“A Dream and a Memory” (Season Finale)

Taylor Sheridan didn’t need 8 episodes to conclude 1923. Like firing both barrels of Spencer Dutton’s big elephant gun, he just made this Episode 7 finale louder. Is this series, as one chapter of the Dutton family’s nearly 150-year western saga, truly over? Sheridan’s quotes from 2022 say yes. But we’ll put aside determining the future of television (or anything else) and focus on immediate Sheridan-O-Verse outcomes for 1923’s characters. Because they’ve been put through it, and if this is the end, not everyone makes it out. 

Cara, whose defense of the land began 1923, picks off Whitfield’s gunmen from her overwatch position at the house. “Of all the things I’ve had to do for this ranch” – she cocks the rifle and checks the scope – “this takes the bloody cake.”

The final battle of the Dutton-Whitfield War takes place on two fronts, as dozens of Whitfield’s killers descend on the ranch and the showdown at the station erupts into violence. But we’ve gotta clarify who’s on that train. It’s Spencer and Alexandra, together. Because in her luxury vehicle snow tomb, Alex used the accoutrements of her dead companions to make fire. When that ran out, she burned Spencer’s letters. And when she finally shouted accusations at an absent Almighty God – “You give us a child…drag me through Hell…to freeze here?” – it was her husband’s train which appeared on the track her car had followed. For the second time this season, Spencer leapt from a train, this time to rescue his wife from the creeping grip of ice-cold death. Reunited and it feels so good…except for Alexandra’s necrotic extremities, her digits blackened from frostbite.  

In the Sheridan-O-Verse, those who are noble and determined see their way through. But they don’t always keep living outside of memory. After the ordeals of her journey, after she made it from Oxfordshire to Montana despite everything, after she and Spencer finally embraced for the first time in months, and their baby boy – “I’ll name him John,” she said – was born three months premature in a Bozeman hospital, Alexadra Dutton died from her injuries. In their final hours together, Alex told Spencer she could not have lived as a mother who chose her own life over a child’s. She was never a dreamer, she was a doer. And she would rather their son lived to create reality from his own dreams than for her to survive in some broken, permanently abbreviated form. Spencer stayed with his wife overnight, as John Dutton II slept on her chest. And in the morning, he felt her lifeless form in the same moment he sensed their son’s living breath.

Was the romantic sweep of their just-in-time reunion and the brief reestablishment of Julia Schlaepfer and Brandon Sklenar’s winning chemistry as Alex and Spencer worth it? Some will certainly see Alexandra’s death as the biggest loss, a sellout of the series faithful. But if we’re talking Taylor Sheridan’s writing, doesn’t it also feel natural? In Texas, after Marshal Mamie Fossett catches up with Teonna Rainwater and learns about the ghastly Indian School conditions that forced her to kill, a court magistrate dismisses the murder charges against the young woman. No witnesses to any of it are alive. Teonna fought back, at the cost of her dignity, her family, and her love for Pete Plenty Clouds. And though she leaves Texas free, with a horse and a hat and a rifle, otherwise, the price was nearly everything. But to fight was Teonna’s only option, just like fighting to a righteous sacrifice was for Alexandra. “War isn’t a metaphor for this family,” Alex told Spencer after the gunfight on the train platform in Livingston. The fighting spirit in the heart of Taylor Sheridan’s characters lives on, even if their own lives and a happy ending aren’t guaranteed.

After Alex passed, Spencer placed his infant son in Cara’s arms and turned to Jacob. “I wanna meet the man who killed my wife,” he said, and Donald Whitfield soon answered for all of his Dutton murdering, sadistic rich guy sex-having, and planning to violate Paradise Valley land for generations with a bullet in the head from Spencer’s gun. (Spencer also killed Lindy, Whitfield’s sadist-in-training, when she came at him with a kitchen knife.) The culmination of the Dutton-Whitfield War was the wealthy instigator’s payment upon death and the burning of his mansion to the ground, a show of force from the locals designed to deter any more Whitfield-like robber barons from coming around, at least for a decade or ten.   

While Jacob and Sheriff McDowell handled the roustabouts sent to Livingston, including Banner Crieghton, who was killed in the battle despite a late-in-the-game realization of Whitfield’s pure evil, Cara and Zane and the 1920s Bunkhouse Boys successfully held off their attackers until Spencer arrived at the ranch. And with his .416-caliber double rifle, which traveled all the way from the grasslands of Africa to the grasslands of Montana, he shot through three bad guys at once and rendered a Thompson gunner headless. During the battle, the ranch almost got knocked over. It almost burned to the ground. But like most trouble that comes the Dutton fam’s way, they were able to save it by fighting together to overcome.

So what’s left? Jacob and Cara, helping to raise another Dutton in their (finally) peaceful golden years, as Spencer builds a new herd from wild cattle he gathered in the shadows and crags of the Crazy Mountains. Elizabeth departs the ranch to rejoin her family Back East. With the slaying of Jack Dutton, her prophecy – “Death is the only thing you can catch out here” – scared her away permanently from a life she never truly took to, even if she did grab a shotgun and help defend the ranch. And Elizabeth is technically still pregnant, even if that is not mentioned in her somewhat cold farewell with Cara.

It feels fitting that the ultimate final word on 1923 comes from the ageless narration of Elsa Dutton, who fills in the resulting lore. According to her, “Spencer never remarried.” And 45 years after he interred Alexandra in the soil of the Paradise Valley, “my young brother joined her.” Baby John Dutton II, we can assume, lived to become the father of John Dutton III, aka Kevin Coster’s character in Yellowstone. And though he didn’t remarry, Elsa does also mention Spencer “took the comfort of a widow and made another boy,” which feels like a purposeful loose end, in case the Duttons’ television genealogy ever requires a bit of genetic finesse. After everything, all of the ordeals and all of the fighting, 1923 ends with the memory of Alexandra, the shooting star who captured the hunter-warrior’s heart. Her death created the dream of generations of new life. 

Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social) is a Chicago-based writer. A veteran of the alternative weekly trenches, his work has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork, The All Music Guide, and The Village Voice.