Well Jack Dutton, you always seemed like a good dude. There in your sidearm, with your dialed-in Van Dyke beard, and your goosefeather chaps; with your steadfast eagerness to prove yourself against the legacy of your family name. Honestly, and especially here in 1923 Season 2, we felt like we got to know Elizabeth way more than you. But Jack, with Elizabeth’s wolf bite recovery and the revelation of her pregnancy, we were looking forward to knowing you better. Especially after you – it was assumed – contributed in some major way to winning the Dutton-Whitfield War. But we will only know you in legend. Because Jack Dutton, in your tryhard haste to be a hero, you let Banner Creighton’s mercenary thugs shoot you dead, right out of your saddle.
With Episode 6 of 1923 Season 2 (“The Mountain Teeth of Monsters”), the bleak voices of the dead are overtaking the living. They’ve become a chorus in Taylor Sheridan’s writing, in support of Elsa Dutton’s out-of-body narrative, whose own life ended in 1883. Because Jack isn’t the only one who’s suddenly gone. On a lonely grassy plain in Texas, for the crime of existing, Pete Plenty Clouds was shot down by Marshal Kent. At least we were able to witness Pete’s last act of protection toward Teonna Rainwater, as his horse gave out and he unleashed a righteous war whoop, turning to fire his rifle at Kent and Renaud.
Pete’s sacrifice stoked the poisoned glimmer of the vows the priest took, in his own youth, somewhere in a half-remembered France. “Now you go scream with the devil” Renaud said, as poured bullets into Kent. But Renaud is not redeemed by killing his posse boss to avenge acts of vacant cruelty he condoned. Not in the eyes of his God, and not amongst we viewers of this bloodbath of an episode. Because on top of everything else for which Renaud is responsible, he also murders Runs His Horse. He ambushed them. Waited for them in the dark by Pete’s body. And then he expects Teonna to repent? To him? As the Catholic priest’s hands close around her neck? Teonna delivers redemption in the form of a blade plunged into his back.
We know Teonna is on the right side of history. And we know the Duttons will achieve victory, at least in some form, and at least among what is a growing list of losses. Dutton and Rainwater are the names which endure in this timeline; there are no descendants of Donald Whitfield making trouble in Yellowstone. But even though Spencer has never been closer to joining the war that has now claimed his brother and his nephew – his latest train is only a day or so from Montana – do you think Whitfield is worried? The tycoon isn’t bracing himself behind some picket. He’s at his mansion in town. Wearing a silk dressing gown. Smoking fine cigars. And subjecting the newly-recruited Mabel to his power-tripping sexual whims. “Make her enjoy it,” he tells Lindy. “To look past the pain, fear, and panic.”
This episode of 1923 isn’t just bloody. It’s fucking bleak. Banner Creighton might be a deadly apparatus, but he knows he’s just another one of Whitfield’s prisoners, someone who might as well be in a set of stocks right next to Mabel. When the enforcer tries a little moral pushback on his debased oligarch employer – “That’s someone’s daughter” – Whitfield offers this paean to generational cruelty: “If her mother were here, I’d do the same to her.”
The characters Taylor Sheridan isn’t killing are either waiting around to get shot at – Cara to Elizabeth, back at the Dutton ranch: “We have much more in common with the wolf than the rabbit; the human race will covet itself right out of existence” – or confusing momentary respite for impending doom. Given all that has befallen her, if Alexandra’s wealthy saviors had turned out to be 1920s organ thieves, set to use their Winnetka mansion to chop her up and sell her for parts, we would’ve been like, “Yeah, that seems about right.”
Instead, inside this most bleak-est of Sheridan-O-Verse landscapes, Alex is alone again as Paul and Hillary are eaten alive by an act of God.
Almost right up until they died in a region-blanketing blizzard, Paul and Hillary made good on their promise to promulgate Alex’s journey with a few touches of rarefied adventure. As they pointed their Duesenberg toward Montana, on “the path of the pioneers, in the name of lost love, soon to be found” – Paul had a way with words! – they saw wild horses running free, guzzled champagne road sodas, and Alex even learned to drive, somewhere out there in the American West. “Take the train,” an elderly woman behind the counter in a small town warned. But their adventure was too grand, and had made them oblivious to Wyoming and its dangers. Now, as she sits in the backseat of a luxury vehicle transformed into an inert snowdrift, pregnant, near frostbite, and surrounded by nothing but cold and death, Alexandra is actually only a few hundred miles from her new family. And as his own train churns northwest, technically, she hasn’t been this close to her husband since Alex waved to Spencer from the starboard side of the stern at Marseille.
“Nothing coexists,” Elsa Dutton’s narration tells us, as the camera zooms out to reveal the drifting snowy magnitude of Alexandra’s latest shitty reality. “If it was up to the wolves, it would be the wolves and nothing else.” And Elsa goes on to helpfully describe the planet’s cycle of mass extinction events, where all life was eradicated in an evolutionary instant, just in case three major character deaths and another’s latest peril wasn’t enough of an indicator that in 1923 season 2, the evolution of Team Dutton is now a top-to-bottom struggle for survival.