Will the Yellowstone Dutton ranch finally fall? Will the new sheriff make it his
business to shut down the Duttons? These questions and more from Yellowstone Season 4.
As the 4th season gets underway, we learn that Kayce survived the attack
in the previous season's finale. There are no magic solutions to this puzzle,
though — just Kayce's dogged determination and sharp-shooting skills, which helped him
stay alive and kill the men who came after him. But in the aftermath of the attack,
things change for Kayce and his family: Monica and Tate were also targets of assassination,
and though the pair survived thanks to Tate's handling of a shotgun, they were left traumatized.
Looking out for the emotional well-being of his family first, Kayce decides to relocate,
taking his wife and son off the Yellowstone-Dutton Ranch and buying a house in Pryor, Montana.
It seems to do wonders for young Tate and Monica, too, and it's not long before she tells Kayce
that they are expecting another child. After yet another mysterious wolf sighting, though,
Kayce seeks the help of his friends on the reservation, who convince him to undertake
a vision quest for answers. There, he encounters images of his dead brother Lee, flashbacks of his
time in the war, and the wolf — his spirit guide — in the form of a young Native American woman.
With what we've seen Kayce and his family go through this season and the comfort he's seemingly
found off the ranch, we wonder if he'll keep his promise to his father and return to Yellowstone.
Is this Sheridan's way of writing Kayce out of the series, or just a new story arc for him?
It was way back in Season 2 that Jamie's ex-girlfriend Christina dropped a major
bombshell on him: she is pregnant with his child. Jamie begged her to allow him to be
a part of the baby's life, but she announced that she couldn't be with him if he was still
working with the Duttons. Before leaving him again, Christina gave Jamie a fateful choice:
"Serve your father's family or serve your own. Like it or not, that choice is coming."
It wouldn't be an immediate decision for him, as Jamie does return to serve his father as a
weapon of the ranch against his enemies. But then he discovers he is not really a Dutton at all,
having been adopted as a baby. And it's when he reconnects with his birth father Garrett
Randall in Season 4 that Christina resurfaces — with their baby in tow.
But after Season 4's conclusion, there is still no indication that anyone else
in the Dutton family knows of the existence of Jamie's child,
and it's anyone's guess how they'll react when they find out. Could Beth be looking for blood,
vengefully resentful that she can't have children of her own? Could John see this
child as a possible heir to the Yellowstone, as he has made it clear he still views Jamie
as his son? We'll have to wait and see.
Speaking of Jamie, one major plotline that is still left hanging at the end of Season
4 is the fate of the governor's race. The adopted Dutton split away from his family
to pursue the office against the wishes of his father and in defiance of John
entering his own name in the race. A potential political rivalry between
father and son figures could be a fascinating story for "Yellowstone,"
but Jamie still hasn't officially filed his own candidacy, leaving the plot up in the air for now.
There were a few wrinkles before the 4th season finale, namely the existence of Jamie's birth
father, Garrett Randall. With the family now aware of the role Jamie's birth father played
in the attempt on their lives, there's a whole new can of worms opened, even if Garrett himself
doesn't survive the fourth season. But Jamie insists he "had a plan" for how to deal with
John's knowledge of his father, so we're curious what that could mean. As it stands, the race to
be Montana's next governor is just heating up and could be the main story of the 5th season.
In the season opener, Beth meets Carter while outside the hospital that her father is recovering
in, and the pair bond over their mutual family problems. Carter's father is dying, and when
he needs someone by his side to say goodbye, Beth uncharacteristically offers to be support for him.
"Are you a friend of the family?
I guess I am now."
After a little tough love from Beth and Rip, Carter winds up working at Yellowstone as
a ranch hand and living with Beth and Rip in a quasi-family unit. Since we learned in Season 3
that Beth is unable to be a mother, we've pondered what that might mean for her future on the ranch,
unable to be a part of her family's continuing legacy. But since the introduction of the young
Carter, it has increasingly felt like she might just have a crack at parenthood yet.
From Carter's introduction, it seemed that he might be the next Rip Wheeler:
a troubled, angry orphaned boy brought to the ranch through a compassionate Dutton and raised
to be a cowboy. But in the finale, Beth makes it clear she wants no part of being a mother,
though it's hard to deny that's exactly what's happening. Still, the question remains:
What will Carter become? Will he be the next surrogate Dutton like Rip, a future wrangler
and Yellowstone enforcer? Or with Kayce and his family off the ranch — perhaps for good — could
Carter stand to become the next generation of the Dutton family with Tate out of the picture?
We've seen John getting closer to Carter in the same way he was bonding with Tate
earlier in the series, so there's no telling which way this one could go.
For four long years on "Yellowstone,"
we've watched Beth Dutton's hatred for her brother Jamie percolate,
a few times boiling over into overt aggression.
