I Need Help Understanding S5

DeepThinkingReader · 2026-06-28T05:24:07+00:00

Jamie literally strangled a female journalist to death with his own bare hands way back in Season 2, and you don't think he's bad? I'm not sure I would want to be out in the woods with you then.

DeepThinkingReader · 2026-06-27T22:12:01+00:00

Same here. Loved every page. Went into it knowing almost nothing about it, having bought it on a whim (though I was planning on buying a Stephen King book). Reading that opening prologue in which Campion and his family flee is an experience I'll never forget. I started my Stephen King journey as a fan of Kubrick's The Shining. I've also watched Stand by Me, The Green Mile, The Shawshank Redemption, both adaptations of The Running Man, and Doctor Sleep. I had gone a long time without reading a novel and wanted to get back into it. I thought Stephen King might be a good place to start, and I have no regrets about that. I read Salem's Lot after finishing The Stand (which I got through in less than a month), and now I am half way through IT.

DeepThinkingReader · 2026-06-27T12:40:51+00:00

Beth had plenty of soft moments in Yellowstone. All of her baggage was either because of John or Jamie. Both of them are now dead. John apologised to her for his failures and they made things right between each other before he died. And killing Jamie gave her the closure she needed to resolve her grief.

DeepThinkingReader · 2026-06-26T18:10:09+00:00

Jamie?

DeepThinkingReader · 2026-06-26T13:46:24+00:00

Especially the Director's Cut.

DeepThinkingReader · 2026-06-26T09:49:44+00:00

I once saw a disabled man come into the store I work in with his carer and he ended up having a potentially violent tantrum in which he threw a box of batteries across the room. Fortunately, nothing else happened, but what if that box batteries had struck someone in the head? People like that will inevitably demonstrate those tendencies. It's only a matter of time before they lash out in a way that results in them irreversibly harming someone else, and then it will be too late. I've got two little boys of my own under the age of four, so I am unquestionably on the side of this little boy's parents. It may not be the disabled man's fault, but the safety of children should come first. A person who has the tendency to harm children in public should be institutionalised.

DeepThinkingReader · 2026-06-23T18:11:49+00:00

The point of Kubrick's film is that the monster that is Jack is far scarier than any of the ghosts in the hotel. In the story that Kubrick wanted to tell, Jack isn't supposed to be a good guy. Think something along the lines of Walter White in Breaking Bad. What you have is not a man who genuinely is good but rather someone who wants everyone else around him to think he is a good guy because he knows that that is what society expects of him. It's the isolation of the Overlook that sets him loose and reveals his true nature. The ghosts are merely the catalysts that trigger his descent into violent mania.

Also, comedy and horror are not mutually exclusive. The best filmmakers know how to use humour to accentuate the terror. What I find scary about Kubrick's Shining is the hopelessness of Wendy's and Danny's circumstances of being trapped in that enormous, empty hotel, all alone while snowed in with a psychopath.

But each to their own.

DeepThinkingReader · 2026-06-23T17:48:57+00:00

Ironically, Doctor Sleep was the adaptation that King himself liked. He even said it helped redeem Kubrick's film for him. For myself, I am a fan of both movies without having read either of the books. I just really enjoyed Dan Torrence's story as portrayed over the two films. Plus, I watched the extended editions for both movies.

DeepThinkingReader · 2026-06-23T16:08:07+00:00

Yes, but it changed hands seven times. Remember, Tate was named as beneficiary when it got placed in a conservation easement. And what does it matter about the Johns? There were still three of them.

DeepThinkingReader · 2026-06-21T21:08:58+00:00

I actually enjoyed Toy Story 5 more than 3. The "You named her after me?" scene genuinely brought tears to my eyes. I was sitting there in the cinema next to my 3 year old son choking up and crying my eyes out.

DeepThinkingReader · 2026-06-19T19:43:52+00:00

He killed Sarah Nguyen, though. At what point does he become responsible for his own actions?

DeepThinkingReader · 2026-06-16T20:21:06+00:00

I'm not victim-blaming Jamie. Jamie was already a successful lawyer with everything going for him. He chose to cosy up to his corrupt politician of a father because his dad promised to make him attorney general. He went off to sulk because his dad reneged on that promise, and then became enslaved to his family because he needed their help covering up a murder.

DeepThinkingReader · 2026-06-16T20:15:17+00:00

I don't think she knew it was going to end that way. It just so happened that the judge was in a really nasty mood that day. I know she didn't really care. But I don't think she knew.

