'1923': A Major Reveal Could Be a Clue to John Dutton's Ancestry

If you thought the Yellowstone gang had it bad, then you should really meet their ancestors on 1923. After a few weeks off, the Helen Mirren-Harrison Ford vehicle is back with an all new episode, in which the already beleaguered Dutton crew faces a whole boatload of new hardships. Can't this family just catch a break already? Haven't watched yet? Don't worry. We've pulled together six of the most consequential moments from last night's episode. 

Spencer captains a tugboat — sort of

After getting his Aunt Cara's letter, Spencer Dutton quickly sought a way back home from his island paradise. As it turns out, though, getting from Mombasa, Kenya to Montana wasn't all that easy in 1923. Spencer quickly finds out that there are no boats direct to the states, and even getting to England would require a three-week wait even to get on a ship. 

After a little asking around, though, Spencer lands himself and his bride a gig helping out on a tugboat headed for the Suez Canal. It's a rust bucket, to be sure, and the captain is ominously coughing way too much blood into nearby cups and napkins, but it's the best option Spencer has. 

At least, it's the best option until it isn't, and Spencer is awoken by the sound of a very quiet engine. Turns out the captain expired in the wheelhouse and the tug is listlessly afloat at sea. He makes a mayday call, only to see a ghost ship they encountered the day before, headed straight for them. He does what he can to get past, but the little tug is T-Boned, throwing both Spencer and Alex clear across their respective rooms. We don't see much after that, but the episode ends with the tug floating upside down in the open ocean, not a person to be found. Of course, right around the same time we see the capsized ship we also see Cara getting the wire Spencer sent before he boarded the tug telling her that he was on his way home. The irony.

I'd bet $1,000,000 that Spencer and Alex are alive and fine, even after that ordeal, but, hey, in Yellowstone, stranger things have happened!

Jacob Dutton is on the move

After a painful looking sponge bath and God knows how much bedrest, Harrison Ford's Jacob Dutton is getting better, slowly. His doctor told him to spend time outdoors in the sunshine, and lets him know he can start eating solid foods. (Oatmeal, not steak. Don't go crazy, Jacob!) While Jacob's still very much worse for wear —he seems to have lost the use of his right hand, for the most part — he seems determined to come out of this awful situation as best he can, even doing his own form of PT via some trips up and down the house stairs. 

A Tragic Death

Poor Emma Dutton. First she lost her husband in that brutal gunfight, and then she lost her will to live. Though Cara tries to shake her out of her depression with a little tough love and a plea to think of her son, Emma sadly decides to take her own life instead, an act that's represented on the show by the flash of a gun barrel through a darkened window. It's a terrible situation made all the worse by the way she ended things, and I have to imagine it will affect her son, Jack, who isn't really handling everything else all that great already. 

Jack and Elizabeth are married and more

Speaking of Jack: He's hell-bent on some sort of revenge, leading his bride-to-be Elizabeth to confront him. If he's not going to love her like he promised, she wants to leave the "prison" that is the Dutton ranch. The ultimatum appears to scare Jack straight, and he and Elizabeth perform an impromptu vow exchange on the lawn outside the house. It's not an official, legal wedding but the pair have a wedding night all the same, leading to Elizabeth finding out she's pregnant however much later. She tells Cara they'll have to have an actual wedding now, and Cara promises to plan something small helmed by a priest who doesn't have an issue with fudging license dates. "Many a reputation has been saved" that way, Cara says. Scandal!

Of course, the pregnancy announcement has us wondering what this means for the Dutton family tree. Could Elizabeth and Jack actually be John Dutton III's grandmother and grandfather? We'll have to wait and see.

Banner is movin' on up

Timothy Dalton's Donald Whitfield might be evil incarnate, but he's generous to those who help him. Just ask Banner Creighton, who is now the proud owner of a big fancy house in town complete with a gas stove, electric lights and running water. It's a big step up from a brick and sod house out in the mountains, and one that his family will certainly enjoy. All Banner has to do is help Whitfield run out all the landowners around the Yellowstone, thus forcing the Duttons to sell their land. We all know how that's going to end for him — we've seen Yellowstone, after all — but watching him threaten Cara and company is still creepy and thrilling all the same.

Teonna flees a wolf and meets a friend

When last we saw Teonna Rain Water, she was killing the nun who so brutally beat and tormented her at the American Indian school. Turns out she also killed the nun who sexually assaulted her and all of this carnage is discovered first thing by the other evil nuns and priests at the school. They instantly set upon the other girls, beating Teonna's cousin so severely that we're left to wonder if she's actually still alive. 

Meanwhile out in the Badlands Teonna tries to fight off a wolf, almost succeeds, and then ends up being so thoroughly terrorized that she ends up sleeping on a sort of mound of stone that only she can climb. She's awakened in the morning by a bunch of sheep that just so happen to be driven by a fellow native — someone, in fact, that both knows her dad and thinks she was fully justified for what she did at the boarding school. He tells her that he'll help hide her, taking her to his village instead of her own, saying her hometown is the first place the school's staff would go to look for her. It's super smart and we can only hope that the school's staff never finds her — or anyone else, really. They really are monsters.

 

READ MORE: A Second Season of 'Yellowstone' Prequel '1923' is On the Way