1923 Recap: No Room for Miracles

From its dust-caked outset, 1923 has been building toward a few events that will feel oh-so-incredibly satisfying when they finally hit: a wedding on the range; Teonna’s escape, however she makes it; Spencer’s homecoming; a war that may devastate the Duttons though we can be sure they’ll win it. We know they win because the series Yellowstone exists, but even for viewers who’ve so far resisted the gravelly charms of latter-day Kevin Costner, there’s this series’ doleful narration. Elsa reminds us time and again how the Duttons live to suffer. For Duttons, the scope of a man is the size of his fight.

This applies to the Dutton women, too. “War and the Turquoise Side” opens with Cara in her Sunday dress — the cornflower blue one she saves for trips to town — standing in the kitchen. Her husband’s blood drips from her table to the floor, hitting the floor with the eerie dependability of a metronome. The subtext is clear: Time moves relentlessly forward. Even when it feels like it should stop entirely, the minutes tick — or pulse, or drip — by. Cara runs to the fields to scream in agony at all that’s happened since the family departed Bozeman in last week’s episode, then collects herself to go clean up. She wrings her husband’s spilled blood into a rusty bucket. Even when it feels like time should stop entirely, a woman’s work never ceases.

She’s a loyal bride, our Cara, intent on following Jacob’s last orders, which are, basically, to shut up about what’s happened. Don’t tell the sheriff in pursuit of justice, and don’t send a posse in pursuit of revenge. Shore up resources. Recall Spencer from the bush, though that may take months or even a year. While I hoped this strategy might also include Zane and Jack Weekend at Bernie’s–ing Jake Dutton’s corpse to the Livestock Commission offices, Cara is going to attend meetings in his stead.

Also, crucially, there is no corpse. Jacob remains on death’s door, but he has yet to pass through it. He spends the hour bedridden in fits of restless sleep. Zane doubts he’ll make it, but Cara remains true. She’s a cradle Catholic, raised on potatoes and Hail Marys. She catches herself talking to God when she doesn’t know what else to do. Emma, on the other hand, has no hope left. Her husband is barely dead before she picks up a spade to dig the grave herself. Chores, again, in the face of despair. These women don’t know a life without keeping busy, and now they’ll teach that gospel to Elizabeth. She and Jack survive their bullet wounds to find that Elizabeth’s mother — freshly made a widow by Banner’s men — now objects to the union. Lizzie is forced to choose between Jack and the hardscrabble life of a rancher’s wife and her mother and a New York–bound train back to an enchanted land of gin rickeys. Like a good Taylor Sheridan heroine, she chooses frontier freedom.

Banner has proven himself a deadly foe, but a shepherd is still low man on the Montana totem pole. That said, Jake’s not top dog either. That distinction belongs to Big Sky Country’s gold miners. Knowing that the Duttons will be building an army to protect the Yellowstone from vultures, Banner makes a one-sided deal with a man who thinks even less of him than Jake does. “Killing a king doesn’t make you a king,” Mr. Moneybags tells Banner. “It makes you an assassin.”

Despite mutual misgivings, though, the mining magnate and the Scotsman reach a deal that strikes me as most unfavorable. Banner will get the money to assemble an army to wrest the Dutton land and, if he is lucky enough to survive that battle, which he absolutely will not be, he wins the right to … wait for it … continue herding sheep? A grueling and un-lucrative line of work in which he has so far found himself incredibly unhappy? Meanwhile, Mr. Moneybags maintains the rights to all mineral deposits on the land, which is all the land really has to offer right now. We already know it doesn’t have any grass.

Plus, even if Banner wins and survives the battle for the Yellowstone, which he can and will not, he’s still fucked. He has shaken hands with a bad man. Ranchers and even shepherds work the land. But if you rape the land — if you only extract from it and never tend to it — you are a bad man. This is Taylor Sheridan morality, and I am here for it. Mr. Moneybags tells Banner he’ll end him if he ever lies, but Banner has inadvertently told his backer two fibs already: that both Jake Dutton and his nephew Jack are dead.

Emboldened by their deal with the devil, the sheepherders steal the cattle the Duttons moved up the mountain, leaving a few more dead cowboys in their wake. Jacob didn’t whisper a plan for what happens when the war won’t wait for the good son’s return. Bad news travels at a gallop around here, which means Cara — a woman! — is forced to talk her trigger-happy nephew down from urgent revenge. Luckily, Jake gains consciousness just in time to make sure a woman doesn’t really have to take the reins. He tells her to let the stolen cattle go; it’s human lives they can’t afford to lose now. Not until Spencer gets here. Spencer, who has survived a world war and the big five game. Spencer, on whom the Yellowstone’s fate depends. Spencer, who steals from the rich and gives to the poor. Spencer, the caped crusader. Spencer, man of steel.

