and impossible and, guess what, my pathetic heart absolutely SOARED for it because you can take any actual romance out of 1923 but you can’t make me a sensible viewer. A “pickle,” Alexandra calls their new predicament — the same word Spencer used to describe the night they spent in a tree evading a lion pride. In the absence of much shared history, a lexical callback will have to do.

When they get on the train (psych! — it does stop), a doctor records Alex’s body temperature at less than 95 degrees, which would terrify her if she had any appreciation for Farenheit. They immediately start to warm her with wet towels, but Alex’s feet and fingers are black from cold. And the baby? The doctor remarks that women’s bodies are miracles. “If there’s a way to protect the child, your body will find it.” The subtext is so obvious that it can hardly be called subtext and yet my idiotic, besotted heart continued to thump in the direction of a happy ending. This couple survived an elephant attack and a capsizing and a duel with a jealous ex, but nothing survives the grind of the Yellowstone.

Now, there are many places where one could stop to interrogate our characters’ hasty choices, but in the spirit of enjoying myself, I mostly chose to ignore the moments that chafed for me. As an example: If Banner knows that Livingston Station is about to be the site of a major shootout between his enemies and the men he’s betraying, why not drive 25 miles to catch a train out of peaceful Bozeman? But I cannot stop myself from asking: If the conductor could radio the dispatcher to send an ambulance to Bozeman for Alexandra, then why couldn’t McDowell radio the conductor to inform Spencer not to alight at Livingston Station, thereby obviating a gunfight in a crowded public space? Am I missing something? (I don’t think I’m actually missing something — I’m just being polite to our host because Sheridan’s throwing us a decent party.)

The evitable shootout goes how shootouts tend to on TV: The bad guys die more than the good guys despite outnumbering them. McDowell kills Banner, who dies saving Jacob from that snake Clive, whom McDowell hired. It’s a good death. A hero’s death if you forget that Banner is the reason Clive is shooting Jacob in the first place. I thought this melee would be the moment to make sense of Spencer swapping his lion’s tooth for a pocket knife with a kid on the train, but Spencer doesn’t do close combat. He doesn’t have scrapes. Spencer does total annihilation of his enemies.

When the train departs Livingston for Bozeman, Banner’s family are aboard, assisted by Spencer no less. And so is Jacob, weeping blood from old bullet holes. (Gross.) Alex, in the early stages of labor at only six months pregnant, releases her husband to go save the ranch instead of joining her at the hospital. “I’ll meet you in Bozeman,” Spencer tells her. Historically, this couple keeps their wild promises to each other, but Elsa Dutton immediately drops in to spare us any hope. The brief reunion was “enough” for Alex, Elsa insists, and yet I still held on because shut up, Elsa, WTF do you know about it, you undead weirdo? Stop stalking your own family.

Now, as Livingston was becoming crowded with Whitfield’s men over the course of the long afternoon, additional mercenaries kept arriving at the Yellowstone, where Zane and Aunt Cara — armed with an elk rifle — manage to fend off an impossible number of men. Even Lizzie, who mostly hides under a table with her gun for two hours, gets some good kills. Still, the shootout goes how shootouts tend to on TV: No one is that great at shooting, so there are tons of bullets flying and only a few hits. Until Spencer shows up after nightfall to alter the math, that is. This guy doesn’t miss. I’m pretty sure the first bullet he fires from his elephant rifle kills two people at once, and at that rate, it takes about two minutes to wipe out Whitfield’s army.

At the hospital, a story line that I didn’t think could get more infuriating becomes scream-at-your TV dumb. The doctors want to abort Alex’s pregnancy — which is now an active labor scenario, so I’m fairly sure this isn’t science — in order that they might amputate her necrotic limbs and save her life. Alex, though, would prefer to die giving birth to a premature child doctors tell her will not survive the day. In the world of Yellowstone, intuition has repeatedly been deemed more reliable than medical advice, and so you each had to watch Alex birth this small, helpless human being. (I did not have to watch it, because I covered my eyes with my hands.)

But then, even after the baby is safely delivered, Alex refuses the surgery in the hopes of spending an hour with him! It’s dreadful, and I cried a little anyway, in spite of hating the inane sacrificial model of motherhood that was being celebrated. Why not try saving both lives? Let Jacob hold the baby while a doctor stops Alex’s infected body from decomposing. If she really believes her miracle son can survive, then this hour isn’t special enough to die for. “A mother who would choose herself over her child is no mother at all,” Alex says. No, a dead person is no mother at all, because they are dead. Moreover, she isn’t dying to save her baby. She’s dying to prove that she would be willing to die if the situation required it, which it doesn’t!

