For largely unavoidable reasons, the back half of Yellowstone Season 5 has been complete rubbish. It brings me some pleasure to report that Episode 11, “Three Fifty-Three”, bucks this trend a little bit. It remains imperfect – there are still pointless cold open flashback sequences, Jamie is a little b*tch on a grandmaster level, and there’s far too much attention being paid to Kevin Costner’s body double which doesn’t even have the same build – but it feels like it’s going somewhere, keeping Kayce busy doing the job of about three different government departments and having the temerity to finally kill someone on-screen.
What I’m hoping for is that in its final episodes the show returns to the halcyon days of Kayce shooting everyone for no reason. I think we’re almost there – he throws Jamie across his own desk! – but I do worry that he’s still in vision quest mode. But the body count’s going to mount, I can feel it.
Cut The Flashbacks, Please
“Three Fifty-Three” opens like the previous episode with an ill-advised flashback, this one pointlessly detailing how three men broke into John Dutton’s home, strangled him, drugged him, and then staged his suicide. I contest that we had no reason to see this and could have deduced what happened fairly easily, but there’s a bit later where Kayce turns into Columbo so I imagine it’s intended to make his deductions more reasonable.
There’s another dumb bit, too. After leaving Rip in a Texas hotel, Beth decides to drive home through the night. While she’s doing so, John is being murdered, and at the precise moment of his death, she feels it psychosomatically. So, too, does Kayce, who’s lying awake in bed when he gets a call from the police. He thought it was a nightmare, but it was his familial sixth sense kicking in.
Kayce’s On the Case
What I like quite a bit is Kayce floating around Montana pulling the strings of the state’s entire apparatus with just a few abrupt phone calls. First, he visits the medical examiner and insists she re-examines his father’s body with a focus on looking for signs of a struggle. At one point he calls the detective in charge of the case and puts him on speakerphone so he can give the go-ahead for this. The sense of him having had quite enough of bureaucracy is genuinely palpable.
There’s a funny bit during the examination, which Kayce insists on being present for, when Kayce describes how his team used to snatch targets in Afghanistan and he needlessly chokes out one of the doctors to demonstrate. I’m sure they could have gotten the idea without that, but it’s hilarious all the same. Anyway, the conclusions are obvious – John was forcibly restrained and has the bruises to show for it. It’s enough for the cause of death to be changed to “undetermined” and the case to be reopened.
Next, Kayce gives the police permission to comb through the Livestock Office’s surveillance, since the murder weapon was a pistol taken from there. Then he drives to Jamie’s office and throws him over his desk. Jamie whimpers and cowers and promises Kayce that he had nothing to do with their father’s death, which I doubt Kayce is buying.
Jamie Is Recused
With John dead, Montana needs a new governor, and Steven Rawlings is sworn in to take his place. This guy’s a mixed bag. It initially seems like he’s totally on Jamie’s side and supports his intention to revoke most of the policies John put in place so Market Equities can resume construction on the Yellowstone land. He’s so keen that Clara, who he moments before had employed as his new chief of staff, walks out in disgust and asks Lynelle for a job instead.
Of note: Lynelle reminds Clara that she’s technically unemployed at the moment so isn’t bound by the usual confidentiality laws of government buildings and business. In other words, she’s telling her to let people know what Jamie is up to.
As it happens she probably needn’t have bothered, since in the new governor’s first assembly, which occurs moments after the reopening of the Dutton case as a murder investigation has been plastered all over the news, he recuses Jamie from anything to do with his father’s activities or land. Jamie is now officially powerless to smooth things over for Market Equities, who have been making all kinds of big promises about the airport’s development timeline. So, that’s awkward.
Thomas Rainwater Has No Ideas
Thomas Rainwater – who hasn’t been seen since the midseason premiere – and Mo Brings Plenty turn up at the Dutton ranch in Yellowstone Season 5, Episode 11 to… do nothing, as far as I can tell. Thomas lends a sympathetic ear to Beth and implies that he’d be willing to help with whatever plans she might have to sell off portions of the ranch and keep the rest of it as untouched as possible, but he has no actionable ideas of his own. I thought he was going to swoop in with some kind of solution, but I guess not.
Mo’s not much use either, just giving Kayce cryptic advice about how to make his sweat lodge vision come to fruition. There’s clearly going to be a big moment down the line when Kayce has to choose between his family and the ranch, but everything involving Mo and Rainwater now feels like Sheridan contriving a way to keep them involved without having any real idea of what they can be doing.
See You Later, Sarah
Finally, someone gets killed. And blessedly it’s Sarah Atwood, who spends the entirety of “Three Fifty-Three” panicking about the potential repercussions of the Dutton case being reopened. As it turns out, she was right to worry.
After buying a burner phone to try and call her murderous associates, Sarah goes to see Jamie and tries to keep him in line by belittling him, which usually works. He’s feeling a bit out of sorts, so he slaps Sarah, and she slaps his back so hard his eyeballs switch places and he starts crying a bit. This guy, honestly.
The second Sarah leaves the house, Jamie calls her groveling, which means he’s on the line when a pair of assassins posing as an everyday couple pull up alongside her and shoot her dead. His demented wailing is ridiculous, but it’s fun to see Sarah get her comeuppance, even if it deprives Beth of revenge. There’s always Jamie for her to punish, after all.
Speaking of which – since Jamie was on the phone with Sarah at the time, when the police turn up, they’re going to uncover his connection to her. The very fragile house of cards he’s sitting atop is about to collapse, and I’ll take great pleasure in it doing so. Hopefully, Kayce finds someone to kill next week.