‘Yellowstone’ Season Season 5 Episode 13 Recap: “Give The World Away” 

Wait, it’s the second-to-last episode (ever?) of Yellowstone, and nobody got killed? Is the writing in the Sheridan-O-Verse slipping? Not quite. Taylor Sheridan is just expanding the fluid space around the Duttons and their embattled ranch. This episode, instead of subtracting characters, Sheridan adds one – Bella Hadid in a cowboy hat has entered the Yellowstone chat – and puts a “for sale” sign on everything else that isn’t a barn, a house, or Lloyd and Carter. (Because those two guys are the only Bunkhouse Boys Rip and Beth can afford to keep on.) Horses, cattle, equipment, basically everything a ranch boss like Rip Wheeler requires to do his job that isn’t the land itself, all of it will be sold at a huge onsite auction. At the Yellowstone, change itself is for sale. 

But before we get to the auction, Beth’s gotta take a quick trip to Texas and Bosque Ranch, where she monitors and comes to grudgingly admire the horseflesh selling skills of Sheridan’s Travis Wheatley. It’s Sadie (Hadid), Travis’s girlfriend, who greets her at the door. 

The scene in Texas is what Beth calls a “Cowboy Twilight Zone,” all boozy strip poker parties with his young staff and Sheridan, as Travis, showboating his way around Bosque without much use for the buttons on his shirt. Beth can’t stand Wheatley’s arrogance, his hardwired horndogness, even if this guy is one of her husband’s oldest friends. (Later, we even get a lengthy speech from Rip in tribute to Travis’s heroic levels of good-buddyness.) But she has to hand it to him on the cowboying. When Beth sees Travis’s mastery of horsemanship, and how he fleeces a group of foreign buyers into paying an extra million for one of the Yellowstone’s prized show horses, she enlists his razzle dazzle with the animals for the auction back in Montana. Anything to move the needle a little on price, because the amount of debt servicing the ranch must pay is totally astronomical.

While Beth is managing the fire sale of the ranch, she’s also lobbing bombs at Jamie. He’s couch rotting at his place when the news reports on his “repeated sexual encounters” with Sarah Atwood, whose murder has now been publicly linked with Governor Dutton’s demise. It was Beth who leaked word of Jamie and Sarah’s earlier-season hookup at Helena’s tony Deerfield Club. And it’s Beth who tells Jamie, when he calls to shout more empty threats, that he should remember what she promised.  

There’s still a chance Beth could avenge her father’s murder by keeping her promise and personally murking her hated brother. Just because the penultimate episode of Yellowstone doesn’t kill anybody doesn’t mean the series finale won’t be a bloodbath. But in the meantime, Jamie is doing more than just spewing invective over the phone. He’s turning to another woman in his life to gas up his ego and reassure him that he didn’t fuck up. Not Beth, obviously. And not Atwood, who died literally in the moment she was telling Jamie everything would be alright. No, it’s Christina (Katherine Cunningham), his ex, former campaign strategist, and the mother of their son. “Jamie, you are the definition of complicit.” And he totally is! But she advises him to publicly hang suspicion about John Dutton’s death around Sarah Atwood’s neck. Christina will still help Jamie because his political legacy is tied directly to the legacy of their son. And it could be the mildly creepy look in her eye. Christina seems easily obsessed.  

God, Jamie is so, so close to being cooked. Detective Dillard is onto him, and made good on his promise of a search warrant, raiding Market Equities for all Atwood materials. But with Christina’s help – with her holding his hand, what Jamie always needs – he just might have a few of his own lives left, which he can sell out politically for another ego power-up.

It’s auction day at the Yellowstone ranch, and everybody’s made the trip out. The Texas bunkhouse contingent has returned, and it’s a tough pill for Teeter to swallow, seeing Laramie leap into Walker’s arms. (Hassie Harrison also returns!)  She still grieves for Colby, but it was nice of Lloyd to at least save her his hat. Travis Wheatley, Sadie, and even Jimmy Hurdstrom and fiancée Emily (Kathryn Kelly) have also made the trip from Texas for the auction. And so has Senator Perry, who Beth personally invites to John Dutton’s funeral. 

“Today we honor a man who dedicated his life to preserving our way of life.” While everything’s for sale at the auction – even the chuck wagons have a price tag – there is also a moment of silence for John Dutton and Colby, and a fascinating little ceremony to uphold cowboying as a sacred act. As Ryan and Teeter lead a pair of empty horses into the paddock, we hear of how Colby died exercising the freedom by which they all live, the very freedom John Dutton died protecting. It’s like Rip told Ryan earlier. There’s a reason why cowboys can’t buy life insurance. But within that same reason is the definition of why they do this work at all. It’s the nadir of the Yellowstone, and the Duttons’ dedication to it. 

The family’s funeral for John Dutton is shaping up to be the centerpiece of the season finale. Beth wants it to be quiet, after the hubbub and carrying-on of the auction, which eventually netted $30 million bucks. And here is one prediction: the funeral will be quiet, until it isn’t. In some fashion, Yellowstone must end with more blood seeping into the land the Duttons have been fighting on for generations. Right? Or is there an eleventh hour solve? At the auction, Kayce told Monica that unlike Beth’s plan to sell everything off in search of pausing the inevitable, his own plan is different. “My plan guarantees the future.” What if there was a way to sell the ranch land for only a dollar? Wouldn’t that reduce the resulting taxes owed? Kayce doesn’t pitch Beth on his idea directly. He gives her the space to figure out his meaning, and once she does, she kisses her brother with joy. “You’re smarter than you look!”

The question is “who.” Who is the buyer in Kayce’s scenario? Howabout Chief Thomas Rainwater, or Mo, Kayce’s spiritual advisor? Elsewhere in this episode, they were seen to declare guerilla war on the pipeline invading their people’s land. What if the Duttons arranged for the Broken Rock People to have a financial say in the future of the ranch, which ended up saving it for everyone? We’ll have to see what Taylor Sheridan has planned for his Western epic’s final ride. Anything’s possible. He could even end up selling the Yellowstone to Bella Hadid.  

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.