One of the most anticipated moments of the entire two-season run of 1923 was Spencer (Sklenar) finally returning to the Yellowstone Ranch and reuniting with the rest of the Duttons. Spencer was to play a major part in the war against Westfield (Timothy Dutton) and his bid to eliminate the Duttons so he could simply own their land and build his tourism utopia. Creator Taylor Sheridan didn’t disappoint in terms of the highly, highly, highly anticipated final shootout between the forces of Westfield and the Dutton cowboy clan, but it wasn’t the only reason Spencer was eager to get home. In what would become the tearful and impassioned morsel of melodrama fans were eagerly waiting to consume, Spencer reunited with his star-crossed wife, Alexandra (Schlaepfer).
When the tears and the smoke cleared, the epilogue Sheridan gives us through Elsa’s (Isabel May) smoky, Southern narration is that, while Alex sadly passed soon after making it to Montana, their child John, premature by three months, survived. Elsa then continues to tell the audience that her little brother Spencer lived to a ripe old age, well into the late 1960s.
This was another morsel that fans had been awaiting, as the timeline would indicate this means that “Grampa” Spencer would have been around not only for the birth of baby John III (who would eventually grow into Kevin Costner’s John, in his most modern iteration) but for the first decade of John’s life. Sklenar would like to play it off that this theory isn’t canon, adding that “we can’t confirm or deny that the John in question is the John in question” but ultimately it has to at least mean that Spencer is the link between all three shows – as a child in 1883, as the mustachioed champion of 1923, and as a part of Yellowstone’s upbringing.
“There’s a Dutton ‘thing’ they all have,” Sklenar says of what a conversation between an elder Spencer and (likely) grandson John would look like. “There’s a certain weight, there’s a certain sense of responsibility, there’s a certain brand of masculinity that’s rooted in very strong principles and morals and a code of ethics, which is ultimately about the love of their family and everything they’ve worked for.”
“I think that’s also why this family is so universally loved,” Sklenar continues. “I could be all over the world and people tell me ‘I love Yellowstone.’ Or shooting a movie in Ireland, and they love it over there. It’s so different, culturally, but there’s a core value there that is just so universal, that anyone can connect with. And I think that is part of what Spencer is – passing down and what he got from his father, and it’s just this whole ethos that Taylor’s created.”
That ethos transcends the Dutton family within the Yellowstone universe to at least one other fan-favorite family, the Rainwaters. In the finale, a beleaguered Teonna (Nieves), now free of the murder charges, sets out on her own. That is, other than the child she carries inside her. Once again, that is a major link to the Yellowstone timeline, but there still remains a substantial gap. In modern times, Thomas Rainwater, (Gil Birmingham), Teonna’s grandson, tells stories about his adoption and growing up not knowing his First Nations heritage. Cue the theories as to what happened in just a few decades to the Rainwater family, and why Thomas was in danger of never knowing where he came from. Could it be that Teona, who is justifiably bitter and afraid of the racism she’s experienced, goes out of her way to hide from the world and hide who they are?
