NOTE: this post contains spoilers for Yellowstone season 5 premiere.
US Election night was on November 8, but the Yellowstone season 5 premiere took us back to it, as John Dutton (Kevin Costner) is elected governor (who else is happy we skipped the campaign trail?). But while Beth (Kelly Reilly) is crying tears of joy over the win, John is miserable, expressing not only his resentment for the job (which he will repeat a lot during the episode) but that this doesn't magically make things easier.
If anyone rivals John's claim as the most miserable man in the room (if not the state), it's Jamie (Wes Bentley). He had dreams of being the next governor, but John nixed that and now he's back as attorney general with Beth watching him like a hawk.
While John gives his acceptance speech alongside Lynelle Perry (Wendy Moniz), who won her race for the US Senate, Caroline (Jackie Weaver) fumes over the result. However, her colleague Ellis (John Emmet Tracy) notices Jamie's low demeanor, recognizing he may be a weak link. Caroline tells him to call in someone named Sarah Atwood, "it’s time to take the gloves off" with the Duttons.
Before we pick up with the scene after the election, we get our first flashback of Yellowstone season 5. Young Beth (Kylie Rogers) and young Rip (Kyle Red Silverstein) go on a date, at least that's what it started out as. At the bar, Beth flirts to get served despite being underage, which Rip is bothered by. She argues she uses men to her advantage and basically too bad if Rip doesn't like it. He leaves and heads back to the ranch, but waits for her there. However, Beth ran into other Yellowstone ranch hands and as they get back, right in front of Rip, she pulls one of them into the back seat.
In the present, Beth wakes up at the ranch and offers Rip (Cole Hauser) a blanket apology for anything she did in the past to hurt him. Rip doesn’t want to hear it. He knows she has a big heart, but sometimes her brain gets in the way. He asks her to do two things: find someone else to fight (easy enough for someone like Beth) and find something that makes her happy (not vodka).
Down in Helena, John is getting ready to be inaugurated, but first meets with Lynelle. He admits he has no intention of running for re-election, which she says actually gives him a huge leg up because he doesn't need compromise to curry favor for another run; that he can build a "legal wall" around Montana to keep it the way it is for the next 100 years.
When it comes time for John to be inaugurated, all audio is dropped as the national anthem is being sung except for a bit of the show's score and the ominous ringing of a bell. Things go back to normal when it's time for John to be sworn in, though he takes one last pause, possibly debating if there is any way out, before going along with the ceremony.
In his speech, he says his first act as governor will be to cancel funding for the Market Equities project and to raise property taxes, sales taxes and other government fees for non-residents.
In the audience at the inauguration is Thomas Rainwater (Gil Birmingham) and Angela Blue Thunder (Q’orianka Kilcher). Earlier in the episode, after Dutton is elected, Rainwater says the result is good for the land, but he isn't sure if it's good for them. Angela seems sure it's not, whispering in his ear at the ceremony that he could have stopped Dutton.
Not at the inauguration is Kacee (Luke Grimes), who is where he is almost certainly more comfortable, riding down a group of horse thieves trying to cross the border into Canada. It seems to be a coordinated effort to stop the thieves with the Canadian forces, but Kacee rides (ever so briefly) on Canadian soil. Upset, the Canadian forces want to trade prisoners for the horses that crossed, but Kacee holds his ground and gets them to release the horses.
On the way back to the Yellowstone ranch for the Governor's Ball, John rides with Beth and Jamie. As the two bicker over policies and their general dislike for each other, John says this is all Jamie's fault, it should have been him as governor, but his actions didn't allow John to trust him. Not sparing himself, John says he has made a mess of his own family and that they all must make sacrifices now to protect the ranch that their family made sacrifices to found (RIP Elsa Dutton).
Thankfully, the Governor's Ball provides a bit of fun in the episode, as the Yellowstone cowboys are usually pretty good at that. However, Rip isn't having a good time. Sitting on a hill overlooking the festivities, he tells Beth it reminds him of Nero playing the fiddle as Rome burned, worried this new dynamic is ultimately going to cost John the ranch.
While John may not be happy to get started as governor, he probably would have preferred government bureaucracy to what happened on his first official day in office. After Kacee catches the horse thieves, he gets a call from Monica (Kelsey Asbille), she's in labor three weeks early. He tells her to head to the hospital and he'll meet her there. However, with Tate (Brecken Merrill) not being able to drive, she is forced to while having contractions. That, plus another distracted driver and a buffalo in the road, cause her to get into an accident.
John arrives at the hospital. Monica is alive with Kacee by her side and Tate just outside the room with a broken arm. Tate tells John he had a brother, but only for an hour. Kacee and Monica named the baby John.
Check out our Yellowstone season 5 episode 2 recap here, which also debuted on November 13. New episodes of Yellowstone release weekly.
