Larry McMurtry was a literary inspiration for writer-director Taylor Sheridan, who took a page from the miniseries adaptation of that late author’s Lonesome Dove by scattering the harsh terrain with the bodies of its most beloved characters in the Paramount+ 101 Studios MTV Entertainment series.
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The final 1883 episode, titled “This Is Not Your Heaven,” opens with the worsening of the wound suffered by Elsa. In steering away from her family the Lakota warriors hellbent on revenge for the murders of most of its tribe, Elsa took an arrow to the abdomen that pierced her liver and went right through her body.
Even with the arrow removed, the trauma set a ticking death clock in motion — Lakota warriors dip their arrow tips in animal manure to causes fatal infections to the wearer — which could snuff out Elsa’s bright light forever.
Sheridan’s 10-episode odyssey, about the push to Montana by the ancestors ofYellowstone s Dutton clan, saw the death of the show’s bright young narrator, Elsa Dutton (Isabel May), the grizzled Pinkerton agent Shea Brennan (Sam Elliott), and most of the European settlers who made the trip from Fort Worth, Texas in a ragtag wagon train caravan.
While there has been speculation of another season with this iteration of the Duttons once they arrived in Montana, a conversation that follows here with Sheridan that can only make you think, don’t hold your breath. He is only interested in picking up the Dutton story as a new cycle of shows taking place in the years of the Depression.
James (Tim McGraw) and Margaret Dutton (Faith Hill) began to come to grips with the knowledge that their spirited daughter probably will not survive. They’ve resolved to keep that news from their still optimistic daughter, and to settle and build their homestead wherever Elsa perishes. The young woman fights off the fever and blinding headaches, and is on horseback until she collapses when they reach a fort where hopefully a surgeon can help.
There, the Duttons learn there is no surgeon, and that the fort has been taken over by the owners of the soon to be built railroad. Meaning, the young soldiers guarding it are colleagues of the badge-wearing deputies who massacred the Lakota campsite and stole their horses.
And since those murderers were gunned down by Dutton, Shea and Thomas (LaMonica Garrett, who puts down one deputy with a short speech inspired by the one Clint Eastwood makes to Gene Hackman before sending him to hell in Unforgiven), they’d better exit the premises quickly or risk winding up on the wrong end of a hangman’s noose.
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Says John Dutton to wife Margaret: “We can’t wait it out here. Ain’t no doctor can help her. Nobody can. And we ain’t gonna lay her to rest here. We keep heading North. Where she dies is where we stay. She’ll be with us. And you can visit her anytime you want.” Says Margaret, “Oh, I’ll be there, every day. Until you put me in the ground, right beside her.”
All the while you’re thinking, Sheridan’s not really going to kill Elsa and Shea, is he? If you watched the Season 1 finale of Mayor of Kingstown, or many episodes of Yellowstone, or his movies from Sicario to Wind River and Hell or High Water, you might recall he has proven to be as unsparing and unsentimental storyteller as McMurtry and Cormac McCarthy. Death is always a main character.
That is why his 1883 scripts drew guest stars like Tom Hanks and Billy Bob Thornton. And there in the finale there is Graham Greene — best remembered from Dances with Wolves — in a small but key role as he happens upon the Duttons and tries to save Elsa with a cold-water plunge to stop the bleeding.
While it only slows what is coming, the chief tells James Dutton where to go to bury his daughter and rebuild his life, pointing the way but with the caveat that seven generations up the road, his tribe will take back that land.
From there, it becomes a race against sepsis and fever, and it is played out with high emotion and sadness. Particularly as Elsa realizes her father lied when he told her she would recover. His sole focus becomes finding her final resting place, and they make that final trip alone.
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