If you don’t quite have a handle on the sprawling Dutton family tree, that’s intentional.
After the massive success of flagship series Yellowstone, Taylor Sheridan traveled back in time to explore the origins of the central family in the saga, first with prequel series 1883 and then with 1923, which released its record-setting season two finale on April 6.
Each Paramount+ prequel has introduced a new generation of Duttons. 1883 put on the board the Duttons who would settle in Montana what we know to be the Yellowstone ranch, while 1923 followed the Duttons who fought to the death to keep it. Just like 1883 birthed the characters who would go on to feature in 1923, the latter series has now paved a path to the next prequel series coming from Sheridan: 1944.
1944 was announced as the next prequel spinoff back when Paramount Network announced that Yellowstone would be ending. At the time, no information about the series was released. Sheridan still hasn’t officially said anything about 1944, but the 1923 ending leaves open several possibilities of where the story could go, while also continuing to ask the big question about the mysteriuous identity of the grandfather to Kevin Costner’s character in Yellowstone, the late patriarch John Dutton III.
The John Dutton of 1923
After charting their transcontinental romance across two seasons, 1923 ended with both a death and a life to close the epic love story of Spencer (Brandon Sklenar) and Alexandra Dutton (Julia Schlaepfer). After the season one finale had separated Spencer and Alex, season two charted the husband and wife taking different, yet both treacherous, journeys to get back to Montana. When they both finally reach Bozeman, Alex has their baby premature, at 6 months old, and dies shortly after childbirth. She names the baby John, in honor of the brother that Spencer lost (John Sr., played by James Badge Dale).
With Costner’s Yellowstone character being John III, is baby John the grandparent who will usher in the present-day family line? When speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, Sklenar had indicated that he got that answered, but he and co-star Michelle Randolph (more on that below) have since left it open-ended for Sheridan to confirm in 1944.
“One would assume what it is at the end of the finale, but it still hasn’t been confirmed,” Sklenar said. “So I guess we’ll have to wait for 1944. Hopefully, they’ll reveal that in the first episode, and we won’t have to wait an entire series for confirmation of who John Dutton III’s grandfather is.”
1923 left viewers with the images of Spencer’s aunt Cara Dutton (Helen Mirren) vowing to take care of baby John, who is now without his mother, as Spencer worked with uncle Jacob Dutton (Harrison Ford) to run the ranch. Baby John, if he survives, will be in his twenties when the saga checks back in with 1944, and the series could follow this father and son as they maintain the ranch. Sklenar emphatically told THR he would like to be in 1944 (“He’s got to learn how to do things. Someone’s got to show him,” he said of Spencer as a father), while Schlaepfer threw out the idea of Alexandra haunting the men she left behind.
The finale’s epilogue, which came in voiceover from 1883 character Elsa Dutton (Isabel May), who narrates 1923 from the grave, also introduced another baby into the mix when she said that, after Alexandra’s death, Spencer had another mystery son by a widow, but that the widow ultimately left him and he never remarried.
The Other Dutton Baby
Following the untimely death of Jack Dutton (the nephew to Spencer and great nephew to Jacob and Cara played by Darren Mann), his widow Elizabeth Dutton (played by Randolph) decided to leave the ranch in the 1923 season two finale. She is pregnant with her and Jack’s baby in her final scene of 1923, when she says goodbye to Cara and reveals her plan to move back to the city, which is presumably Boston where she is from.
Randolph told THR that she doesn’t know what Sheridan has planned for 1944, but that she isn’t counting Elizabeth out yet as disappearing from the Dutton saga. “I think she’s more of a Dutton now that she’s ever been before,” she said of Elizabeth. “I don’t think she’s going to go to the city and forget her life and get swept up in it [like Cara suggested]. I hope she has moments of relief — but she’s a Dutton.”
When thinking about what could be next for Elizabeth after she steps off that porch, Randolph said she hopes that either The Madison, (the present-day spinoff series now in production) or 1944 will check back in on her and her Dutton baby, whose sex has not yet been identified.
“The fantasy in my head is that I’m still alive and could be in 1944 somehow; they do incredible prosthetics,” she said. Plus, “my interpretation is that we still don’t know [who the grandfather is]. It’s not verified. I thought by the end of the season we would know, and it’s funny because that’s obviously the question I always get. Everyone is like, ‘Well surely you know what happens by the end.’ If someone says they do, they’re lying. I think Taylor [Sheridan] is keeping it secretive for a reason.”
The Rainwaters
There’s another 1923 character who wasn’t confirmed to be a mother (yet), but who also could have been pregnant in the season finale, and she comes from a different family tree altogether.
Teonna Rainwater — the Native teenager who escaped an Indian assimilation boarding school and earned her freedom in the season two finale — goes on to launch the Rainwater legacy of the fictional Broken Rock Tribe that Yellowstone viewers meet via Chief Rainwater (played by Gil Birmingham) in present day. The Yellowstone season 5B finale (which may be the series finale; we still don’t know) circled all the way back to 1883 and a promise made between the Duttons with the elders of the Broken Rock Tribe to cement these two families as the heart of the Yellowstone legacy.
So if you ask Aminah Nieves, the actor who plays Teonna, she thinks her character could already be pregnant when she’s riding away in the 1923 finale. “She has to be pregnant. I definitely have thought about that, and I hope that it is Pete’s if she is,” Nieves told THR about Pete Plenty Clouds (Jeremy Gauna), the love of Teonna’s life who was killed in season two.
If Teonna were pregnant, her child would also be in its twenties when checking back in for 1944. And Nieves says there’s no doubt in her mind that Teonna, the ultimate survivor, would be among the living then, too. “I really hope that she does have a full life, because I’m so over having Native historical stories end so early and seeing these people not having full lives,” she said, “because there are so many Natives still out there. People of all BIPOC communities, even through adversity and struggle, they still have full lives. So I would love for Teonna to have a full life. I’ve dreamt of that for her.”