From now on, all time will be split in two. There is the time before Spencer’s return, in which Duttons were men and men were vulnerable and a time after Spencer, in which Duttons will apparently be remade into gods and gods are bulletproof, not to mention financially solvent. The shift between these epochs is expected to occur roughly a year from now. As we’re presently on the cusp of a monthlong break from episodes, I’m guessing much of that year will pass without us watching.

Needless to say, Cara is the talk of the livestock commission meeting when she shows up with the news that Jacob is busy hunting cattle ranchers in Wyoming and that she — a woman! — will be running the show. She might not be as eager for war as her nephew, but she’s also not as complacent as her husband. She uses Banner’s nefarious handiwork, including the killing of Elizabeth’s father, to force a vote on giving agents of the livestock commission policing powers, which I presume means weapons, too. By the time Spencer makes his way home, there will be no need for vigilante justice. Cattle ranchers will all be cops.

Whatever God saved Jacob Dutton’s life is not alive at the missionary school. After a one-episode reprieve, we resume Teonna’s terrible storyline, with its abusive nuns and their wicked torture of the week. On this grim afternoon, they’re forcing girls to pick fruit from thorny bushes without the use of gloves for no reason except that they have a clever retort for complainers: If Jesus could cope with a crown of them, you can pick a few berries. Teonna again becomes violently rebellious, which is again punished with more violence until something unexpected happens.

As per usual, Sister Mary is slapping her charge across the face with a wooden ruler when the ordinarily temerarious Teonna begs to be saved. It’s both what I would have personally done ASAP and something I never thought I’d see from Teonna. The nuns cut off her braid and start reading to her from the Bible, a book that will forever be associated with the worst period of her life.

Teonna’s back is now exposed by her messy bob, so the nuns scrub their newest convert’s naked skin with steel wool. (I cannot confirm whether this exact form of violence was used in reservation schools, because an attempt to research that fact was met with some of the darkest news stories I’ve lately seen.) Teonna, of course, does not really want to be saved. She just wants her enemies to sleep soundly in their underestimation of her. In the dead of night, she beats Mary to near death with the Good Book before finishing the job with her hands. RIP Jennifer Ehle. Then, Teonna brands Mary’s cold, dead cheek with a hot ruler, for style points. Even if she gets caught on the run from this crime, she’ll have one last gulp of freedom.

On the range, the whole world seems to hang on Spencer’s arrival, but when we’re in Africa, the countdown feels more like a doomsday clock. The second his aunt’s letter reaches him is the moment Spencer’s bliss ends. He and Alexandra are honeymooning — or something like it — on the Indian Ocean, enjoying the white sand beaches and each other’s bodies. And yet I was distracted entirely with worry for Alex. Sunblock is still 15 years from existence. Instead of finding it hot to watch two hot people have sex on the beach, I found myself scanning the nearby foliage for the aloe they’re soon to need.

Their whole world is the two of them now. They make love, they rest, they talk, they make love. Some of what they discuss is the hardest stuff; Alex lost a brother to the same war that cost Spencer his soul. Some of it is fanciful, the half-serious what-ifs of new romance: Where should we live? Will my parents like you? Why do you carry a stack of unopened letters that bear another woman’s name?

That’s right! Spencer. Does. Not. Read. Cara’s. Letters. He hasn’t since long before the war ended. He tells Alex he couldn’t bear the invasion of real life; it’s the kind of hopeful distraction that gets a person killed. Now, though, he neglects them out of guilt. The man they were written to — the Spencer who left the ranch to serve his country — no longer exists.

Luckily, Alex is intent on fixing up this fixer-upper, and they make short work of Cara’s back catalog. She reads the letters aloud to their addressee, inadvertently meeting his family through these private and occasionally painful missives. Cara writes beautiful accounts of personal tragedies and hilarious accounts of Jack’s pratfalls. Jack’s courtship with Elizabeth gets particularly warm focus, and Cara reveals herself to be a woman whose life bursts with love for those around her.

Spencer has fallen asleep by the time Alexandra reaches the last letter in the neat stack, the one Cara wrote in haste, the one she told Zane to keep clean of Jake’s blood for her. Spencer’s been carrying it around with him maybe for months by the time he hears the desperate plea she’s written inside it.

Earlier in the episode, Alexandra asks Spencer to vow that life will always be an adventure. He doesn’t quite manage it, though. He says only that it will never be dull — a sentiment that feels nearby but evades the promise of fun.

All those inevitable events that 1923 has been teasing still don’t quite land on “War and the Turquoise Side.” Jack and Elizabeth reaffirm their intent to marry but don’t do it. Teonna is on the verge of escape, but we never glimpse her beyond the schoolhouse. The war is coming and coming and coming. Spencer is as close as he’s ever been to coming home, but he still hasn’t asked Alex to board the ship with him to the once-new world.

And my guess is that he’ll never have to. Cara herself has inadvertently compelled Alex to Montana with her rich and vivid account of pioneer freedom, not to mention the people waiting there to become her family. What happens next won’t feel like an adventure the way African safaris and private beaches do, but they won’t be dull. Home on the range is so far enchanting as it is exacting, but it’s never ever dull.

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