Yellowstone season 5 comes to an end, and here’s our spoiler-filled review of Life Is A Promise. Read on at your peril…
“How fast can you dig a hole?”
I don’t think, reflecting on Life Is A Promise, that Yellowstone fully worked out how to deal with the premature exit of its patriarch. It’s been a story heavily told, but from a narrative perspective, season five’s first half worked on the ‘will Kevin Costner return to play John Dutton’ question, and its final, belated six episodes on ‘what do we do now he’s gone?’
Had the narrative been designed that John Dutton wouldn’t be part of the story’s final run, then perhaps Yellowstone’s final episodes would have felt less organic. But instead, we’ve had key characters – Rip, Monica, Chief Rainwater – stood towards the sidelines until the plot’s needed them. We’ve had Jamie reduced to, admittedly hugely impactful, five or ten minute moments. And instead writer, showrunner and occasional co-star Taylor Sheridan put the weight of the show more on Kelly Reilly’s Beth than any other.
Kelly Reilly is, thankfully, brilliant. But Yellowstone, a genuine television phenomenon, has ended on a low note with Life Is A Promise.
The game was given away in the week leading up to its transmission. There’d been speculation about a Yellowstone season 6, but for contractual reasons, were that to happen then the show would still have an obligation to allow Peacock streaming rights in the US. Start again with a new show, and it can go elsewhere, and that’s just what’s happening. As such, we got an hour and a half of cleaning house. The Rip and Beth story is going to carry on, dealt with by a casual look at a laptop and a property purchase right near the start. Everyone else? Well, they got to take a farewell bow.
Kayce and Monica, then? They get the ranch they wanted, freed of the John Dutton name and the Yellowstone land. Teeter ends up with Taylor Sheridan’s character, the showrunner holding court on screen for the last scene in the bunkhouse as the episode opened. Rainwater meanwhile got what he wanted all along, courtesy of a cut-price deal that makes true a promise he once made to John Dutton, albeit not by expected tactics. Everyone else is scattering, looking for jobs, moving on. The only characters really left going forward being Rip and Beth, allowing whatever the new Yellowstone series to start with a relatively clean slate. Most of these characters we won’t ever see again, and the long lingering pan over the gorgeous landscape suggests a different location is incoming too.
The show’s entitlement to a victory lap is hard to argue with, but it did feel we got roughly 70 minutes of that, and 20 minutes of actual story. Even then, long-running threads were rushed to a conclusion. All without room for even one shot of Evil Bastard Lawyers In The Big City. When the pipeline was cut at the start of the episode, I was at least figuring we might get one pissed off phone call. But nothing.
The biggest waste of the finale was Wes Bentley’s glorious Jamie, an oily coward who’s been the standout character of late. Yet, after a full-on scrap with Beth, he ends up in the recycling bin with everyone else. I’ve spent hours watching his plan come together, with help from Sarah, and it’s all unravelled in about five minutes. It was probably the least interesting possible conclusion to his character’s story arc, but he’s not been alone with that in Yellowstone of late.
When, right at the start, we were told that John Dutton had had life-saving surgery, the inevitable endpoint always seemed to be his demise to save the land. Yellowstone certainly got there, albeit by an unexpected route.
In truth, I far more enjoying the journey to where we got to than the last 90 minutes. Taylor Sheridan is clearly a genius, but I also wonder whether he was backed into a contractual corner to deliver six more episodes he didn’t quite have the material to service. That notwithstanding, the main chapter of Yellowstone draws to an end, the baton passing to two of its characters, while the other stare mournfully at John Dutton’s coffin. At its best, this has been a terrific show. In other clothes, it likely will be again. But Life Is A Promise proved to be a modest, slightly indulgent send-off. Albeit with some gorgeous imagery, and a traditional sing-song thrown in.
Onwards…
