{"id":161821,"date":"2022-12-19T02:04:17","date_gmt":"2022-12-19T02:04:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/1923-premiere-recap-season-1-episode-1-yellowstone-prequel\/"},"modified":"2022-12-19T02:04:17","modified_gmt":"2022-12-19T02:04:17","slug":"1923-premiere-recap-season-1-episode-1-yellowstone-prequel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/1923-premiere-recap-season-1-episode-1-yellowstone-prequel\/","title":{"rendered":"‘1923’ Premiere Recap: Season 1, Episode 1 \u2014 ‘Yellowstone’ Prequel"},"content":{"rendered":"
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1923<\/em>the newest Yellowstone<\/em> prequel picks up 40 years after the events of 1883<\/em>. And though the Dutton family is doing considerably better from when we left it on the Oregon Trail, life is still a tire, dusty, hard-won battle.<\/p>\n

In a moment, we’ll want to know what you thought of the premiere. But first, let’s recap the highlights.<\/p>\n

The hour opens with a scared man running from someone or something. A shot fired in his direction send him sprawling on the ground, and soon we see who fired it: A woman we’ll later learn is Cara Dutton (played by The Queen<\/em>‘s Helen Mirren). He begs her to wait, telling her she’ll never get into Heaven if she kill shim. \u201cWhat do you know about Heaven?\u201d she wonders, and goes to finish him off but realizes too late that she needs to reload. While she does, he scrambles to shoot each<\/em>, but she’s faster. She kills him, screams to the sky, then walks away.<\/p>\n

\u201cViolence has always haunted this family,\u201d a voiceover informs us, and if you watched 1883<\/em>, you’ll recognize the speaker as Elsa (aka Isabel May), who’s maybe piped in from the Great Beyond? She says violence followed the Duttons to America from Europe, \u201cand where it doesn’t follow, we hunt it down. We seek it.\u201d<\/p>\n

As she talks, the action jumps among a few seemingly unrelated scenes. We see a young, khaki-clad man in Africa who stands his ground as a lion rushes at him; he shoots the giant cat just as it leaps at him, much to the happiness of the man’s two companions, who’ve been helping him track the animal. Then we see Jacob Dutton (Star<\/em> Wars’ Harrison Ford) on horseback, with a few other men also on horseback, surveying a field full of dead sheep, many covered in flies. It’s probably important to note that locusts also appear to be a problem; Jacob, his friends and their horses have the bugs on them and seem too weary to do anything about them.<\/p>\n

WHAT HAPPENED TO JAMES, MARGARET & CO.?<\/strong> | Elsa gives us an update on the Dutton family of 1883<\/em>, and \u2014 Spoiler Alert \u2014 it ain’t pretty. \u201cMy father had three children. Only one would live to see their own children grow,\u201d she says. \u201cOnly one would carry the fate of this family through the Depression and every other hell the 20th century hurled at them.\u201d<\/p>\n

We know from 1883<\/em>‘s finale that she was the first of the kids to go. She had a brother, John, who was a little boy when the family settled in Montana. regular Yellowstone<\/em> viewers will remember that Spencer, James and Margaret’s third child, was born after the events of the prequel and first showed up in a Season 4 flashback.<\/p>\n

\u201cUpon my father’s death\u201d \u2014 which we also saw in a Yellowstone<\/em> flashback \u2014 \u201cmy mother wrote to his brother, begging that he bring his family to this wild land and save hers,\u201d Elsa continues. \u201cA year later, he arrived to find my mother frozen in a snow drift and two boys, half-starved and barely able to speak. He raised them as his own and took my father’s dream and made it into an empire. Then the empire crumbled.\u201d Welp, now we know what happened to Margaret. Is it weird that I’m sad?<\/p>\n

