1923the newest Yellowstone prequel, picks up 40 years after the events 1883. And although the Dutton family is faring considerably better since we left it on the Oregon Trail, life is still a grueling, dusty, hard-won struggle.
In a moment, we’d like to know what you think of the premiere. But first, let’s recap the highlights.
The hour opens with a frightened man running from someone or something. A shot at him knocks him to the ground, and we soon see who fired it; One woman we get to know later is Kara Dutton (played by The QueenHelen Mirren). He begs her to wait, saying that he will never enter heaven if he kills Shim. “What do you know about heaven?” He is surprised and goes to finish her off, but realizes too late that he needs to reload. While he does, he tries to shoot his, but he is faster. He kills her, screams to the sky, then leaves.
“Violence has always haunted this family,” the voiceover tells us, and if you watched 1883, you’ll recognize the speaker as Elsa (aka Isabel May), who may have entered from the Great Beyond. Violence followed the Duttons from Europe to America, he says, “and where it doesn’t follow, we hunt it. That’s what we’re looking for.”
As he speaks, the action jumps into several seemingly unrelated scenes. In Africa we see a young man in khaki standing his ground as a lion rushes at him; he shoots the giant cat just as it pounces on him, much to the delight of the man’s two companions who were helping him track the animal. Then we see Jacob Dutton (Star Wars’ Harrison Ford) on horseback, along with several other men also on horseback, survey a field full of dead sheep, many of them covered in flies. It’s probably important to note that grasshoppers also seem to be a problem; Jacob, his friends and their horses have bugs and seem too tired to do anything about them.
WHAT HAPPENED TO JAMES, MARGARET AND CO.? |: Elsa gives us an update on the Dutton family 1883, and — Spoiler Alert — it’s not pretty. “My father had three children. Only one will live to see his own children grow up,” he says. “Only one can carry the fate of this family through the Depression and the rest of the 20th century hell that was thrown at them.”
We know since 1883it was the end that he was the first of the children to go. He had a brother, John, who was a small boy when the family settled in Montana. Regular Yellowstone viewers will recall that Spencer, James and Margaret’s third child, was born after the events of the prequel and first appeared in a Season 4 flashback.
“By the Death of My Father” — which we also saw Yellowstone “My mother wrote to her brother, begging him to bring his family to this wild land and save her,” Elsa continues. “A year later, he came and found my mother frozen in an avalanche and two boys half-starved and barely able to speak. He raised them as his own and took my father’s dream and turned it into an empire. Then the empire collapsed.” Well, now we know what happened to Margaret. It’s weird that I’m sad.
sheep VS. COWS |: Jacob and the men from the fields travel into town, passing cars and wagons along the way. They make a loud banter for the Montana gang that chases them as they enter a local soda shop. Jacob sits next to the sheriff (ScorpionRobert Patrick) and orders a Coke while they discuss how the sheep run their flock across his land. He calls the sheep “thugs who worry about the consequences of breaking the rules,” and he doesn’t seem any more sympathetic when both he (as commissioner of the Montana Cattlemen’s Association) and the sheriff are co-chairs. hearings related to high tensions over livestock in the city.
A sheepherder named Banner Creighton (Game of ThronesJerome Flynn) is really angry about the dead sheep they apparently slaughtered as things begin. When Jacob points out that no one knows who killed the animals, Banner (who is originally from Scotland) accuses a group of Irish farmers of doing it, and a fight ensues.
Sheriff McDowell stops the fisticuffs by firing his gun in the air and yelling for everyone to cool it. It soon becomes clear. tenants). “Until it rains, there will be no grazing in the valley,” Jacob pronounces, advising Banner and his ilk to graze their sheep in the mountains and/or sell their stock if they are plentiful. “Who do you sell them to?” the Scot scoffs, but Jacob is adamant, saying they must all work together or they’ll return to Britain in tatters. And when a ruthless Banner shouts that the Duttons own a ton of land, Jacob’s anger flares. “I have what my family fought for. You also want to fight for me for this.” he spits. “I didn’t think so. If you wanted more land, you should have rented more.” The hut then strikes, ending the match.
Outside, Creighton confronts Dutton. Grasshoppers might graze the grass, but bears will eat the sheep if they graze in the mountains. The exchange almost blows up, but Jake holds the gun to the sheep’s neck and then the sheriff breaks it up. Long story short? All the herds need grass, and at a regular men’s meeting in Stetson, the Montana Cattlemen’s Association agrees to round up everyone’s herds, move them to higher elevations, and then help the cowboys keep predators at bay.
Much later, under the cover of night, we see Banner and his sheep cut through a barbed wire fence to allow their flock to cross onto someone’s private property and graze.
NO SIDE! |: Let’s put a pin in that situation and go to a Catholic school located in an isolated part of the plain. It’s an all-girls school and all the students are Native American, but the nuns in charge are all white. One of the students flippantly responds when her teacher asks what soap is made of, and what begins with a girl dominating her knees with a ruler quickly escalates after the girl curses the nun with her tongue; the girl jumps on the nun and starts beating her and chaos breaks out.
