“Yellowstone” just got real.
It’s odd to say that for a series that has largely been defined by its shocking (and wholly unexpected) twists and turns, especially since this half of the season began with the unceremonious death of family patriarch John Dutton (played by Kevin Costner). But Sunday night’s episode, titled “Three Fifty-Three” (named for Dutton’s time of death) and written by series creator Taylor Sheridan, was a doozy.
The episode contained all of the hallmarks of this half of the season so far – shifting time lines, characters on different (and separate) paths and everyone continuing to mourn John’s death. But there were also some big revelations that led to, ultimately, a jaw-dropping final scene.
TheWrap spoke to the episode’s director, Christina Alexandra Voros, about everything that happens in this episode – and where things could be headed from here.
Very big spoiler warning, up front. You do not want to have this ruined for you. Come back after you watch. This interview will still be here.
Let’s start at the beginning – Sarah Atwood (Dawn Olivieri) gets murdered by the same shadowy operatives she hired to kill John Dutton, disguised as a suburban couple. What was it like shooting that sequence?
The end of this episode is the kind of thing every director hopes to be lucky enough to get to wrestle with, because everything’s at play – Dawn and Wes [Bentley, who plays Jamie Dutton] have, from the moment she’s joined the show, been one of my favorite elements of the narrative, partially because you can never tell who’s playing whom, and partially because as actors, they level up with each other so beautifully, and every take is different, and they’re constantly searching and looking for different levels and subtext.
And I think Dawn did something really beautiful. The way she played her last moments in the story, because the scene with Jamie that happens before, it’s the first time we’ve seen her rattled, and it’s the first time we’ve seen her on the defense. It’s the first time we’ve seen her have to explain her actions to a doubting Jamie. She’s been this enchantress in his life and she has been this strong, clear force of no bullshit, direct action, and this is the first time one senses that something hasn’t worked out for her and she’s not on an even keel. She doesn’t know what to do, he doesn’t know what to do. I guess any relationship is tested in the most stressful moments of our lives.
I think there’s something she put into her performance during the fight scene that feels like more than just an agent manipulating their target. And you feel her own fear. You feel her own panic. And at the at the end of the scene that you know, the last few lines, she says to him, she is so affected by the violence, by the conversation, that you almost find yourself wondering, Wait, does she feel something for him? Is this a real fight between lovers? Is there a relationship that exists outside of this political sphere? You feel that she does this remarkable thing as she’s driving at the end, you feel the emotionality of it, and she’s not crying because Market Equities isn’t getting their airport. She’s crying because she’s just had a fight with someone that she’s in a relationship with. She’s also still trying to fix things. It’s so complex and nuanced what she has layered into that 10-minutes of screen time that it was just a joy to craft that with her and with Wes.
What’s particularly powerful is that it’s a moment or reconciliation that is then punctuated by this shocking violence. Was that all on the page, or did you discover anything in production?
It was meant to be shocking. I think what’s interesting about it is the fact that Sarah might have a heart is shocking, and you get wrapped up into the oh, wait, maybe they really care for each other. And then, right at the moment, and Taylor’s so good at doing that, you think you know something new, or you’ve been surprised by something, he will back up something onto that. You’re just catching up to the surprise of this new reality. And that’s when he strikes. There are a number of people who I know have seen this within our world who said it felt like a jump scare in a horror movie. Part of that is the way it’s shot, and part of it is because you just thought you got the big aha moment and it comes right up against it when you are least expecting it, because you’re still processing the other.
And at the very end, you feel like this apparatus that was utilized against John could swing back around and come for Jamie.
I think at the end of this, this episode is one that I really love, because it spends half the time resolving all the questions you’ve had up until this moment, and then balances it out by teeing off just as many questions moving forward. I know people have responded on both sides of the aisle to the flashbacks. I feel like Episode 11 is where time catches up to itself, and the flashbacks make sense, having gotten here in a way they didn’t along the way. You don’t really know why you’re there until you get to this episode, and it really does feel like the closing of a certain set of questions and the opening of a Pandora’s Box of new ones.
This really has everything, too, from the HGTV home renovation of Kayce’s cabin to seeing the siege on the governor’s mansion that ends in John’s death, to Kayce on the trail of the killers, which ultimately leads to the police ruling his death a homicide. Was it fun to hit on all those different aspects?
