Ahead of Its Finale, Taylor Sheridan Delivers a Quintessential 'Yellowstone' Episode

Spoilers ahead

Only two episodes remain of Yellowstone, and the plot has been accelerating since its return and John Dutton’s death. Credit to Taylor Sheridan for pausing just long enough as the series rounds the corner to do what it does best: wax poetic about the nature of ranching. Sheridan also takes a page from a presumed mentor, Kurt Sutter, by killing off a beloved character purely to break our hearts.

In a scene emblematic of the random tragedies ranchers endure, a wild horse nearly trampled Carter to death. When Colby intervened to save him, he was killed instead. It wasn’t violent. It wasn’t dramatic. He died doing the job, as so many in this industry do.

“I’m just saying he didn’t suffer,” Colby’s best friend, Ryan, tells Colby’s girlfriend, Teeter.

“Suffering’s the job. I just wish he would’ve suffered a little longer so I could say goodbye,” Teeter replies. That brand of cowpoke wisdom is where Sheridan shines, when he can get off his high horse long enough to channel his inner Thomas Savage. This is the good stuff, the essence of Dad TV: wild horses, hard-living ranch hands, and lives lost in service of a dying industry. RIP Colby.

Still, fans of the Kurt Sutter school of writing likely saw it coming from the opening scene, when Colby confessed his love for Teeter for the first time. Sutter always liked to put a real shine on a character before ripping him away from us (RIP Opie).

This is also where Rip (Cole Hauser) excels — not as the ranch fixer but as a man quietly grieving a loss he feels partially responsible for, even though he knows it’s just the nature of the job. “What can I do to help?” Beth asks him.

“All I need is time and you, Beth,” he replies. “You know, if I started feeling guilt for all the mistakes I’d made, then guilt is all I’d feel.”

Sheridan’s sentimentality, often diluted by his moralizing, works best in the mouths of Yellowstone’s ranchers. Take Jimmy, for instance. He refuses to take a week off to mourn John Dutton’s death because, as a cowboy, that’s not what you do. “Best thing you can do, Jimmy, is just to outrun [the pain],” Sheridan writes for his own character. Hard living and repression — that’s the stuff.

That’s the bulk of the episode: this random death, which might otherwise feel frustrating as it takes time from the show’s need to wrap up before the finale. But it also feels quintessentially Yellowstone. This is why people love the show, not the drama around John Dutton’s death. Sheridan can be a hack sometimes, but he’s nailed a couple of things: Hell or High Water and the half of Yellowstone that captures ranchers doing their jobs.

Meanwhile, Jamie’s grief over Sarah Atwood’s death evaporates when detectives want to search her luggage, which is at his house. After confronting the cops and sending them away, he destroys any evidence Sarah might have had that could tie her to John Dutton’s death or establish a motive.

Elsewhere, while Beth insists on being the one to “take care of” Jamie—a plotline surely headed for the finale—Kayce confronts the man who executed the contract to kill John Dutton. Kayce doesn’t kill him, though. Instead, he holds a gun to the man’s young daughter’s head and warns him: “I should kill you in front of her for what you did to my father, but I’m not gonna trade my family for yours. You don’t want this fight. You can’t win it.”

The message lands. As Kayce later explains to Mo Brings Plenty, he “counted coup,” an Indigenous term meaning to force an opponent into admitting defeat without killing them—fittingly, the inspiration for the episode’s title.