Yellowstone Feels Like Taylor Sheridan's Diss Track for Kevin Coster

[Warning: The following contains spoilers for Yellowstone Season 5, Episode 13, "Give the World Away." Read at your own risk!]

This week's episode of Yellowstone — the penultimate episode of the season and possibly the series — might as well have been called "Taylor Sheridan's Revenge." In fact, this whole back half of Season 5 could take that title, starting with John Dutton's assassination — a hit staged to look like a suicide, all because he canceled a land lease that would have allowed for airport construction on his land. That death was bad enough, but with every episode, the final episodes of Yellowstone are feeling more and more like a personal vendetta. One might think that all the alleged scheduling issues between Sheridan and Kevin Costner, which Costner cited as his reason to not appear in this half of the season, had created such bad blood between them that Sheridan needed to find a way to really stick it to the character Costner played for four and a half seasons. Now, Sheridan almost appears to be gloating on screen. 

In case you forgot what happened, Yellowstone ended the first half of its fifth season in early January 2023. At that point, John was the governor of Montana, but was only interested in preserving his own personal land. He had just started kissing Summer Walker (Piper Perabo), the vegan activist who was imprisoned (via some really sketchy house arrest) in his house. Rip (Cole Hauser) and some of the other ranch hands were taking a bunch of horses and cattle to Texas. Monica (Kelsey Asbille) and Kayce (Luke Grimes) were put in charge of the ranch while Beth (Kelly Reilly) and Jamie (Wes Bentley) had declared that they were going to kill one another. 

More on Yellowstone:

• Everything we know about Yellowstone Season 5 Part 2
• How to watch Yellowstone
• More shows like Yellowstone
• Fun facts about Yellowstone

Finishing Season 5 faced quite a few hurdles, including the SAG and WGA strikes for a large chunk of 2023, but production didn't immediately resume when the strikes were over. Sheridan hadn't written new episodes yet, and so Costner's attempts to simultaneously work on his passion project, a theatrical western epic called Horizon: An American Saga, were also stalled. He planned to pause Horizon to go back to Yellowstone in May 2024, but found there was still no script. He told GQ that throughout Yellowstone's run, "We very rarely started when we said we would and we didn't finish when we said we would." That pattern became much harder to deal with for Costner when Horizon became a reality. He had been trying to get it made since 1988, and was co-writer, director, executive producer, and star, which meant he couldn't really deal with wishy-washy scheduling.

Sheridan blamed the involvement of lawyers for the deterioration of their working relationship and insisted they had tried to work things out. Costner claimed he didn't quit, and that it simply became an impossible situation. In June 2024, Costner announced that he wouldn't be returning for the back half of the season, despite how much he loved the show. 

Soon after, Horizon debuted in theaters and was a box office flop. It was such a disappointment that the second movie was pulled from a theatrical release and has yet to come out at all, but that wasn't enough humiliation for Costner apparently, given how Sheridan has handled these final episodes. 

The Yellowstone creator is not only the sole writer of the series, but he also plays Travis Wheatley, the arrogant horse trainer who only shows up when somebody — be it a horse or a person — needs some wrangling. Last week, he learned the news of John's death from Rip, then informed Jimmy (Jefferson White) that his hero had died. This week, the entire Yellowstone ranch needed some desperate financial help, so Beth begrudgingly took a last minute trip to Travis' grand Texas estate to ask him for a favor. 

What she found was a sort of stereotypical fever dream of masculinity, with Travis at the center. He was in the middle of a round of strip poker with a house full of women, most of whom were losing. His girlfriend, Sadie, was played by supermodel Bella Hadid in a black cowboy hat. Everyone in his orbit knows he's a bit of a jerk, but they don't care because he apparently just rides horses so well that all else can be forgiven. 

ALSO READ: The winter TV shows we're most excited to see

Travis then showed off his riding skills and managed to sell a horse for three million dollars, after which it was time to party. Beth interrupted the party (and Travis' plans to deep fry corn dogs) to ask Travis to come help out with an auction with hopes to get the ranch out of some debt. He made her play strip poker for it, but he pretty easily agreed to come help save the day. 

The auction itself was part auction, part funeral for both John and Colby (Denim Richards), and it was wildly successful. By the end of the episode, all of the Yellowstone stock had been sold, thanks to Travis. Rip was telling most of his ranch hands to look for new work. The whole thing ended with Kayce realizing that perhaps they could commit property tax fraud to save the ranch, and even if he does that, the integrity of that place is gone. John and everything John cared about has been destroyed, all thanks to Taylor Sheridan and Travis Wheatley. 

It's hard to say what would have happened to John Dutton if Sheridan weren't forced to write the character out of the show, but thematically, it should have always been this way. The question of what would happen to the ranch without John could never have been answered when John was around, and yet his death feels particularly cruel. John would be mortified to have been attacked while asleep and forced to shoot himself in the head in the governor's mansion, far away from the ranch he'd committed his entire being to, only for said ranch to then be torn apart chunk by chunk, with Sheridan gleefully swinging the wrecking ball. 

It feels as if the entire Dutton family is being punished for Costner's scheduling issues, and it has essentially destroyed one of the most popular shows on TV. John should have been killed off, but not like this. The show should end, but not like this. We should all be anticipating an epic series finale, but instead we're waiting to see if Kayce and Beth are going to commit tax fraud in an episode that Paramount Network hasn't even officially labeled as the series finale. (There's word that the show could continue on for Season 6.)

And if it's not actually the series finale and the show does end up continuing, what will the show even be? A tale of Rip buying new horses? Kayce and Monica decorating their house some more? Hopefully, Sheridan's got something exciting up his sleeve for the next episode, or he'll just end it like John and that horse in the pilot's opening scene. "I know you deserve better," he should say. "Best I can offer you is peace."

The season finale (and possible series finale) of Yellowstone airs Sunday, Dec. 15 at 8/7c on Paramount Network.