Yellowstone fans who’ve wondered why, exactly, the Dutton clan are such an ornery bunch are about to discover what therapists have been trying to tell us about our own dysfunction for years: It’s all in the family origin story.
Country stars Tim McGraw and Faith Hill take the leads, playing great-grandfather John Dutton and wife Margaret, with eldest daughter Elsa in Yellowstone’s second season.
In the three episodes provided to critics, we learn John is rendezvousing in Texas with the rest of his family, who arrive from Tennessee on 1882’s just-completed Texas Pacific Railway.
The opening scene of the pilot flashes forward to an unidentified moment, showing narrator Elsa struggling to process a scene of fiery destruction, her wagon smoking with flames behind her.
When the camera pans out to reveal a mid-conflict clash with the local Native tribe that doesn’t look much in the travelers’ favor, she reaches for a pistol, then asks one tribesman if he’ll let her go.
Brennan spends most of his time in deeply sad, gruff, no-bullshit mode, reminding the trail noobs that just about everything is capable of killing these fools—especially because they have neither horses nor guns, much less any idea of the numerous deadly threats ahead.
1883’s travelers are a mix of Oregon- and elsewhere-bound, also navigating threads of the last decade of the Chisolm Trail, a Texas longhorn cattle-driver’s last profitable run to Kansas and beyond before barbed wire cordoned off the land—with Montana as the bonus for the especially hardy.
But Sheridan makes it clear they have little choice in an era where sex work or wifehood appear to be the only options, particularly when good men are hard to find—especially living ones, as many drop dead left and right from smallpox, shoot-outs, or any number of mishaps.
It’s a grim reminder that the wagon-worn, horse-beaten trails leading to supposed freedom—whatever that really meant—are not just littered with abandoned supplies, outlaws, or even the bones of the unlucky.
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