The end of ‘Yellowstone’ and the last great mystery of the western

11/13/2024

Updated 11/14/2024 at 05:58 a.m.

“What if I prefer to play on the attack?” The words that Jamie (Wes Bentley) spoke in the first half of the last season of ‘Yellowstone’ resonate strongly, even more so when the voice and presence of its great star and greatest attraction left the Montana ranch forever. It was neither cardiac arrest nor a car accident, as Sarah Atwood (Dawn Olivieri) promised the Duttons’ wayward son. It wasn’t Kelly Reilly’s character who ended up visiting the train station either. But, end of the mystery, no sign of Kevin Costner in the return of Taylor Sheridan’s successful modern western, which premieres on SkyShowtime this Thursday the first episode of its latest batch of episodes.

The actor and director, immersed in his own epic odyssey with ‘Horizon’, got off the horse of ‘Yellowstone’ when its creator decided to divide the final installment into two parts. Not even 24 million dollars were enough to convince him for one last rodeo on the ranch he defended, so successfully, for years. There is, therefore, no possible farewell for Kevin Costner, although there will be one, in some way, for his character, John Dutton.

Of course, not everything is unknown. Costner is known – although he says he has not seen it yet – how they have resolved his departure from the series and also the details of the return of the fiction, which premiered yesterday the ninth episode of the fifth season before a total audience of 16, 4 million viewers, marking a historical record for Sheridan’s fiction.

The real mystery now is to see the series’ ability to stay at that maximum; to know if that legion of followers who watched this episode en masse did so only to know the final fate of the protagonist of ‘Yellowstone’.