‘Yellowstone’ Midseason Finale Recap: Catching Up With the Cowboys

Jimmy (Jefferson White): The beloved ranch hand — who’s been long gone from Yellowstone (with John’s blessings) and now rides for the Four Sixes Ranch down in Texas — returns. He’s so besotted with his new spouse Emily (Kathryn Kelly) that he’ll skip breakfast for a sweet morning tryst with the wisecracking veterinarian of his dreams. As White explains in one of the charmingly low-key backstage extras posted on the show’s site, Jimmy is plenty happy now. And Paramount+ will be happy if you tune into his forthcoming Yellowstone spin-off series 6666 (and, of course, to the current Yellowstone prequels 1883 and 1923).

Kayce Dutton (Luke Grimes): Since Rip is absent and daddy John (Kevin Costner) is distracted as the ever-more-imperiled Montana governor, Kayce faces a change in lifestyle. John, in a bonding moment with Kayce’s wife, the revitalized Monica (Kelsey Asbille), enlists her to convince Kayce to take over running the ranch. That means moving to the ranch’s East Camp and leaving behind their current home with its sadly unused child’s bedroom. Why doesn’t John ask his son instead of his daughter-in-law? As John indicates in an aside to Monica, it’s she who wears the pants in the marriage.

(Left to right) Luke Grimes as Kayce Dutton, Cole Hauser as Rip Wheeler and Kevin Costner as John Dutton.

Paramount Network

John Dutton (Kevin Costner): He seemed to have skated past a love triangle involving sometime casual lover Lynelle Perry (Wendy Moniz) and manacled-to-the-ranch activist Summer Higgins (Piper Perabo), and looked momentarily secure in taking management prerogatives more suited to a king than a governor. But his angrily ambitious son Jamie (Wes Bentley) and Market Equities backroom operative Sarah Atwood (Dawn Olivieri) full-on plot not just his political demise but perhaps — and this is a reveal that serves as the cliffhanger for all episodes to come — his physical demise, too. Not that John isn’t prepared to meet force with force: He counsels gubernatorial aide Clara (Lilli Kay) that the way to answer mortal threats is with “menace.” As we watch Beth fully realize the family history that she — curiously — only just discovered from Jamie, we see a previously unseen emotional schism cracking open between daughter and father.

Wes Bentley stars as Jamie Dutton.

Roger Snider/Paramount Network

Jamie Dutton (Wes Bentley): In a deftly edited sequence of intercut moments, we see him as attorney general delivering a special emergency-session speech to a willing assembly calling for John’s impeachment, while John takes the stage at a press conference staged by Lynelle and Chief Thomas Rainwater (Gil Birmingham). They’re quite eloquently opposing a pair of pipelines the feds have authorized to cut right through the Broken Rock reservation. But as always, Jamie has a conspiracy afoot. We used to think Beth had him checkmated with an old photo of him dumping his nefarious biological dad’s body at —  yes, the train station — but we soon learn differently. Jamie will blow the whistle on those decades of secret revenge homicides.

Beth Dutton (Kelly Reilly): Beth and Portland activist Summer engage in an almost sitcom-style bit of repartee, with Beth zinging her for liking Scotch, having hairy armpits and obeying John’s order to stay indoors because she’s under house arrest. “When you forsake feminism, you go all in,” snipes Beth. “You're almost Amish.” But after this lighthearted moment, Beth bashes her way into the connubial retreat of Jamie and Sarah, bashes him over the head with a rock for good measure, and calls scantily clad Sarah an “expensive hooker” and sarcastically asks, “Enjoying your marionette?” Sarah purrs back, “Every inch of him.”

“She’s a monster. She always has been,” says Jamie in the aftermath, adding with calm assurance: “I think she’ll try to have me killed.” Displaying her own lethal calm, Sarah adopts Jamie’s idea that, in response, it’s time to be “playing offense” — which may include threats not just to John but also to the so-far unstoppable Beth. Sarah knows some “professionals” who have their own means of taking out a foe and getting away with it, and vows, “I will meet with them.”

Her ruthlessness tees up what promises to be quite a rip-snorting second arc of Season 5 this summer.