In the 4th season's final episode, the feud between the siblings reached what
may be its climax, with Beth discovering that it was Jamie's birth father, Garrett Randall,
who ordered the assassination attempts on the Duttons. Beth gives Jamie two choices — neither
of which are good — before Jamie chooses a third option. At the end of the episode,
we see Jamie murder Randall, openly weeping for what he had to do to save his future.
Just when he thought he was in the clear,
Beth appears while Jamie dumps the body into the canyon.
"You should have picked options one or two.
Three's gonna be worse, but you're f—ing mine now."
But does this threat really carry the weight she seems to think it does? Her own husband, Rip
Wheeler, has buried more than one murder at the bottom of the same cliff, and revealing Jamie's
involvement with Randall could threaten to expose more than one family secret, including Rip's part
in the cover-up of a reporter Jamie killed. Could this threat come back to haunt her next season?
And moreover, will the death of Garrett Randall have greater consequences that we don't yet see?
There are still many questions surrounding Randall that need answering, including what he's been up
to behind Jamie's back. He seemed to be expecting his death just before it came, so it may also be
possible he had a posthumous backup plan ready, having promised to go after the Duttons again.
A divisive new foil for the Dutton family,
Summer Higgins is an environmental activist added to the cast this season.
Summer comes to town under the auspices of ending animal cruelty and saving Montana's rich untamed
lands from the change that industrialists are attempting to bring to the region.
Along the way, she becomes a pawn of Beth Dutton's desire to sabotage Market Equities' land deal
and winds up facing life in prison because of Beth's vicious machinations.
Thankfully, John feels it isn't right for Beth to
do what she did and attempts to sway the judge to let Summer off the hook.
"It's the right thing to do."
"Right barely factors into it anymore, John."
It's touch and go, but in the end, Summer gets a much-reduced sentence,
and it's said that she'll likely be freed from her jail cell within a year. While
this may seem like the end of her story on "Yellowstone," we can't help but wonder if
there's more of a role for her to play. She's still a potentially powerful ally as leader of
an environmentalist movement, and she and John seem to share some of the same goals.
If she's only expected to do eight months behind bars, we may not have seen the last of her.
At the beginning of the season, Jimmy finds himself seriously injured, not by the attack
on the ranch, but by a misguided attempt to rodeo again, breaking his promise to John Dutton. But
he's still a member of the family, and John isn't ready to give up on Jimmy altogether, so
he orders the young wanna-be cowboy off to Texas to a notorious ranch called the "6666" — a place
that works their men harder than any other. If the 6666 can't turn Jimmy into a cowboy, nobody can.
Jimmy does indeed learn to cowboy and even meets Emily, who becomes his fiancée in a rapid-fire
romance. When Jimmy returns to Yellowstone, he promises to stay until his debt to the ranch
is repaid, but John graciously lets him leave with Emily and start a new life at the 6666.
What's next for him? We likely won't get answers in the next season of "Yellowstone" and will
instead see Jimmy's story continue in the new spin-off series, "6666."
In one of the season's many shocking moments, John and Rip meet Sheriff Haskell at a roadside diner,
only to discover the restaurant is in the middle of being held up by a group of lowlifes.
Rip and John are able to turn the tables, but not before the thugs fatally wound Haskell.
In the penultimate episode of the season, we meet Haskell's replacement, Commander Ramsey. John
is clearly rattled when Ramsey is announced as Haskell's interim replacement, and it’s suggested
that John is unsure if Ramsey can be trusted. Not because he's corrupt, but because he might not be.
"Things will be different with me in charge."
"New rules, huh?"
"Still the old rules, but now they'll be enforced."
We only get a brief look at Ramsey in his new role as sheriff,
but he's already made it clear he's going to do things differently.
Ramsey seems acutely aware of Haskell's corruption, setting him up to be a major
thorn in the Duttons' side as the series moves into its 5th season. But the question remains:
Will Sheriff Ramsey be a momentary roadblock, or will he stick around to cause trouble?
We're not suggesting for a moment that Season 5 of "Yellowstone" will be the last,
but we could be entering a new stage of the series and wonder if we might be seeing the last days of
the Yellowstone-Dutton Ranch. Surrounded by enemies on all sides, there seems to be no
way out for John and his family, who have all but acknowledged their days could be numbered.
With one of the country's biggest firms at their back in Market Equities — whose principal owner
now has a personal reason to go after their land after Beth crossed her — and allies dropping left
and right, it feels like the noose is finally closing around the Duttons. Could the series'
fifth year see them lose their ranch and fight to get it back? It might seem like a far-fetched
notion for a series that's built around a family willing to die before they lose their land,
but where "Yellowstone" is concerned, there seem to be no limits to the stories that lay ahead.
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