SPOILER ALERT! This story contains details from the season two premiere of 1923 on Paramount+.
The long-awaited return of the Yellowstone prequel finally arrived Sunday, though it appears as if it could be a while before Brandon Sklenar’s Spencer Dutton makes it home to his beloved Montana.
The episode titled “The Killing Season” kicks off with the camera panning the snow-covered ranch made famous in Yellowstone, with Helen Mirren’s Cara Dutton narrating a letter to her son Spencer about how it’s up to him to rebuild their little corner of the world after it’s been plagued with burdensome taxes. Cara and Jacob (Harrison Ford) are gutting out the winter while impatiently awaiting Spencer’s return with their son Jack (Darren Mann) and his wife Elizabeth (Michelle Randolph, last seen traipsing around in a bikini on Landman). Things are so grim that even a lion has taken refuge on the Dutton porch (more on that animal later).
And where exactly is Spencer? He’s toiling away on a slow boat to America, earning his keep by shoveling coal in the engine room where he meets a wobbly Italian chap named Lorenzo (George Gallagher) who ends up needing his protection services. A beefy baddo in the crews quarters has been secretly raping Lorenzo, so Spencer saves him and ends up getting his own private Don King in the process. Lorenzo raises money for them both by finding onboard fights for Spencer to win.
Back in Bozeman, we get a look at just how repugnant the local villain Donald Whitfield (Timothy Dalton) really is: he likes to hire hookers to abuse for his sexual satisfaction. Whitfield was introduced in season one as a greedy mining baron who has his eye on every last acre in Paradise Valley, including the Dutton ranch. Season 1 ended with Whitfield paying the Duttons’ property taxes with the expectation that they’ll pay him back by the end of the year or have to surrender the ranch.
And somewhere in the wilderness, Teonna Rainwater (Aminah Nieves) remains free from her Catholic captors by traveling with her father, Runs His Horse (Michael Spears), but Father Renaud (Sebastian Roché) is still hot on her trail. For now, she’s in bliss — thanks to her burgeoning romance with Pete Plenty Clouds (Jeremy Gauna, who replaced the late Cole Brings Plenty).
As for Spencer’s long lost love Alex (Julia Schlepper), she’s holed up in a room somewhere in England, lamenting how time is running out because she’s pregnant and needs to reunite with the father of her unborn child. With help from a pal named Jennifer, Alex books passage to New York where she’ll supposedly seek passage to Montana. She’s no doubt in for quite a journey, herself.
The episode ends back where it began — with a tiger on the porch of the Dutton home, this time threatening to jump on Elizabeth who just went outside to get some sun. Cara shoots him dead, with Isabel May’s Elsa saying in voiceover that “winter is the killing season, and the hungers among us seek out the weak, the foolish. Only the strongest among nature’s creatures survive it.”
