'Yellowstone' Season 4 Ending Explained: Keeping a Promise (2024)

Paramount’s modern Western melodrama Yellowstone closed out its fourth season with the Dutton family in an overall position of strength. This is a far cry from Season 3’s explosive cliffhanger. As revealed early on in the season, Jamie Dutton (Wes Bentley) learned that his biological father Garrett Randle (Will Patton) was responsible for the simultaneous attacks on John Dutton (Kevin Costner), Beth Dutton (Kelly Reilly) and Kayce Dutton (Luke Grimes).

This attack left John in a coma as Season 4 began, with the other characters dealing with the trauma of the attack in their own ways. Kayce’s wife Monica (Kelsey Asbille) and his son Tate (Brecken Merill) stay in hiding after Tate was forced to kill an attacker. Beth, now permanently scarred, manipulates her way into a high-level position at Market Equities, the firm now run by ruthless CEO Caroline Warner (Jackie Weaver). Meanwhile, Jamie exiles himself from the Yellowstone ranch and bonds with his birth father as he prepares to run for governor of Montana.

RELATED: ‘Yellowstone’ Season 4 Finale Sets Records With Over 10 Million Viewers

Up From Under

The once-besieged Duttons seemingly work through their collective trauma as quickly as we’ve come to expect from stoic cowboy types. However, Kayce realizes that Monica and Tate need a change of scenery. He moves his family off his father’s land and into a pleasant house. Soon Kayce communes with a visiting wolf, which leads Chief Thomas Rainwater (Gil Birmingham) and Mo Brings Plenty (Mo Brings Plenty) to recommend that he seek a vision to help him find answers.

Rip (Cole Hauser) and Beth have semi-adopted a foul-mouthed teen runaway named Carter (Finn Little), and put him to work mucking out the stables. Thanks to a sterilization she endured after an abortion as a teenager (which Jamie signed off on without her knowledge, causing her to bitterly hate him ever since), Beth cannot have children, making Carter the closest thing she’ll ever have to a son. She fights every maternal instinct to avoid becoming too attached to him.

John Dutton’s “friendship” with vegan hippie activist Summer Higgins (Piper Perabo) previously triggered an intense jealousy in Beth, revealing a rather disturbing streak of possessiveness toward her father. Beth manipulated Summer and her friends, directing them to protest a Market Equities building site. The protest became a melee and Summer unwisely pushed back against a federal officer. The authorities decide to make an example of her, and John’s extreme disapproval of Beth’s cruelty towards Summer nearly sends her off the ranch.

Spinning Off & Out

In the Season 4 finale, “Grass on the Streets and Weeds on the Rooftops,“ the former ne’er do well Jimmy (Jefferson White) returns from his extended stay at the 6666 ranch in Texas, a subplot which essentially served as an extended backdoor pilot for Yellowstone’s next spinoff, 6666. Jimmy’s arc on Yellowstone resolves with his blessing from John, his long-sought approval from Rip, and a choked-up, manly nod from Lloyd (Forrie J. Smith).

With this parallel (and distracting, and relatively uninteresting) storyline tied up, the finale catches up with Kayce, who has been fenced off in a field for at least several days in the show’s timeline. He receives visitors, in the form of his older brother Lee Dutton (the returning Dave Annable), who died in the series’ pilot. Lee gushes blood from his mouth and screams at Kayce to let him in: this is clearly a malevolent entity masquerading as his brother. Kayce receives other visions, until finally one last spirit (presumably the wolf who has been shadowing him) appears in the form of a young Native American girl. She shows Kayce diverging paths, representing choices that seem terrible all around. He tells Monica (who is pregnant with their second child) that he saw nothing less than “the end of us.”

Beth scams her way into a fake conjugal visit to meet face-to-face with Terrell Riggins (Bruno Amato), the convict who was Jamie’s biological father’s cellmate. The paper trail on the Dutton attack leads to Riggins, but when Beth shows up looking for answers, he claims he’s just a middleman, just like he told the “other guy.” The other guy is Jamie. Armed with this knowledge, Beth goes into kamikaze mode. She essentially kidnaps a priest and makes him marry her and Rip, with John, Clark, and Lloyd witnessing. She confronts Jamie, gun in hand, and gives him some unappealing options after he confirms that he knows Garrett ordered the hit. Beth gives him one final way out.

Endgame

After a speech that manages to distill much of Yellowstone’s clunky conservative politics into one bitter spiel, the judge in Summer’s case gives her a 37-and-a-half-year sentence, which makes her eligible for parole after 14 years. Summer, who had changed her plea to guilty with the assertion that she’d get a 15-year suspended sentence, is gut-punched, and John is furious. He convinces the judge to commute most of it, but Summer Higgins will still spend a chunk of time behind bars, all for the crime of being a vegan activist from a blue state.

Jamie finds Garrett packed and ready to hit the road. His father understands that if Jamie is really going to run for governor, the truth about his paternity will be a liability. In the penultimate episode, John Dutton and Garrett finally had their scene together, and it crackled with everything left unsaid. Garrett previously claimed that he killed Jamie’s birth mother to protect Jamie, but Garrett and John’s history seemed to simmer with all kinds of resentment. Both men wanted to lay claim to Jamie Dutton, and when Jamie raises the gun and kills his biological father, perhaps we finally see the Dutton mark win over.

However, when Jamie dumps Garrett’s body just over the Wyoming state line, Beth is waiting there to take a picture with her phone. She and John own Jamie now, and this was her design, not her father’s. The Season 4 finale does find the Duttons relatively stronger than they were in Season 3’s explosive finale, but they perhaps cannot yet fathom the costs that brought them there. Yellowstone often skirts any moralizing when it comes to the Duttons’ often monstrous behavior, but “Grass on the Streets and Weeds on the Rooftops” perhaps sets the stage for a coming reckoning.