Soon, both are bloodied and bruised and standing before the high priest, Father Reno (SupernaturalSebastian Roche). When he assumes what happened, he breaks a nun’s hands, forcing her to recite a Bible verse; The student is so traumatized to witness this, she screams for him to stop. “You beat the kid, but he begs for mercy for you,” he says with amusement. “Even though he must be the teacher.” But before you start thinking that maybe there’s justice in this place, he warns her that her brawl will make others do what they want. Then he creepily touches her face, props her up against the bookshelves, and warns her:
After a harrowing bathing scene in which the nuns give step-by-step instructions to a roomful of naked students to wash, battered girl Teonna (newcomer Amina Nieves) and her boyfriend whisper to each other from their beds. Teonna’s friend says that she has one year left in school and then they can leave. Teonna notes that everyone they know who is left has never been heard from again, and she fears the worst. He’s very serious as he whispers that they should go out.
THE WEDDING HAS TO WAIT! |: Back to the Duttons. Kara walks out of the family home to join a small group of people watching the ride on a bucking horse. “Why men enjoy danger so much, I will never understand,” he muses. His great cousin Jack (Chilling adventures SabrinaDarren Mann) is the young Bronch man, and we learn that he’s getting married to the rancher’s daughter in a week. He is also the son of Elsa’s brother, John Sr. Later that night, Jacob and the men arrive late from town. “Let the boss break it first, and then we’ll see what happens,” Jake advises.
The boss, of course, is Kara, who greets him as he slides into bed. He is horrified to hear of the delay, but says he will talk to the bride’s mother and sort things out. “It’s a wedding for a woman, Jake. If it were men, we’d spit on our hands and spit on it, and then you’d bend me over the first thing you could find that would hold our weight,” she quips. “Not far from how it happened,” he snarls, making her laugh.
The next day, Jack breaks the news to his wife-to-be, Elizabeth (newcomer Michelle Randolph), who doesn’t take it well. So Kara tries to smooth things over by gently informing the younger woman (who went to school in the East and was therefore somewhat isolated from the rough life of the ranch) that it’s like this. “You have to want more. than the boy. You must also desire life.’ Elizabeth is definitely heartbroken, but she’s also very much in love with Jack. “I don’t know life, but I will learn,” he promises. So they push back the wedding date by two weeks, and Elizabeth asks Kara to take her to Jack, who she’s having a fancy makeover with.
The cattle drive, involving Jacob, Jack, and a group of other ranch men, begins the next day. Jack rides forward and finds the sheep grazing where the herds go, and then a man shoots him.
AROUND |: Return to Africa. A train pulls into a station in Nairobi, Kenya, and the hunter (WestworldBrandon Sklenar), who we saw at the top of the show, is asleep in his seat. He dreams of being on the battlefield in the First World War, shooting at the enemy, but he cannot fall back when necessary because his leg is broken. An enemy soldier gets too close, so the hunter hits him with his helmet. Another fighter suddenly comes at him with a gun… and just then the hunter wakes up to realize he’s pulled a gun on the train conductor who was trying to let him know they’ve arrived. The hunter apologizes and admonishes the conductor for his fear, explaining: “I don’t wake up well.” The man is a little shocked, but sneers. “No sir, I’d say you don’t.”
The hunter disembarks the boat and turns up at a luxury safari camp. He’s there to hunt the leopard that torments rich white people who pay for vacations in the great outdoors. as if the cat had already attacked the person. “Once they get a taste of man, man is all they want to eat,” he observes, and avoids any animal bait because his assistants will serve as bait. (This is the first time his assistants have heard of this plan.)
When the camp director refers to the hunter as “Dutton,” we get a hint of his identity. Later, when Kara writes a letter to her missing nephew, we learn that he is John’s brother, Spencer. “Why don’t you come home to us?” she wonders through the voice. “We can’t help but think that your absence is a punishment, that somehow we are the reason why you won’t come back. It’s selfish, I guess. War changes men, I know. I can only assume that you are searching for a part of yourself that you have lost, and I can only pray that you find it and come back to us.”
Meanwhile, Spencer is busy hitting on a rich, blonde British safari visitor whose charms she doesn’t seem to care much for. And it’s fitting, seeing as how he becomes leopard food when he leaves his tent to pee that evening. The cat drags her up a tree to eat, and when Spencer shoots the animal, the blonde falls to the ground with a sickening thud, her neck clearly broken. But that’s when Spencer’s assistants realize they are two leopards stalking the camp. And as they yell at him so much, something (like a cat?) rushes after Dutton. He turns and the scene fades to black.
Now it’s your turn. Rate the premiere in the poll below, then write your thoughts on the new series in the comments.
Comments