It really was. I mean, it checked all the boxes – you have the siege, you have the loss of Eden, you have this powerhouse moment for Gil Birmingham and Kelly [Reilly] and Mo [Moses Brings Plenty] and Luke [Grimes]. That scene with the four of them is one of my favorite scenes in the series. It is the acknowledgement of a loss that no one has ever been willing to accept. And you are seeing John Dutton’s two greatest warriors not put down their weapons, but acknowledge that they may have lost this war. We’ve not seen that. It’s not giving up, because they will continue trying to solve things. They aren’t relinquishing all hope. But there is a very firm acknowledgement of the fact that the cards have been stacked against them, and they don’t have many moves left. And I think Kelly’s moment with Gil on the porch is one of the most heartbreaking pieces of acting from both of them that I’ve seen in the series.
One of the more fascinating moments of the episodes is, following John’s murder, there is this psychic shockwave that goes out through the other members of the family. That could have been pretty hokey, but it has an unexpected emotional weight.
It’s interesting. That beat was something that reads seamlessly, and then when you get in to start doing it, you realize everyone’s having the same reaction at the exact instant. And unless you have five screens with five different stories going on, you can’t do that. The trick became, how do you expand that moment to leave space for everyone who feels it in a way that defies time? That’s what was tricky. And I think that the goal is that it feels like one shock wave that is moving through the family unit.
It ended up working very well that way, but there was definitely a difference in reading it on the page and then adding the temporal reality of, oh, well, it’s 3:52 here. It can’t be 3:52 there, because that scene was one minute, and now we’re here. There was a certain amount of poetry, and I credit our editors with really finding the way both to expand time and to jump back and forth in this racing siege, and then these moments that characters can’t really identify. There’s no way to articulate what that feeling feels like. I don’t know if you’ve ever felt it. I’ve felt it before. It’s the kind of thing that as soon as you try to put words to it, it stops making sense. Or like you said, sounds hokey, yeah, but it’s a very real thing. The goal became, how do you let the shock wave move through the family? As opposed to feeling like everyone’s had the shock wave and we’re just jumping back in time for each of them to feel it. And I think it ended up working really well.
Does this mean time is moving forward on the show from now on? Or should we expect more flashbacks?
I don’t want to tip my hat at anything moving forward, but I will say at this point, time has caught up with itself.
What about the sequence where we actually see John die? What was that like to shoot?
It was a lot of fun to do. I mean, the whole episode, all those nuances that you’re talking about are pivots you don’t always get to make, certainly not within one episode. This is the last moment we are with John Dutton. And he is, for all intents and purposes, alone. We don’t know who these people are who have intruded into his space. And to take a character who is so loved, so noble, so true. In his laser-focus, on his purity of purpose, there is a horrifying violation that you feel watching the way he dies. He deserved better. His iconic nature as the patriarch of the family is gutting. In a moment where his guard was down, in a situation no one could have imagined coming together, that something so simple and brutal and gruesome could transpire. And so the trick was to try to make you feel the immediacy of it, but also the last shot from a distance down that hallway was something very specifically written by Taylor. You’re supposed to jump back, and we’re the first one who feels the reverberation that goes through the family as the episode progresses. And finding the right frame to be the last moment of that the moment that it is all over, was intended to put you back far away and to take in the terrible tragedy of it. I think that episode 509 [the season 5B premiere], answers the what we know. We know what happens after the gunshot. We we’ve seen that. This is about the how. And as soon as that trigger is pulled, that question has been answered.
Was it important to have that at the beginning of the episode to establish who these people are – and what Jamie and Sarah have unleashed?
Absolutely. One of the things that I feel is really well done here, is for a bunch of people who are constantly on the lookout for danger, the Achilles heel needs to be something that one isn’t expecting. John certainly wasn’t expecting assassins to sneak into his bedroom, get him in a choke hold and stage his suicide. Nor did Sarah expect that she would be so immediately put at risk because of that. I also think, because it was such a specific technical thing and Taylor really does his research when it comes to these law enforcement maneuvers, it would be a very tricky thing to address in exposition. You couldn’t understand it. If you did, you wouldn’t feel it. I think you really need to witness what happened. Someone needs to be a witness to what happened. Kayce figures it out. Beth finds out. But the audience is the witness to what really transpires, and the audience is perhaps more aware of the specificity of the threat moving forward than the characters are themselves, because they’re still trying to unravel the mystery of it.
New episodes of “Yellowstone” air on Paramount Network on Sunday nights.
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