I eventually relinquished a scintilla of my rage only because Alex is right about one thing: It’s hard to run a ranch without hands or feet, and if that’s not the life she wants, then maybe she shouldn’t have to live it. Still, maybe deal with the problem of having one hand tomorrow? Be alive to have the problem in the first place. By the time Spencer arrives at the hospital, the decision is irrevocable. His son, called John, is swaddled in Alex’s arms, which are also swaddled. The lesson here is clear: Never choose a life of love and adventure. The three of them spend the night in the cramped hospital bed — the only time they’ll ever have as a family. In the morning, Spencer immediately calls for Aunt Cara. Instead of disabusing her bereaved nephew of the feeling that he doesn’t know how to look after his own son, she eagerly accepts the baby from him. Babies are women’s work.

And Spencer has a man’s job to finish. He marches into the Whitfield mansion and frees the sex worker Mabel. (Finally, someone frees Mabel!) He kills Lindy (why not) and Whitfield (hell yeah), drawing a line under the most recent battle for the Yellowstone. He’s got the family ranch, and all it cost him was his family. Spencer’s wife is gone. Spencer’s nephew is gone. Without any mention of the Dutton baby she’s carrying, Spencer’s niece-in-law, Lizzie, decides to head back to her family in Boston. At least she won’t have to suffer through any more chats with Aunt Cara, who doesn’t just tell Lizzie it’s okay to move on from her dead husband, but insists that she will. It’s old ladies like Aunt Cara who will remember Jack best. Grief-stricken Lizzie listens silently, though I think we would all forgive her if she finally took the opportunity to tell the doyenne of Paradise Valley to go to hell.

That’s that. Elsa Dutton returns one final time to tell us that Spencer will never remarry, though he will have another son with a widow, which sounds foreboding and yet I hardly know what to make of it. When Spencer dies, after another 45 years on this earth without his love, he’ll find her again in an afterlife of their own imaginations, which looks a lot like the last evening they spent together on the SS Majestic. They’re in love and dancing again, because I guess Aunt Cara is wrong sometimes. The young don’t have to move on. They can let their undying love raze a whole life’s happiness. The second and final season of 1923 ends as it began: well-lit and miserable.

And yet, the series continued to compel throughout its run. If not on its own terms, then for what it could teach us about the Yellowstone in the age of John Dutton III. For example, before Spencer guns down Whitfield in his dressing robe, Jacob grumbles that the world of private investment will learn not to knock on the ranch’s door again, at least not for a generation or two. “I want them teaching about how you died in school books,” Jacob tells Whitfield — a confounding line in itself given Spencer’s just told a young boy on the train not to believe what his teachers tell him. Regardless, maybe Whitfield’s violent death does echo around Bozeman for decades. And perhaps this explains why it will take another hundred years for the land developer Dan Jenkins to dare take on the Duttons.

There’s also the matter of obsessively plotting the Dutton family tree. How to connect the dots between 1883 and Yellowstone has been a preoccupation of 1923 fans, myself included. Disappointingly, John Dutton III’s parentage is still muddled (I think). It’s tempting to assume that Spencer and Alexandra’s baby is John III’s dad, because we know John III is a rancher of formidable stock and because his name is John and because the timing all works out, roughly speaking. But how would we jump from John I to John III in a single generation? Conundrum. Also, John III once told Jimmy that his grandfather lost a leg. If Spencer is his grandad, then perhaps this is the leg of John’s maternal grandfather because 1) I can’t imagine Spencer legless and 2) it seems a particularly cruel outcome for a man whose wife died after refusing a life-saving amputation. How many times will our great and terrible God come for one family’s limbs?

Alternatively, maybe John III is Jack’s grandson. It would better explain the jump in Roman numerals — Jack could have been a John Jr. in disguise all this time. Imagine that Lizzie has Jack’s son in Boston and comes back because she can’t bear to raise him so far from the memory of his cowboy father (take that, Cara). Or maybe circumstances conspire to force Lizzie to send her own little John Dutton back, to be raised by Uncle Spencer and fall in love with the same forsaken hollow that stole her only love. This lineage also more tidily explains that John Dutton III is referred to as a “fifth-generation rancher.” If he was Spencer’s grandson, I’m pretty sure he’d only be a fourth-generation rancher. Then again, perhaps the fifth generation comes from John III’s mother’s side, which we know almost nothing about! That could be the plot of the newly announced spin-off 1944. Star-crossed lovers, each the child of warring ranchers in fair Paradise, where we lay our scene. At the rate Paramount is agreeing to pump out spin-offs, Sheridan’s likely to regret demarcating as much as he has. Every generation he can squeeze between JD3 and 1883’s Tim McGraw is more cash in his saddlebag.

Personally, I’m not sure I’ll be tuning in for the next installment. On Yellowstone, John Dutton starts out a hero. He’s by no means a good guy, but the men who want his land — finance dudes — and what they want it for — development — are way worse. To root against John is to root against a thoroughly American way of life. But the more I learn about the family’s bloody history via the spin-offs, the more I wish someone would throw open the cowpens and bulldoze the ranch to the ground. Spare these men and women from a way of life that refuses to die or live, but kills the Duttons who love it one way or another. No one wants to lose the family ranch, but the farther this epic sprawls across the 20th century, the more it seems that saving the Yellowstone is the real tragedy.