SPOILER ALERT: This article includes details of Yellowstone‘s Season 5 episode “Three Fifty-Three.”
Sunday night’s Yellowstone episode belonged to Kayce Dutton (Luke Grimes), the youngest son of patriarch John (Kevin Costner, who was unceremoniously written off the show after disputes with co-creator and showrunner Taylor Sheridan). There is a shocker of a death at the conclusion of tonight’s episode, as Sarah Atwood (Dawn Olivieri) is gunned down. She has been the lover of Jamie Dutton (Wes Bentley), the Montana AG and dark sheep adopted son of the Dutton clan. After coming to Texas at the behest of the Dutton clan’s arch enemy Market Equities, she seduced Jamie into embracing her suggestion that the best way to get John Dutton’s Montana ranch is to have him killed and make it look like an accident.
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While Olivieri had a relatively brief run as the femme fatale, Sheridan fans might remember her from her turn as Faith Hill’s matronly sister from 1883. She blazed such a path on Yellowstone, it seems sure that Sheridan will find another way to plug her into one of his many series.
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Back to Kayce. We are shown exactly how three mercenaries subdued John Dutton while he slept in the governor’s mansion, shot him with drugs and staged the suicide. Armed with a badge from his position as livestock commissioner, and with plenty of well-placed sources who owe him favors, Kayce presses the coroner who labeled Dutton’s death a clear-cut suicide. The coroner is brusque, telling him they didn’t do a full autopsy out of respect for the family, in case they wanted a viewing. “I’m more concerned with why he’s being buried,” says Kayce. Every theory he had proves true, as signs show John Dutton was restrained before being shot.
Kayce presses to have the results made public immediately, and that stirs up a hornet’s nest, just the way he hoped it would. Soon, the death broker that Sarah hired to arrange the murder is on the phone, and you know where this is going. Kayce confronts Jamie in his office, and after Bentley’s character delivers an emotional promise to Kayce that he would never be involved in the murder of their father, Kayce seems unconvinced, telling the AG he hopes what he’s saying is true, “for your sake and mine.”
While keeping the ranch now seems a pipe dream because of a huge tax burden, Chief Thomas Rainwater (Gil Birmingham) and his right-hand man Mo (Mo Brings Plenty) come to the ranch to pay their respects and pledge their support to Kayce and Beth (Kelly Reilly). The latter seems to have ideas in how to involve Rainwater and his tribe’s clout as a possible way to keep the land away from the condo development crowd, which Beth and Thomas agree is their common goal.
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The temporary governor is sworn in, and makes clear he will go along with Jamie’s plan to unload the ranch. By the time the guv addresses the legislature he would back Jamie’s plan to essentially split up the Dutton ranch — delivering the deal to his girlfriend’s employer and paving a short road to a gubernatorial run — Kayce has found enough shady business to have the governor’s death changed from a suicide to a possible murder. The new governor tables Jamie’s plans — Jamie’s story that trying to preserve some of the Dutton family ranch has become a sinking ship. The new governor then recuses the late governor’s son from being involved in the land transfer, at all. Checkmate.
While Sarah is lunching with her Market Equities partner and saying the ranch will be theirs and development can begin within months, she gleans a news bulletin on the TV behind the bar and John Dutton’s death has gone from a suicide to a homicide. Sickened, she leaves the table, tries to call her hitman on a burner phone, to no avail. What follows is a confrontation between Jamie and his girlfriend — Jamie strikes her and Sarah hits him back harder — he calls immediately and she pulls her car over to assure him that as long as he trusts as she trusts him, he will be in the clear with no way to tie him to the murder of his father. She’s interrupted by a man and woman in another car, who first ask for directions. Then they ask if she is Sarah Atwood, and riddle her body with bullets as Jamie listens helplessly. And then cries, as he sees his plans crumble even further. In Western parlance, the killers are circling the wagons, and Jamie is a loose end and he knows it.
Beth usually plays the role of the avenging angel. Grimes shines here as Kayce, showing his mettle as a former soldier killer who took part in covert ops and returned with a bad case of PTSD over what he’d done and saw in his time in the Middle East. We’ve seen him kill before, but we haven’t seen him use his wits like this.
And we have not yet seen the wrath of one Rip Wheeler (Cole Hauser), Beth’s husband and perhaps the most menacing presence on the show. No one is more loyal to John Dutton than he. Once Kayce and his soldier pals figure out where to point him, let’s hope we get to see some righteous Rip rage in the final three episodes.
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