\"1923-premiere-recap-season-1-episode-1-yellowstone-prequel-\"SHEEP VS. COWS<\/strong> | Jacob and the men from the field ride into town, passing cars and wagons on the way. They pass a loud Prohibition for Montana group that harangues them as they enter the local soda shop. Jacob sits next to the sheriff (Scorpion<\/em>‘s Robert Patrick) and orders a cola as they discuss how the sheep men run their herd across his land. He refers to the sheep men as \u201cbullies worried about the consequences of the rules they broke,\u201d and he doesn’t seem much more sympathetic when both he (as a commissioner of the Montana Livestock Association) and the sheriff are among those presiding over a hearing related to the high livestock-related tensions within the town.<\/p>\n

A sheep herder named Banner Creighton (game of Thrones<\/em>‘ Jerome Flynn) is really angry as about the dead sheep \u2014 who apparently were slaughtered \u2014 as things get underway. When Jacob points out that no one knows who killed the animals, Banner (who hails from Scotland) accuses a group of Irish farmers of doing it, and then a fight breaks out.<\/p>\n

Sheriff McDowell stops the fisticuffs by shooting his gun in the air and yelling for everyone to cool it. The matter at hand soon becomes apparent: There’s limited grazing land for the sheep, but when they roam (or are driven) onto other people’s property, they ruin the grass for other animals, which basically guts the livelihood of the property owners (aka the leaseholders). \u201cUntil it rains, there’ll be no grazing in the valley,\u201d Jacob pronounces, advising Banner and his first to graze their sheep in the mountains and \/ or sell off some of their stock if they’ve got too many. \u201cSell ’em to who?\u201d the Scot scoffs, but Jacob is unmoved, saying they’ve all got to work together or they’ll be heading back to Britain in shambles. And when an unrelenting Banner yells that the Duttons have a ton of land, Jacob’s anger sparks. \u201cI have what my family fought for. You wanna fight me for it, too?\u201d he spits. \u201cI didn’t think so. If you wanted more land, you should’ve leased more.\u201d Then the gavel bangs, ending the meeting.<\/p>\n

\"1923-premiere-recap-season-1-episode-1-yellowstone-prequel\"Outside, Creighton confronts Dutton. The locusts might’ve decimated the grass, but bears will eat the sheep if they graze in the mountains. The exchange nearly comes to blows, but Jake holds a gun to the sheep man’s neck, and then the sheriff breaks it up. Long story short? all<\/em> of the herds need grass, and at yet another meeting of men in Stetsons, the Montana Livestock Association agrees to push everyone’s herds together, move ’em up to a higher altitude and then have cowboys help keep the predators away.<\/p>\n

Much later, under cover of night, we see Banner and his sheep men cut a barbed wire fence in order to let their flock pass onto someone’s private property and graze.<\/p>\n

\"1923-premiere-recap-season-1-episode-1-yellowstone-prequel-\"NO MERCY<\/strong> | Let’s put a pin in that situation and go to a Catholic school in an isolated section of the plains. It’s a school for girls, and all of the students are Native American, but the nuns in charge are all white. one student answers flippantly when her teacher asks what soap is made of, and what starts with the girl getting her knuckles rapped with a ruler escalates quickly after the girl curses the nun in her language; the girl leaps at the nun and starts beating her, and chaos erupts.<\/p>\n

Soon, both are bloody, bruised and standing before the head priest, Father Renaud (Supernatural<\/em>‘s Sebastian Roche). When he ceased out what happened, he<\/em> mangles the nun’s hands while making her recite a Bible verse; the student is so traumatized to witness it, she cries out for him to stop. \u201cYou beat the child and yet she begs for mercy on your behalf,\u201d he says, amused. \u201cPerhaps she<\/em> should be the teacher.\u201d But before you start to think that there’s maybe justice in this place, he warns her that her lashing out will cause others to want to do so. Then he touches her face in a creepy manner, has her stand against his bookshelves and warns her, \u201cI have compassion, but I have no mercy\u201d as he beats her, too.<\/p>\n