Javascript is not enabled.

Javascript must be enabled to use this site. Please enable Javascript in your browser and try again.

Skip to content
Content starts here
CLOSE ×
Search
Leaving AARP.org Website

You are now leaving AARP.org and going to a website that is not operated by AARP. A different privacy policy and terms of service will apply.

‘Yellowstone’ Season 5 Recap: The Daughter Also Rises

In Episode 3 of TV’s No. 1 hit, Kevin Costner’s cowboy John Dutton gets respectable, and his ruthless child goes wild

spinner image Kevin Costner and Kelly Reilly in a scene from Yellowstone Season 5 episode 3
Paramount Network

In the third episode of Yellowstone’s triumphant fifth season — it’s now the most popular show on TV besides football — we reach a turning point. John Dutton (Kevin Costner, 67), the rancher bent on keeping Montana free of airports, ski resorts and infernal Californians and New Yorkers, is governor. Yet his character recedes from center stage of the sprawling drama, and John’s ferociously loyal daughter, Beth (Kelly Reilly), steps right up into his field of schemes. She seems more and more to be not just his key strategist but his fully committed avatar, a rattler coiled to strike.

Costner has compared the Dutton family to “Murder, Incorporated,” but now John’s cinched into his respectable gubernatorial gray suit, a straitjacket for a cowboy used to taking what’s his (i.e., everything). He starts to wonder philosophically what he’s doing it all for — the Dutton ranch? The people of Montana? But Beth is free to be, in the words of her fave philosopher, Nietzsche, “beyond good and evil,” doing dirty deeds for personal power and Daddy. John’s partly — temporarily? — tamed, but Beth can be the executrix of his unacted desires.

Yellowstone is Freudian soap opera, but it also parses rather complicated political points. Even though coastal blue viewers were slow to catch on to its appeal, it’s not just a hit for conservatives, the red states’ Game of Thrones. That’s a common charge the showrunner Taylor Sheridan denies, and the opening flashback of Episode 3 proves it: In a long shot, four horsemen ford a creek in the gorgeous wilderness, and the young John Dutton (played by Josh Lucas) comes across some wolf-mangled cattle carcasses. He’s the livestock commissioner back then, so at a shouting-match meeting between local ranchers and bureaucrats, he rebukes the nature-ignorant pols who have been preaching about species endangerment. Do we root for the men-of-action ranchers saving their livelihood or for the ecologically evolved powers that be?

Nobody’s dilemma is simple or safe. Terrifying, airport-building Market Equities CEO Caroline Warner (Jacki Weaver, 75) is suddenly in jeopardy, but oily Market Equities lawyer and fixer Sarah Atwood (Dawn Olivieri) is an ascendant, Beth-worthy threat in her slit skirt and sangfroid. Yellowstone’s Native American power broker, Thomas Rainwater (Gil Birmingham, 69), is Dutton’s nemesis but also his opportunistic anti-developer ally — and now he’s under assault by activists picketing his casino, and his increasingly rebellious aide Angela Blue Thunder (Q’orianka Kilcher), who thinks he’s selling out their people to Dutton and other commercial interests, all under what she calls ‘slave rules.’ ”

Grownup viewers love this show where seasoned goodies and baddies mix it up, and it’s tricky to say which is which. There’s good intergenerational fun in Episode 3’s flashbacks to the characters in their youth, and the raucous modern-day scene that erupts when the oldest guy in the bunkhouse, avuncular Lloyd (Forrie J. Smith, whose lookalike real son Forrest Smith plays Lloyd in flashbacks), gets a 70th-birthday celebration. When the boys want to take the party to a Bozeman bar where savvier heads predict trouble with the “fake cowboys” apt to be there, Beth leads the way to the inevitable fracas.

And at the bar, when a hottie brunette from (hiss!) Sacramento puts the moves on Beth’s long, tall husband, Rip (Cole Hauser), Beth almost grins at what the out-of-towner is in for. Guess that gal never saw the popular T-shirt that reads, “Don’t Make Me Go Beth Dutton on You.” Beth assures Rip, “I save all my crazy for you, baby,” But she’s still got enough of it to set off a barroom donnybrook.

When a sheriff tries to take custody of the less-than-penitent Beth, Rip tells him, “It’s your problem now.” In Yellowstone, the problems proliferate, and they’re getting more complicated all the time.

Unlock Access to AARP Members Edition

Join AARP to Continue

Already a Member?