Taylor Sheridan fails to live up to his reputation and Yellowstone falls from its pedestal as Kevin Costner leaves to finish his own failing Horizon saga

For Taylor Sheridan, Yellowstone Season 5B is a slap in the face. Despite his severe hatred toward the f*ck-you-car-crash storyline, he was forced to end the arc of his main protagonist on whose back Sheridan built an entire empire. For 7 years, this neo-Western series promised the audience a certain endgame, a peak where the mercurial battle between the father and the son will decimate everything in its path.

Yellowstone [Credit: Paramount+]

But now, the pent-up anticipation, the waiting, and the wondering – all of it diffuses like a rubber balloon. The scheming and the planning pan out into sweet nothing as Jaime Dutton finally succeeds – behind the scenes, might I add – to do the one thing that hundreds before him have failed to do: kill John Dutton.

Taylor Sheridan Fails His Audience

Wes Bentley as Jaime Dutton [Credit: Yellowstone | Paramount+]

It is almost nonsensical how easy it was to defuse the 7-year-long Cold War brewing between Kevin Costner‘s John Dutton and the ambitious son who was raised to replace him. In Yellowstone Season 5 Episode 9, we finally learn the Dutton patriarch’s fate after Costner vowed never to return to finish the show.

It seems that after the volatile showdown in Season 5 Episode 8 that saw Jaime proceeding with his father’s impeachment, Beth finding out about the betrayal, and telling John that they should send him to the Train Station, Jaime finally grew a spine (or, perhaps half of it) and told his fixer girlfriend Sarah that they should kill John before John annihilates Jaime.

News reaches Beth and Kayce the next day about their father’s apparent demise, which was made to look like a suicide, courtesy of Sarah’s henchmen. But the predictably sloppy ending to John Dutton’s arc still raises a heavy question: how did a fixer like Sarah Atwood get to the man who stood against progress and defiantly declared “I will not be the one who breaks”?

One would think that the Oscar-nominated writer of scripts that can make high-profile actors and directors want to come out of retirement would have something a bit more sophisticated up his sleeve. All that talk of never putting his characters through the same fate as the one he suffered in Sons of Anarchy but when push came to shove, Taylor Sheridan failed to live up to his own word by killing off Kevin Costner after his fallout with the Yellowstone lead.

Kevin Costner Doesn’t Get a Hero’s Funeral

Kevin Costner as John Dutton [Credit: Yellowstone | Paramount+]

When Succession aired, the entire premise of the show was centered around one theme: what happens to the family empire when the aging patriarch kicks the bucket? While Brian Cox‘s Emmy-winning series integrated the concept of his death and the rest of the storyline was woven around it, the grand scheme of Yellowstone always hinged on one man against the whole world.

After Costner faced his impending f*ck-you car crash, the show scrambled to find a footing as dozens of threads remained open-ended and unresolved. Now, the audience will never witness him exacting retribution against Jaime, the future of the ranch, and the fate of the Dutton heirs who were left behind.

5 seasons’ worth of the build-up to an eventual showdown now seems like a wasted effort, anticlimactic enough to offend even Game of Thrones Season 8. Far from getting an honorary send-off, the real-life drama between Taylor Sheridan and Kevin Costner has now ruined the only show that exhibited great potential after years of stagnation in the television industry.

For the fans watching it all unfold from the sidelines, Yellowstone commits a grave error by asking us to simply accept John Dutton’s death as an easy plot device rather than presenting it as a looming threat over the course of several seasons. Even his succumbing to cancer would have been a far more agreeable ending since the issue was already broached once in Season 1.

With frayed nerves after a 2-year-long hiatus and the absence of a suitable party to condemn for the failed series finale, the blame falls on Sheridan and Costner. As far as Yellowstone is concerned, timing and poor plot device had nothing to do with the series’ demise. It was Kevin Costner’s fallibility and Taylor Sheridan’s ego that turned Yellowstone into an utter disappointment.

Yellowstone Season 5B is streaming on Paramount+.