“Death is the only thing you can catch out here.”
Taylor Sheridan didn’t need 8 episodes to conclude 1923. Like firing both barrels of Spencer Dutton’s big elephant gun, he just made this Episode 7 finale louder. Is this series, as one chapter of the Dutton family’s nearly 150-year western saga, truly over? Sheridan’s quotes from 2022 say yes. But we’ll put aside determining the future of television (or anything else) and focus on immediate Sheridan-O-Verse outcomes for 1923’s characters. Because they’ve been put through it, and if this is the end, not everyone makes it out.
Cara, whose defense of the land began 1923, picks off Whitfield’s gunmen from her overwatch position at the house. “Of all the things I’ve had to do for this ranch” – she cocks the rifle and checks the scope – “this takes the bloody cake.”
The final battle of the Dutton-Whitfield War takes place on two fronts, as dozens of Whitfield’s killers descend on the ranch and the showdown at the station erupts into violence. But we’ve gotta clarify who’s on that train. It’s Spencer and Alexandra, together. Because in her luxury vehicle snow tomb, Alex used the accoutrements of her dead companions to make fire. When that ran out, she burned Spencer’s letters. And when she finally shouted accusations at an absent Almighty God – “You give us a child…drag me through Hell…to freeze here?” – it was her husband’s train which appeared on the track her car had followed. For the second time this season, Spencer leapt from a train, this time to rescue his wife from the creeping grip of ice-cold death. Reunited and it feels so good…except for Alexandra’s necrotic extremities, her digits blackened from frostbite.
In the Sheridan-O-Verse, those who are noble and determined see their way through. But they don’t always keep living outside of memory. After the ordeals of her journey, after she made it from Oxfordshire to Montana despite everything, after she and Spencer finally embraced for the first time in months, and their baby boy – “I’ll name him John,” she said – was born three months premature in a Bozeman hospital, Alexadra Dutton died from her injuries. In their final hours together, Alex told Spencer she could not have lived as a mother who chose her own life over a child’s. She was never a dreamer, she was a doer. And she would rather their son lived to create reality from his own dreams than for her to survive in some broken, permanently abbreviated form. Spencer stayed with his wife overnight, as John Dutton II slept on her chest. And in the morning, he felt her lifeless form in the same moment he sensed their son’s living breath.
