The credits have rolled on the last-ever episode of “Yellowstone,” concluding Taylor Sheridan’s epic neo-western drama, which, at one point, was the most-watched scripted series in America.
Naturally, the long-awaited finale drew in a huge audience. According to VideoAmp data released by Paramount, the episode, which aired on Sunday, December 15, brought in 11.4 million same-day viewers on Paramount Network and CMT, making it the biggest episode in the series’ history.
The supersized episode, which ran for 86 minutes, saw Kevin Costner’s character, John Dutton, finally laid to rest after he died in the midseason premiere.
After that, the Dutton land was returned to the Native American community that once owned it, leaving the ranch’s residents and workers to follow their own paths.
While the episode tied up many loose ends, it did leave some dangling plot threads and unanswered questions.
From lingering mysteries to lost characters, keep reading to see the six questions we still have about “Yellowstone.”
Why did Rip never find out about the pain that Jamie caused Beth?
Beth’s (Kelly Reilly) resentment towards her adopted brother Jamie (Wes Bentley) has been a cornerstones of the series since the very beginning.
As audiences discovered in a season three flashback, she had a good reason. When she became pregnant as a teenager, Jamie knowingly ordered a doctor to give her a hysterectomy rather than an abortion, leaving her infertile.
Beth’s been haunted by this experience her entire adult life, not least because the baby’s father was Rip’s (Cole Hauser).
But, by the series finale, Rip is still in the dark about the pain Jamie caused Beth. He seemingly doesn’t even know that he got Beth pregnant all those years ago.
What game was Sarah Atwood playing with the Duttons?
When Sarah Atwood (Dawn Olivieri) was introduced in the second episode of season five, she filled the villain-shaped hole left by the death of Jamie’s biological father, Garrett Randall (Will Patton).
Working on behalf of Market Equities, she pushed forward with the real estate company’s relentless battle to acquire the Dutton land by whatever means necessary.
This included manipulating Jamie into a sexual relationship before convincing him to call for John’s impeachment. She took things further by organizing a hit on the Dutton patriarch.
But Sarah got her comeuppance not long after as she was gunned down by the same assassins in an attempt to cover their tracks.
Her demise, while celebrated by audiences, however, leaves lots of questions unanswered, including what her ultimate goal was.
By the end, it was hinted that she had shifted loyalties from Market Equities to Jamie himself. Plus, as Beth found out while digging into Sarah’s background, she was using a fake name.
Without a real identity and motivations, Sarah ended up being a poorly drawn antagonist with not much depth who wasn’t deserving of such a big storyline.
What happened to Angela Blue Thunder and her attempts to oust Rainwater as chairman of the reservation?
Angela Blue Thunder (Q’orianka Kilcher) was introduced in season three as an adversary to Thomas Rainwater (Gil Birmingham), the chairman of the Broken Rock Reservation.
At the beginning of season five, audiences saw her embark on a plan to supplant Rainwater with younger rival Martin (Martin Sensmeier).
However, Angela and this storyline were nowhere to be seen in the second half of season five.
With this storyline left unfinished, it leads to questions of whether Rainwater will stay in charge of looking after the Yellowstone land following his promise to Kayce (Luke Grimes) to treat it with respect and leave it practically unchanged.
Why did Kayce consider inheriting the ranch as such a burden?
In the finale, Kayce said the words “I’m free” when tearfully embracing his wife Monica (Kelsey Asbille) after signing over the ranch to the Broken Rock tribe.
It was an emotional moment, but the reasons Kayce considered the Yellowstone ranch such a huge burden were never fully explained or explored.
Audiences will recall that at one point, John disclosed that he never wanted his grandson Tate (Brecken Merrill) to be born and opposed Kayce’s marriage to Monica.
But besides this, audiences never really got a grasp on the tensions and resentments at the core of Kayce and his father’s relationship.
Given that in the finale, Kayce bought himself a small herd of cattle to tend to, we understand that it was never the lifestyle that the youngest Dutton son was opposed to, but doing it on the farmland that his father owned.
Where did Lloyd go?
Lloyd Pierce (Forrie J. Smith) was the oldest and longest-serving cowboy on the ranch.
The character also had a significant amount of screentime, appearing in every episode of the show but two, according to IMDb.
But in the finale, Lloyd’s character wasn’t given proper closure. As the cowboys on the ranch disbanded and headed their separate ways, Lloyd was left as the only one without somewhere to go.
While Rip offered him a job on his new ranch, Lloyd declined, stating that he would rather not be a cowboy at all if he couldn’t keep working at the Yellowstone ranch.
His decision made sense as so much of Lloyd’s life and identity were tied up in the ranch (he was among the men branded for life with the Yellowstone ‘Y’). Still, it would’ve been satisfying to find out what he planned to do next if not cowboying.
What was the purpose of showing so much of the 6666 ranch and Taylor Sheridan’s own ranch?
A crucial plot point in season five was that several key “Yellowstone” characters found themselves sent on a secondment to the 6666 ranch – which is a real ranch bought in 2020 by series cocreator Taylor Sheridan.
Elsewhere, Sheridan showed up as the character Travis Wheatley, a horsetrader who essentially saved the Yellowstone ranch from financial ruin by selling off their horses for them.
In fact, almost all of the penultimate episode was dedicated to Beth’s trip to Bosque Ranch, which, again, Sheridan owns in real life. In the show, Travis is the proprietor of the ranch.
There seemed to be no concrete reason why these ranches got so much screentime in the last batch of episodes, besides showcasing Sheridan’s own ranching empire.
There is a possibility that the scenes and characters introduced in them may show up in a new spinoff series.
Alongside a rumored new series following Beth and Rip, there is the franchise extension “6666” also in the works — but that appears to have been shelved for now.
The series was first announced in early 2021 and originally set to debut in 2023.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter in 2023, Sheridan spoke about the delays in getting “6666” (pronounced “four-sixes”) off the ground and said he had told the studio “to be patient.”
What became of the wolves storyline?
It was a blink-or-you’ll-miss-it moment in the midseason finale but on top of the news that Jamie had called for an impeachment tribunal, John was given the additional headache of an investigation being launched into whether or not the endangered wolves from the nearby national park were killed on his land.
Like Angela Blue Thunder, this was another storyline that was introduced and then seemingly abandoned when the show returned from it’s lengthy midseason hiatus.
Given that John had invited his girlfriend, outspoken animal rights activist Summer Higgins (Piper Perabo), to live with him, it felt at the time that this story arc was going to loom large in the second half of the season.
In the end, it didn’t. Audiences didn’t hear anything more about the wolves storyline or the coverup operation that John and Rip carried out to hide their bodies again.
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