‘Yellowstone’ Season 5 Premiere: Taylor Sheridan Does Kevin Costner’s John Dutton Dirty But What Else Could Be Done? [Recap & Review]

OK, Yellowstoners, we’re catching up on the “Yellowstone” season five part two premiere, which aired late Sunday night on Paramount Network (and wasn’t readily available to watch anywhere if you didn’t catch it that evening; thankfully, Prime sorted me out). Titled “Desire Is All You Need,” episode nine of this two-part season started out a little unceremoniously.

As you all should know by now, “Yellowstone” showrunner/creator writer Taylor Sheridan and Kevin Costner, who plays the Yellowstone family ranch patriarch, John Dutton, had a major falling out nearly two years ago over scheduling and Costner wanting to take time away from the series to shoot his “Horizon: An American Saga” Western (which tanked at the box office this year despite an enormous cost and substantial personal investment by Costner).

READ MORE: ‘Yellowstone’ Cast Worked With Redacted Scripts & Didn’t Know Full Storyline For Highly Secretive Season 5

So, despite what Costner might have said in the press—essentially, “I hope we can work this out”—by the time he said anything, season five, part two, was already written, and production had just begun. There was no turning back.

So, if you expected to see John Dutton/Kevin Costner in this season, you’d be very disappointed (though don’t say we didn’t warn you all year).

Given no Costner—and not even any flashback or previously shot footage, at least not yet—“Desire Is All You Need” had to get into its plot and how John Dutton died immediately.

So, after a brief introspective morning with Lloyd (Forrie J. Smith), at dawn, staring at the sky and portending some ominous augur, tragedy indeed struck.

In a panic, the fiery Beth Dutton (Kelly Reilly) races to the Montana Governor’s mansion where her father Dutton’s (appointed Governor last season) government manor is swarmed with police cars and flashing lights. In a panic, trying to find out what’s going on, knowing all this seems terribly foreboding.

With police closing off the perimeter without officially declaring it a crime scene, Beth’s alarm is further rankled until her younger brother Kayce Dutton (Luke Grimes), the current Livestock Commissioner with authority, arrives on the scene and demands to be let in to see what happens.

Support independent movie journalism to keep it alive. Sign up for The Playlist Newsletter. All the content you want and, oh, right, it’s free

It’s clear that John is dead, and when Kayce enters the room to see the crime scene, he sees his father’s body on the floor, deceased, blood stains on the wall, and a handgun nearby. John Dutton has reportedly committed suicide—the theory going that he did so in despair because his adopted son, Jamie (Wes Bentley), Montana’s attorney general, called for his father’s impeachment last season.

But John has been a fighter his entire life; this feels extremely uncharacteristically implausible, and Beth already knows the score. While Kayce is uncertain he’s capable of it, Beth is convinced that Jamie had her father killed after their falling out at the end of season three, which led to a bitter battle for power in season four.

She vows to find out, but this new “Yellowstone” premiere becomes uninspired from there, as it enters the cul-de-sac of delaying the plot by flashing back in time.

At the end of the first half of season five, Rip Wheeler (Cole Hauser) and most of the Yellowstone cowboys were sent to Texas—last season, bison contaminated the ranch, and John decided to lease some land in Texas to protect the livestock—and this flashback is essentially plotless padding, showing Walker (Ryan Bingham), Teeter (Jennifer Landon), Ryan (Ian Bohen) and the rest of the ranchers hanging out and rustling cattle (we get to see Jefferson White’s Jimmy Hurdstrom for a brief minute too at the 6666 ranch—whatever happened to that supposed spin-off series?)

Last season, the bullish billionaire firm Market Equities—which had attempted and failed to buy out several land owners in Montana to build an airport and other developments—tussled with John all season.

Sarah Atwood (Dawn Olivieri) is the ruthless Market Equity fixer who inveigled her way into Jamie’s life, manipulating him into believing his adopted father had abandoned him and never cared for him. She always pulled the strings on Jamie’s curdling resentment and stoked the flames of his bitterness.

Last season, Jamie and Beth basically threw a lot of ominous near-death threats at each other, and Jamie countered by asking Sarah about hiring “professionals.”

And well, she did, and the episode demonstrates how Sarah orchestrated John Dutton’s death by hiring an elite team of contract killers. Of course, Jamie didn’t think he explicitly gave Sarah any marching orders and is aghast that she went through with it, weeping with guilt and remorse as she tries to convince him the only way to kill a lion was for it to die in the jaws of a younger, fiercer lion. That said, earlier in the episode, Jamie received a cryptic call saying the deed had been done—in ambiguous terms, at least—so it’s unclear how involved he really was despite playing innocent with Sarah.

But in terms of the rest of the modern-day story, there is very little of it, mostly Beth and Kayce, dealing with the fallout of John’s death, dealing with his trust, and Beth again insisting that Jamie is behind it all while Kayce remains dubious without proof. But he’s a commissioner with authority in Montana, so she insists he goes rooting around for evidence, only to discover the security surveillance cameras in their father’s mansion were conveniently turned off in the middle of the night.

Back home at the ranch from Texas at the end of the episode, Beth calls Rip in despair, wailing that her daddy has been killed, and he comes to the rescue.

All signs point to a showdown between the Yellowstone ranch and Jaime, Sarah, and Market Equities, but this has been brewing since season three and isn’t all that expected.

As of the way Sheridan dispensed with Costner within the first five minutes of the show. He did him and the character dirty—but what else could he have done? Costner was out, the season had to be written and Sheridan had to make due. It was an underwhelming, unceremonious death for the great John Dutton, but in the words of the character himself, “You can’t change what’s already happened, only what you do next.” [C]