Yellowstone Season 3 Recap & Ending Explained
Yellowstone Season 3 ended with one of the bloodiest episodes of the series and one of the most brutal cliffhangers in recent TV memory. The battle against the Beck Brothers and the explosive Season 2 finale had major implications for the Dutton family, on pretty much every possible level, from emotional trauma to political power shifts. Which means there's a whole lot you need to remember before Season 4.
Not to worry, we've got you covered with a comprehensive Yellowstone Season 3 recap with everything you need to know before the new season, from the first episode all the way to that shocking cliffhanger finale.
The Fallout from Season 2
At the beginning of Season 3, Kayce (Luke Grimes) and Monica's (Kelsey Asbille) son Tate (Brecken Merrill) is suffering from nightmares after his kidnapping. Now that they're living on the ranch again Monica hopes that spending more time keeping busy with John (Kevin Costner) will help him heal. The quality time with his grandfather night only helps Tate recover from his trauma but gives Kayce and Monica time to reconnect and revive their estranged marriage.
As for the politics, John bears the brunt of the fallout from the high-casualty confrontation that brought Tate home. With six dead and an obvious personal conflict given that it was his grandson's abduction, John has to step down as Livestock Commissioner lest Tate's rescue look like a "gross abuse of power" without consequences.
However, those consequences turn out to be pretty minimal since the position easily stays in the Dutton family. Initially, Jamie (Wes Bentley) takes over as the new Livestock Commissioner, but when he's promoted to interim Attorney General for the state, Kayce reluctantly agrees to take on the job and, to his surprise, discovers he genuinely likes it.
The New Threat in Town
The Duttons may have won the battle against the Beck Brothers without any major casualties, but not everyone got off so easily. Dan Jenkins (Danny Huston), California investor and former Dutton rival turned reluctant ally, was killed in the Season 2 finale, leaving a power vacuum for new enemies to step into. And they do, in a hurry.
Enter Market Equities, the new big-money shady operation to set their sights on the Dutton's land. Market Equities buys out Jenkins' estate, and put Rourke (Josh Holloway) in charge of making a deal with the Duttons - or pushing them out, whichever comes first. That puts him, and the company, into battle with Beth (Kelly Reilly), who shorts their stock and costs their investors billions, but also ends up costing her job when Market Equities buys out Schwartz & Meyer and fires her.
And Market Equities is bigger, badder, and way more ambitious than Jenkins ever was: they don't just want the land, they want to build an airport and transform it altogether. As Rourke explains, "Why dream about building golf courses when you can be building cities?"
Of course, that also puts Market Equities at odds with Broken Rock Reservation and chief Thomas Rainwater (Gil Birmingham). Rainwater was once John Dutton's great local enemy, ever-planning to take the Dutton land back for his tribe, but they united against the Becks and remained united against Market Equities - for the most part. Rainwater brings in his own "merciless" heavy hitter, Angela Blue Thunder (Q'orianka Kilcher), to help take down Rourke. But she also ultimately sees the Duttons as enemies to her people and could shape up to be quite the threat.
Monica Draws First Blood
Kayce and Monica spent the first season on the reservation and most of the second season separated, but they can never quite escape the gravity of the Dutton family and their violent legacies. Now that they're reunited and living on Yellowstone Ranch, it was pretty much inevitable that Monica was going to get her hands dirty at some point, but the biggest surprise was that her first "kill" wasn't a part of the Dutton family drama at all.
After a young woman's body is found, Rainwater sets up a council to combat violence against women on the reservation and recruits Monica to help catch the killer. She puts her own life at risk but gets the job done and the killer is ultimately shot and killed by Mo (Mo Brings Plenty) during his attack on Monica. While she's rattled by the operation, it also brings Monica and Kayce even closer together.
The Dutton Brand Is Strong
Speaking of violence bringing people closer together, we get another major piece in the puzzle that is the Dutton legacy of branding their most loyal Bunkhouse crew. Rourke hires a pair of men to provoke John Dutton, leading to an attack on two new employees on the ranch, Teeter (Jennifer Landon) and Colby (Denim Richards). At the same time, Rip and Lloyd (Forrie Smith) happen upon Walker (Ryan Bingham) in a bar - an unwelcome surprise since Kayce was supposed to kill him in Season 2 - and drag him back to the ranch.
In response to the attack, John tells Rip to take 'em to the train station (Dutton-speak for killing someone) and the Bunkhousers set a trap to get the deed done. Turns out one of the men, Wade Morrow (Boots Southerland) bears the signature Dutton brand and clearly betrayed John at some point. In order to win back the family's trust, Walker cuts the brand right off Morrow's chest before they hang him. After the execution, Rip tells them "Y'all wanted revenge, there's a price to pay for revenge," and several of the Bunkhouse crew, including Teeter and Colby, take the brand that night.
John Turned Down "Generational Wealth" to Keep His Land
At a certain point in waging war with Market Equities, Beth comes to terms with the fact that her family's land is unsustainable in its current ownership state. Previous seasons made it clear that though the Duttons' land grants them tremendous capital and local power, it also leaves them fairly cash poor. Rourke tells her point blank, "That land is not your family's legacy, it is a relic that will continue to appreciate until you can no longer afford it," and surprisingly, Beth agrees.
