1883 ends heartbreaking season with a tearful farewell

While the internet has been abuzz with major events like the conflict in Ukraine and the season finale of HBO’s steamy teen drama “Euphoria”, elsewhere in the world of trending streaming dramas in Paramount+’s “1883”, the “Yellowstone” prequel from creator Taylor Sheridan which just wrapped its first season this past Sunday with a gut-wrenching episode that left many, myself included, in tears and acted as a proving point that Taylor Sheridan is unmatched at what he does.

While “Yellowstone” ended its fourth season with a wet fart to cap off a lackluster 10-episode run after being delayed and seemingly rewritten thanks to the pandemic, Sheridan premiered two dramas on the Paramount streaming service with “Mayor of Kingstown” and “1883”.

The latter tells the story of the Dutton Family on the Oregon Trail, showing how the dynasty came about their Montana land, and while the series started out making you think you had some general idea of how things would play out, the finale proved that the show was as unpredictable as the mighty and dangerous trail itself.

1883 did the heavy lifting that Yellowstone started out doing, with brooding and dark ruminations on the dangers of “life out here”, albiet under way different circumstances of course.

It led the audience to believe this would be a seemingly modest “road trip” series following Dutton patriarch James Dutton (Tim McGraw), his wife Margaret (McGraw’s real-life spouse Faith Hill), their son John Dutton, and their daughter Elsa Dutton (Isabel May) as they journeyed from Fort Worth to Oregon with a wagon train of (mostly) German immigrants, lead by two world-weary Pinkerton Agents played by Sam Elliot and LaMonica Garrett.

The show, quickly, threw those expectations on the side of the road to rot.

1883 is a show that was unflinching in its portrayal of how brutal and unforgiving the journey west, “Manifest Destiny” was for not only early-American settlers, but for the Native Americans as well. The untapped wilds of America were Hell, and the voice over narration from Elsa Dutton every episode never made us forget that.

In the show’s opening hours, Margaret's niece is killed by bandits and Margaret’s sister, devastated by grief, kills herself just outside of Fort Worth before the journey even gets underway. It was a brutal statement by the show. One that said “this isn’t a journey you want to go on.”

Of course we see the good and evil from everyone as the wagon train moves to Oregon. We see soldiers, of which James was one of during the Civil War as they are jaded and left abandoned by the U.S. government to man their decrepit forts that become tombstone markers of a world gone-by as the railroad takes over. We see white bandits and even white lawmen massacre and brutalize the Indigenous who are “in the way” of progress. We see young love too, of course. We see Elsa fall in love, we see her come into her own as a woman. We see the compassion and understanding that can happen on the journey.

In the penultimate episode, 1883 presents the audience with a plot development that devastates not only James and Maragret, but the viewer as well. Elsa, having been shot through the liver with an arrow during a misunderstood raid by an Indian war party, is going to die. The arrow was filthy, and if the infection doesn’t kill her the damage done to her liver will. Now, we see two parents have to deal with lying to their free-spirited, wild, daughter that her life is about to end.

The finale was about death. It was about finality. It was about death, yes, but also acceptance.

Sam Elliot's brooding and suicidal Shea Brenna lost his wife and daughter to smallpox and tells Elsa early on in the series, after she experiences loss firsthand, that he is only living long enough to see the Pacific Ocean. It was his wife's dream to see the ocean, and he believes that the spirit of those we love who have passed live within us. As Elsa dies in James' arms in Montana, Shea has made it to the coast, and sits tearfully, starring at the sea, with his gun in hand. He sees a humming bird, and knows that Elsa has passed.

Taking one last look, now for both Elsa and his wife, he commits suicide on the beach.

In Elsa's final voice over, as she dies, she says death is not a terrifying beast with sharp teeth but rather an embracing presence. Her heaven is one where the sun is always rising and where she's with a man who loves her, her Comanche husband she was wed to shortly before she met her end. The episode ends with Elsa on horseback, in a valley, seeing her husband again, and smiling at him before racing him like they used to. It is a scene lifted seemingly from James Cameron's TITANIC, and it is brutal and beautiful in equal measure. Life and death. Embracing and fighting. Acceptance.

It was setting the stage for the Yellowstone TV series, showing us that the Dutton’s didn’t settle in Montana to be kings and queens of cattle and industry, but rather to bury their daughter and face the harsh reality of the trail they set out on.

This shockingly bleak development echoes many sentiments that Kevin Costner’s John Dutton has in the Yellowstone series about that land being where his family lived but- perhaps more importantly- where they died.

An Indian chief, played by Graham Greene in the finale, grants Tim McGraw’s James Dutton their land but notes that in 7 generations his descendants will come for it. He asks that, in the meantime, if his people wish to that James will allow them to the hunt the land.

“In seven generations, you can have it,” James says tearfully. “They can hunt on it today and every day after.” He doesn’t care about the land. About the rights. About the divide between the white settlers and the Indigenous way of life. He just wants to bury his daughter.

Perhaps that is what makes 1883 such a gut punch. In the Yellowstone series much of the drama comes from the Broken Rock Indian Tribe lead by Chairman Rainwater (Gil Birmingham) believing the land is theirs by right and going back and forth with the Dutton’s (and other “white” parties that want it) over the rights to that land.

So much conflict goes into who “owns” it that the true origin of it, of America as a whole, seems lost. It puts a lot of the conflict of the main series into a heartbreaking context that, I think, makes us see the Duttons in an entirely different light.

So much of Taylor Sheridan’s pain in his writing (Hell or High Water, Yellowstone, and Wind River specifically) comes from the nature of the land. Of settlers. Of the death of the west and what the conquerors and conquered think of each other. 1883 was one massive reminder that this land is not yours, mine, and ours. It was someone's. And we’d do well to remember that. We’d do well to remember why were here, and who could take it from us next.