Wokery and Yellowstone

Mo Brings Plenty pays respect to fallen patriarch John Dutton.

Ugh, is there such a thing? Yes, although the phrase is misleading. It describes people who behave like leftists while masquerading as conservatives. They find offense over everything, most recently with Taylor Sheridan’s series finale of “Yellowstone.” The gripe concerned one of the final scenes in the finale.

John Dutton is dead. His kids don’t want the ranch. Kayce Dutton, played by Luke Grimes, spent his entire life fighting to get away from the ranch. His wife grew up on the Broken Rock Reservation. Their son, Tate, is the last Dutton. In the “Yellowstone” prequel series, “1883,” Tim McGraw played the original Dutton patriarch and founder of the Yellowstone Ranch. His daughter Elsa is dying and the family needs to bury her. A Crow elder tells him about a place called Paradise Valley. It’s where the Duttons go to bury Elsa and settle, founding the ranch. The elder tells James Dutton: “Yes, Paradise. Good name. But you know this: that in seven generations, my people will rise up and take it back from you.”

Dutton replies: “In seven generations, you can have it.”

Tate Dutton is the seventh generation Dutton. This stuck out to me when watching the series and it’s been confirmed by actors in the series. As the episode finishes, Elsa, in a voice over confirms it once and for all:

One-hundred-and-forty-one years ago, my father was told of this valley and here’s were we stayed, for seven generations. My father was told they would come for this land, and he promised to return it. Nowhere was that promise written. It faded with my father’s death, but somehow lived in the spirit of this place. Men cannot truly own wild land. To own land you must blanket it in concrete, cover it with buildings. Stack it with houses so thick, people can smell each other’s supper. You must rape it to sell it. Raw land, wild land, free land can never be owned. But some men pay dearly for the privilege of its stewardship. They will suffer and sacrifice to live off it and live with it, and hopefully teach the next generation to do the same. And if they falter, find another willing to keep the promise.

Neither Beth nor Kayce, Tate’s father, wanted the ranch. This was a running theme throughout the entire show from the beginning. The inheritance tax was insurmountable (yes, there are protections in place for such a thing, but this is a tv show and everything is simplified for drama). John Dutton made his kids promise to never develop the land. To keep their promise to their father and avail themselves of the prison that the ranch is to them, they sold it back to the Broken Rock tribe for the exact amount per acre that James Dutton bought it for back in the 1800s. Thus the land cannot be developed and Beth and Kayce are free.

The final episode shows the tribe moving in and taking apart the house, removing the giant Y on the barn, while chanting. Sheridan clearly wanted to create some kid of visual where the land reclaims itself, fulfilling the foreshadowing in 1883. At one point the camera cuts to the Dutton family cemetery in the woods where a handful of teens are shown pushing over the tombstones of the Dutton family, including John’s. Tribal elder Mo rushes across the field yelling at the teens (video here).

“They protected this land! They died for this land!” He angrily shouts. “And this land is where they’ll stay! Go back!” He runs them off and carefully, arduously restores each tombstone to its upright position, pausing to pay respects at each one. We don’t know if there was consequences for the kids after; it’s a TV show.

The coexistence between the Duttons and the tribe predates the first episode of the series. Between 1883 and now Duttons have lost a son at the hands of some in the tribe and gained a daughter at the hands of that same tribe. The future of their family and ranch rests in the hands of Kayce and Monica, who defers to her husband to determine the family’s future, a departure from her original position and nice arc for her character. The two factions began as mortal enemies united in Kayce’s marriage to Monica in the form of their son, Tate. In the end, they were united in their desire to protect the land from development. To protect the west.

The complaint by those referenced in the headline is that the finale was an insult to the Duttons and wokery gave the land back to the tribe. Some cited Elsa’s use of the word “rape” and misattribute it to mean the Duttons, and not the developers. These people clearly didn’t watch the series, or any of the prequels, and miss the point.

The land in this series is a character itself, much in the way the Stanley Hotel was in Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining.” The Duttons were stewards. They wanted to protect their individualistic way of life without the ruination of big government development with all of its regulations. After John’s humble funeral Beth tells Rainwater “You are his protector now” — protector not just of her father’s grave, but of his ideals, of their land. It’s a full circle moment. It’s strange, because we don’t get a lot of stories that end in unity and I think some don’t know how to recognize it or interpret it when it happens.

Overall, I liked the series. Rip and Beth were the characters that kept me coming back. Cole Hauser and Kelly Reilly were perfectly cast. Maybe it wasn’t for everyone. I liked it. I also like Sheridan’s other programs: “Lioness,” “Landman,” Mayor of Kingstown,” Tulsa King,” and his film “Sicaro.” It wasn’t “woke.” Far from it. They blasted climate change, big government, reckless spending, identity politics, feminism, and “wokery” regularly. It’s a shortsightedness typically reserved for leftists to see less than two minutes of a series and from it, falsely proclaim that it’s “woke.” We don’t need anyone on the right overreacting to imaginary offenses and purposefully misleading people because they’ve become as sensitive as the wokescolds on the left.

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