‘Yellowstone’ Season 5 Episode 11 recap: “Three-Fifty-Three” (2024)

A shudder passed through Beth Dutton at 3:53am. She was nowhere near any of her loved ones, as she drove from Texas to Montana through impenetrable darkness. But intrinsically, she still knew something was wrong. It was the Dutton family mind, telling her at that moment that everything would be different from now on. Kayce awoke, too, right around 4, at his family’s home on the ranch. “Nightmare?” Monica asked. But the state police blowing up his phone meant his bad feeling was all too real. Episode 11 of Yellowstone Season 5 fills in the immediate hours surrounding the murder of John Dutton. His children’s apparently cosmic link to the family lifeforce, the governor’s own life being taken from him by a covert team of C-suite killers, and newly public details about his cause of death. That it wasn’t suicide is no longer just an in-house family theory, news that results in another murder, one we didn’t exactly see coming.

More on that in a moment. While bullets are already flying and characters are falling as Yellowstone draws to a close, the Dutton family hasn’t even started firing. They’re too busy bodying people in their offices.

“Don’t listen to her! She’s fucking poison, rotted from the inside!” Jamie trying to turn Kayce against Beth isn’t gonna work. But another portion of their confrontation has legs. With John gone and the giant Market Equities development deal back on, Jamie knows Beth and Kayce’s options are limited as far as shepherding the ranch’s legacy. Financially, they’re gonna have to sacrifice chunks of it in order to save any of it. As Kayce departs Jamie’s office, it’s with his stated hope that desk-tossing is where it ends, and he doesn’t have to come back with a gun.

While his siblings consider how they’ll handle management of the ranch, Jamie is lining up political support for how he’ll take it. He’s got the newly-promoted lieutenant governor in his corner on dealing with Market Equities. But when they hear the parameters of the plan, Senator Lynelle Perry (Wendy Moniz) and John Dutton’s former aide Clara Brewer (Lilli Kay) both cry foul. “A blatant abuse of state authority,” Perry calls it, and walks out. Clara quits the chief of staff job she had for two minutes under the new governor, and follows her. Which could be important! Because this makes Clara currently not a state employee, confidentiality agreements do not apply. Theoretically, she could spill the beans on Jamie’s schemes, and not be prosecuted.

On her way out, Perry also warned Jamie that the conservation easement would be a big problem. But while the new governor does declare eminent domain over the land, strengthening the state’s position, he also calls on Jamie, as attorney general, to recuse himself from any investigations or prosecutions linked to John Dutton’s death. When Kayce demanded a rexamination of his father’s body – highlighting the signs of being bound; of external pressure on the neck; and don’t worry, it was a body double and not Keven Costner – the county medical examiner changed John Dutton’s official cause of death from “suicide” to “undetermined.” She even called a press conference to announce it. And suddenly, Jamie and Sarah Atwood’s neat little plan to remove John Dutton from the equation has become very public and messy.

When she watched the press conference, a shudder passed through Sarah Atwood, too. But instead of any kind of noble family mind meld, it was the cold realization that she was alone and very likely completely fucked. Sarah bought a burner phone, and called the number of the wet work corporate killers she hired. Disconnected. Sarah went to Jamie’s house, and they slapped each other as they argued. All of the risk was hers, she reminded him. “And don’t forget why you let me. You want in that governor’s mansion so bad, you’d probably sleep in his bed without changing the sheets.”

It’s a great line, and with Jamie’s ego chopped off at the knees – again – Atwood drove off in her Range Rover, only to be stopped on the street by a couple in a minivan. It is not directions they seek. Operatives from the company she hired to kill the governor put five bullets in Sarah Atwood, scoop up their spent shells, and drive off before the light turns green. In the end, that they had surveillance dirt on Jamie and Sarah’s illicit sex life didn’t even matter. Killing her to cover their tracks was just simpler. And all over her phone’s notifications will be the Montana state attorney general’s phone number.

The way Beth stares at a topo map of the ranch, it’s as if she could bend the very contours of the earth to her will. But even the powers of Beth Dutton, though considerable, won’t be enough to sustain the ranch status quo. “There is no preserving this place,” she tells Chief Thomas Rainwater as they talk on the porch. “There is only prolonging its collapse.” Rainwater laments the fight with the government to come. It’s one he knows all too well. The IRS, the Department of the Interior – they’ll drive the Yellowstone and its protectors into the ground, and auction off whatever’s left.

Can Beth still work her magic? Can she monetize the parts of the ranch where it matters most, and continue to retain some kind of control over its evolution? Or can she only sit and watch its destruction, just as the Dutton family itself has been targeted for demolition? With the targeted killing of Sarah Atwood, the stakes in this fight just got raised. From here on out, as Yellowstone itself grinds away into dust, the choices the Duttons make will start to feel more like fate.

Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.