Is ‘Yellowstone’ Really Ending? ‘This Last Batch of Episodes Leads Us to the End of an Era,’ Exec Producer Says

SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers from the Season 5, Episode 11 episode of “Yellowstone,” “Three Fifty-Three,” which premiered Sunday, Nov. 24 on Paramount Network.

In the wake of Sunday night’s bloody episode of “Yellowstone,” director and executive producer Christina Alexandra Voros has revealed that the final three episodes of this season will lead to an ending — one that could be the final bow for the series.

“I think this last batch of episodes leads us to the end of an era,” she says. “It’s impossible to talk about it in any detail without tipping my hat towards things to come. But I think [co-creator and writer] Taylor [Sheridan] has managed to — and I’m really not sure how he’s done it, I think it’s sort of masterful — bring the ending to something that feels both shocking and fated at the same time. You need to get to the end of the story to fully understand everything that has come before.”

While it hasn’t been officially confirmed that this second half of Season 5 will be the end of “Yellowstone,” the season was initially positioned as the show’s last. That said, after Kevin Costner’s departure as Dutton family patriarch John, Variety reported in August that Kelly Reilly, who plays Beth, and Cole Hauser, who plays Rip, were in negotiations to star in a sixth season of the show.

As for what the next (and potentially final) three episodes will include?

“I think you can expect to see characters who feel like they don’t have very many options searching and fighting to find a way through,” Voros says. “What’s set up in Episode 511 is everyone feels like they’ve hit a dead end. Jamie [Wes Bentley] has lost his partner in crime, and he is on the verge of losing his political name. Beth and Kayce [Luke Grimes] don’t have a plan as to how to fix this. The best that they can hope for, as Beth says to Rainwater [Gil Birmingham], is holding on to some portion of the land and selling off some portion of it. But because John’s goal and dictate was not to sell any of it, anything short of that is a failure, not carrying on their father’s will, letting down generations of family members who have fought for and protected this place. You see them up against the very stark reality that they don’t have any moves to make to keep that from happening.”

Voros also discussed how the slap fight between Jamie and Sarah (Dawn Olivieri) — immediately followed by Sarah’s sudden assassination — became a key turning point for the show.

“Sarah being shot is so shocking because you’ve just come out of this deeply emotional scene where, amongst other things, you see a flicker of what is perhaps genuine human emotion in Sarah,” Voros says. “That has you going, ‘Oh, wait, does she really have feelings for him? Is this not just all a political ploy? Is she really upset by the fact she just got in a fight with her boyfriend?’ The reason that shock works is because you have set up the ramp to it in such a way that you’re not looking, you’re still thinking about what just happened, and then it hits you when you’re least expecting it.”

Voros adds that this violence is a key to the series’ endgame, which was fueled by John’s death and its seismic impact on his family.

“In many ways, this episode is about people getting hit by something when they’re least expecting it,” she says. “Whether it’s the hit on John’s life, whether it’s Beth and Kayce having to acknowledge the fact that while this may not be checkmate, it’s certainly check, and they don’t know what moves they have. It’s Kayce figuring out what happened to John and refusing to accept no for an answer, as they try to find the missing pieces to unlock the truth about what’s happened. That is the thematic heartbeat of this episode.”