She takes the massive deal to her father and explains in explicit detail why he should take it. The family literally cannot afford to sustain the land, and with exceptionally well-funded corporations and investors coming for it at every angle, eventually, it will be whittled away until there's nothing left to support the family or their legacy. John understands the risk, he believes his daughter, but he also made a promise to his dying father all those years ago, and makes it clear that he would "rather lose it than break it."
We Finally Know Why Beth Hates Jamie
It's always been abundantly clear that Beth loathes her brother Jamie, but after Season 3, we finally know why. And you know what? Fair enough, Beth.
Flashbacks reveal that Beth turned to Jamie for help when she got pregnant as a teenager and wanted to get an abortion. Which he did, but in order to protect her secret, he took her to a small clinic with horrific policies: abortions at that clinic require mandatory sterilization by hysterectomy. Jamie was fully aware of the cost, but he didn't tell Beth beforehand, which means he effectively subjected his sister to the horrors of forced sterilization.
John also finds out about what Jamie did to Beth and the Dutton patriarch is furious and heartbroken, driving yet another wedge between him and his son.
Jamie Learns His True Family History
About that... Turns out Jamie isn't actually John's biological son. When Jamie sets out to become Attorney General, he has to secure a copy of his birth certificate and learns that he was adopted.
“I protected you, I guided you, I loved you, you can call me whatever you want, Jamie, but I will call you son, because I have earned the right, it is the hardest thing I have ever done,” John told him when confronted. “You are a resourceful man so I am sure you can find him and you can look at his black fucking heart, his rotten soul. You can look into his eyes, Jamie and you get to choose. You can choose who you call father.”
After the confrontation with John, he discovers that his "real" father is a convicted killer who murdered his mother when he was just a baby. Desperate to understand who he really is, Jamie finds his dad, Garrett Randall (Will Patton), and learns the full truth of his sad origin: Garrett beat his wife to death when Jamie was just three-months-old because of her drug habit. As he bluntly puts it: "Your mother sold her body for drugs and I killed her for it."
Garrett also had some sinister advice for his long-estranged son, and it seems to have made quite the impact. “The Yellowstone ain’t a ranch, it’s an empire. Empires you take,” he tells Jamie. And how should Jamie take that empire? “It’s the simplest thing on earth. You kill the king.”
Love Is In the Country Air
It's not all scheming and bloodshed, Season 3 was also the most amorous season of Yellowstone yet, by far. As we mentioned above, Kayce and Monica's marriage is on the mend, but that's just the start.
Beth and Rip (Cole Hauser) are finally fully committed after he saved her from the Becks' assassins in Season 2 and told her he loved her. Knowing that he'll never ask John for her hand, she asks instead, and with her father's blessing, she asks Rip to marry her. He accepts, asks Lloyd to be his best man, and digs up his mother's grave in order to give Beth his mother's ring. A fittingly morbid romantic gesture for a couple who spent their "first date" watching a pack of wolves eat a dead deer.
Elsewhere, Teeter and Colby spark up a relationship and everyone's favorite ranch hand Jimmy (Jefferson White) finds romance with Mia (Eden Brolin), a woman he meets at the rodeo after an accident that leaves him with a broken spine. John pays Jimmy's medical bills and makes him promise to give up rodeo, however, Mia is understandably disturbed by the fact that Jimmy let John brand him and how much control the Duttons have over their employees. In the end, she gives Jimmy an ultimatum: defy John and keep her, or stay off the horse and lose her.
The Big Cliffhanger(s)
Season 3 ended with a bang - well, it ended with a lot of them and left the fate of four key characters in question.
First up is Jimmy. After his conversation with Mia, he finds a quiet place on the ranch to practice getting back on the horse, only to be immediately and violently thrown off. Last we see Jimmy he's lying unconscious in the dirt, with no one around to help him.
Then things start getting really rough: three Dutton power players are attacked, seemingly at the same time.
- Beth gets bombed when her assistant opens up a mystery package. Just like poor Jason before her, Beth's assistant is surely dead, but we don't know if Beth survived the explosion or how gravely injured she might be if she did.
- At the same time, Kayce is attacked by multiple gunmen at his office and the last we see him, he's overturning his desk to take cover and fire back while Monica panics on the other end of a call.
- And then there's John, who stops on the side of the road to help a woman and her young son with a flat tire. A mysterious van drives up, someone asks him if he's John Dutton, and when he says yes, the back doors fly open and a gunman opens fire, striking both John and the Mother dead-on. Last we see John, he's conscious but bleeding on the side of the road, and when he pulls out his phone to make a call, he finds it's been destroyed by a bullet.
Who survives, who dies, and who's responsible? Did Jamie try to "kill the king" or was it Market Equities? Or potentially another player altogether? That's the end of the season and it leaves us with a whole bunch of questions we need answered in Season 4, but thankfully the wait is almost over.
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