How Kevin Costner Exits As Dutton War Escalates

SPOILER ALERT: This article contains details for the Season 5 return of Yellowstone on Sunday.

Written as usual by Taylor Sheridan, the long-awaited final half of Yellowstone’s fifth season opened Sunday with Beth Dutton (Kelly Reilly) pulling up to the governor’s mansion to see all hell has broken loose with emergency vehicles flashing everywhere. It isn’t much suspense that her beloved father, John Dutton (Kevin Costner), lay dead inside, before he was to face an impeachment tribunal set up by his son Jamie (Wes Bentley), the Montana attorney general.

She’s held outside by police, but brother Kayce (Luke Grimes) pulls up, flashes a badge and tells the lawman to piss off. And their worst nightmare is revealed. We don’t see John Dutton’s face, but the body is frail and bluing, the wall in the bathroom is painted with blood from a single gunshot to the head. If there was any question what happened, the next scene sets that to rest, as Jamie confirms a COD bill for a murder made to look like a suicide.  

When the Montana attorney general announces Dutton’s death and calls it a suicide, Beth and Kayce hear it over the truck radio, and she makes him pull over. Telling her brother Jamie did this, she said he has “killed everything our father’s ever done.” Then Beth calls Rip (Cole Hauser), whose loyalty to John Dutton is perhaps even strong than hers. As evidenced by his willingness to dump bodies at the Train Station, that ravine between jurisdictions where bodies – and the secrets they hold – are stacked up like cordwood at the bottom.

And so that is how Yellowstone ends the run of its big star Costner, in Season 5’s ninth episode entitled “Desire Is All You Need.” In the scheme of seismic TV show character deaths, Costner’s exit brought none of the surprise of John Amos’ James Evans on Good Times, Ed Marinaro’s Officer Joe Coffey on Hill Street Blues, even Brian Cox’s Logan Roy on Succession and McLean Stevenson’s Lt. Col Blake in M*A*S*H*. Those were real surprises, with little telegraphing.

Costner’s exit is perhaps closer to the surprise exit of David Caruso after one season of the inventive ABC series NYPD Blue. I broke the story that Caruso was leaving, back in the day, with all the backstory, and so the only question became how Stephen Bochco and David Milch would script his exit. What can I say? It seemed newsworthy.

Same thing here, after Deadline was the first to tell Yellowstone fans that things had hit the rocks between Yellowstone’s Dutton family patriarch Costner and series co-creator and creative architect Sheridan, and that it would lead to Costner’s exit and ultimately the end of the series, save for spinoffs.

At the time, Deadline reported Matthew McConaughey was in talks to lead the new series, but that since cratered and they’ve lined it with a strong cast including Kurt Russell and Michelle Pfeiffer. Aside from ending the stalemate with Costner, starting a new show will make room for recurring characters like Hauser’s Rip Wheeler, Reilly’s Beth Dutton, Grimes’ Kayce Dutton and Bentley’s Jamie Dutton, if he were to survive the wrath of his half-sister Beth. There is a coterie of other supporting characters including Gil Birmingham, Jefferson White, Kelsey Asbille, Forrie J. Smith, Mo Brings Plenty and several others who figure to resurface in an immediate spinoff. There’s a much discussed future spinoff taking place at the 6666 cattle ranch in Texas, where, when they ended the first half of Season 5, many of them were headed.

That split up the Dutton resources, and in the waning moments of the last episode of Yellowstone’s half season, “A Knife and No Coin,” Jamie conspired with Sarah Atwood. She’s played by Dawn Olivieri, who played Faith Hill’s doomed prudish sister in 1883 and resurfaces here as a hellcat lawyer/lobbyist for the Dutton clan’s arch enemy Market Equities. She soon cast her seductive spell on the black sheep adopted son of John Dutton, and the family’s weakest link. Their bedroom banter ended in a cliffhanger with her suggesting — and Jamie reluctantly agreeing — to discreetly hire a hitman to kill his father and position Jamie to take over the Montana ranch John Dutton spent five seasons trying to protect.  

The episode swings between present and recent past, as Beth and Rip, and Kayce and wife Monica (Asbille) and son Tate (Breckin Merrill) make plans for their futures. Also planning is Sarah, who meets a shadowy man who choreographs killings. She gives her “permission to execute” a plan that will kill John Dutton and make it look like a suicide. To those who know Dutton, suicide would seem impossible, given all of the attempts on his life he has survived, and his dogged efforts to keep a promise to his dying father to keep the ranch from being sold off. But there it is.

Beyond the real stalemate between Sheridan and Costner, ending Yellowstone and starting anew makes financial sense. It undoes the unwise streaming deal that cash-starved Paramount made before the studio knew Yellowstone would grow to be basic cable’s biggest show, a juggernaut whose streaming home is Peacock and not Paramount+. The new show would go no further than Paramount+, same as other Sheridan show creations that include 1883, 1923, Lioness, Tulsa King, Mayor of Kingstown and the newest launch, Landman, starring Billy Bob Thornton, Jon Hamm, Demi Moore and Ali Larter.

Costner surely deserves a tip of the cowboy hat though as he focuses on the uncertain future of his quartet of Horizon movies. When Costner signed on to Yellowstone because he said he knew a great script when he read one, there was not a lot of interest in a modern-day TV Western. It surely helped to have the Oscar-winning Dances with Wolves star as the show patriarch, to go with his work in Westerns from Silverado to Open Range and Wyatt Earp.

While the marriage was never an easy one — both these guys are opinionated top of the food chain creative talents — Costner and Sheridan succeeded together, and the latter got to show off a cowboy life he has lived since he grew up on a ranch. It is an existence he romanticized, one that most people never imagined. As proven by the advertising that populates the show, Yellowstone has become symbolic of a lifestyle more than just an episodic drama, and it has made everyone involved a fortune. Sheridan might seem a tough nut, but his passion is ranching and being a cowboy, and if you look at some of the moments in this episode that feature long in the tooth non-pro actors, you can bet those are people that Sheridan met along the way, accomplished craftsmen of a cowboy past.

It just seems somehow a shame that Costner went out so meekly.

Back to the present. Jamie comes home, breaks into tears and is met by his femme fatale girlfriend, scantily clad and ready to celebrate. Jamie seems a broken man, but when she gives him a pep talk about the young lion taking out the old lion, he stops blubbering.

Next, Beth sorts over the future of the Dutton ranch with Kayce, a killer who doesn’t seem like he wants to believe Jamie could do something so unspeakable. He uses his law enforcement connections to search for surveillance footage that might provide answers, and is told that a transponder that should have been recording stuff failed around the time John Dutton died.  

Beth offers Kayce a knowing look and tells him to to visit his brother Jamie, because then he’ll know.  

“Look him in the eye Kayce, then come home and help me decide how to kill him,” Beth says. Then Rip pulls up after racing home from the 6666, and Beth collapses in his arms.

Coming attractions indicate that the rest of the season is about payback. There will be blood.