As Kevin Costner’s John Dutton says, “This war is just beginning.”
Kevin Costner’s John Dutton continues to be a peripheral figure in the new Yellowstone season 5, part 2 trailer, which arrived Tuesday morning in explosive fashion. Though we know Costner isn’t returning for the next batch of episodes, coming to Paramount Network on Nov. 10, his character still has some foreboding words: “This war is just beginning.”
So much goes down in this 84-second teaser, which is a nice illustration of what the cast said a few months ago, how “a lot is going to happen in a very short amount of time.”
Rip (Cole Hauser) is determined to protect the Dutton ranch if it means laying down his own life. (Hopefully he doesn’t, since it seems that character is fundamental to the continuation of Yellowstone, if it indeed does continue.) Beth (Kelly Reilly) is feeling the fatigue of fighting so hard to preserve the family legacy, but she still has a lot of fight in her as evidenced by throwing Sarah (Dawn Olivieri) into a table later on in the footage.
We also see Kayce (Luke Grimes) making a blood pact with Chief Rainwater (Gil Birmingham), who separately meets with Mo (Mo Brings Plenty) and forebodingly declares, “This is the hill we die on.”
There’s lot of shady dealings in the dark of night: someone gets pushed off a hill, Rip sets a car on fire, Kayce looks like the unabomber in a black hoodie, etc. Meanwhile, Jamie (Wes Bentley) is in a forever state of “going through it.”
Reilly recently told Entertainment Weekly that Costner’s absence as the Dutton patriarch “was part of the ending” series creator Taylor Sheridan had planned. “That’s not something that we had to pivot, that was already written into the tapestry of the story. It was always going to happen, it just happened a little bit differently.” So even with the delays in production for these season 5B episodes and even with Costner declaring to the world that he wouldn’t return, it seems largely still the story they wanted to tell.
In a behind-the-scenes video that dropped in September, the cast explained how there was so much secrecy involved with these episodes this time around. “We get these redacted scripts,” Jen Landon, who plays Teeter, said at the time. “Basically everything is blacked out, except for your lines.”
It will all finally be revealed when the episodes begin to drop Nov. 10 at 8 p.m. ET/PT on Paramount Network. Watch the trailer above.