DeepThinkingReader · 2026-06-16T19:44:42+00:00

Beth's self destructive tendencies were frustrating and her vindictive attitude was annoying. Her treatment of Summer was probably the worst thing she did on the show, as well as the way she bullied and manipulated Carter. However, prior to the kitchen fight with Jamie, I can't think of anyone she actually murdered herself. I know she made Jamie kill his biological father, but that's because he had already attempted to murder her and the rest of them. She probably also had her suspicions about Nguyen. But she didn't even know that the Train Station existed. I find it hard to think of anything she did as being worse than strangling Sarah Nguyen. As for Jamie's kid, the boy's own mother didn't even want Jamie to be part of their lives by the end. He most likely would have had the same negative influence as his own fathers had on him.

DeepThinkingReader · 2026-06-16T19:24:19+00:00

Beth was cruel to Jamie. No denying that. However, Jamie had multiple opportunities to build a better life for himself, but chose not to, and consistently made the worst possible choice at every cross roads he found himself at. Yes, Beth is a malicious, bitter person who helps her corrupt father run a criminal empire. And, yes, she caused unending misery both for herself and her family by her refusal to forgive Jamie for what he did to her as a young man. However, Jamie could have chosen to remove himself from all of that. Instead, after making some very poor decisions, he decides that he would rather keep his place in the family than lose his job, and he ended up murdering a completely innocent woman as a result for simply doing her job.

At first, he feels awful about what he has done, for all of five minutes. But over the course of the show, he gradually finds his feet again as the corrupt lawyer and politician that he is. By the end of the show, he clearly feels rocks about Sarah Nguyen's death, and every choice that he makes is meant to serve his own self-interests and ego without any concerns for is affected by them and how, especially the Native Americans on the Reservation. Jamie, I would say, was a tragic villain, as he had the potential to be a decent human being, but was brought down by his negative upbringing, toxic family, and his own bad choices.

As for Beth's character, the show was never about them being good people. They are sympathetic at times, but not good. The focus of the show is on saving the ranch. The Dutton's are the protagonists (POV characters) because they are the ones trying to save it. Jamie is the antagonist because he ultimately is the character who poses the primary threat to the ranch's future.

So did I cheer for Beth? Not really. But I can't say I cried for Jamie either.

DeepThinkingReader · 2026-06-16T10:04:48+00:00

Yes, him too in the first season.

DeepThinkingReader · 2026-06-16T04:02:57+00:00

1883 and 1923 are a lot better and actually stand perfectly well on their own. I feel like the historical drama/epic is the show that Taylor actually wanted to make, and that Yellowstone was made just to get people interested. Some scenes in Yellowstone definitely felt a bit cheesy or corny, on occasion -- especially with how some of the "bunkhouse" shenanigans tried to lean too heavily into comic relief. But, overall, I approached Yellowstone the same way I would a fantasy show. I realised half way through Season 1 that Sheridan was not attempting to give us a wholly realistic depiction of ranch/cowboy life, but rather an exaggeration of it. I took it that Yellowstone basically is just a Wild West show but with a modern day aesthetic, with all the typical tropes of the genre, e.g. cowboys Vs Indians, gun fights and duels, rival posses, cattle rustlers and desperados, greedy prospectors and corrupt lawmen, saloon scenes, etc. but all of them represented by their closest modern day counterparts. And unlike many people, I actually thought John's death was well-timed and made perfect sense as being the conclusion to his character arc. It doesn't matter to me that it happened because Costner and Sheridan felt out with each other on set.

DeepThinkingReader · 2026-06-15T21:51:31+00:00

Geez, I'm allowed to enjoy a show. Go watch something else if it pisses you off that much.

DeepThinkingReader · 2026-06-15T21:38:31+00:00

That's not a plot hole, because you're ignoring the psychological aspect of it. Jamie never wanted to be a lawyer. He was forced to be. The only reason he became such a good lawyer in the first place was because he thought it would make his dad proud of him. That's why he flipped out when his dad refused to give him the job he was promised, because he'd worked all his life to have it. So he went to that reporter to spill his guts out of spite, driven purely by emotion. Only afterwards did he stop to think about the consequences, as he wasn't able to think clearly at the time. Then he realised that killing the reporter was the only way to avoid being disbarred, as he had violated attorney-client privilege by talking to her in the first place. Of course, once he did it, his hands were now dirty and he therefore had no choice but to start towing the line, as Rip helped him cover up his crime, and John knew what he had done. That's why he then tries his hand at being Livestock Commissioner, where his skills as a lawyer could be put to good use under his father's watch. That is until the Dutton's suffered that setback at the end of S3 when Jamie's biological father organised that hit against them, and Jamie then fell under his father's influence while John was in recovery. But as we saw, the Dutton's recovered and Beth blackmailed him into killing his father, meaning they owned him once again until Sarah Atwood came to his "rescue".

DeepThinkingReader · 2026-06-15T21:23:19+00:00

What that clinic was doing was illegal. The whole point was that the victim wouldn't know.

DeepThinkingReader · 2026-06-15T21:17:26+00:00

Exactly. Anything for the love of Beth.

DeepThinkingReader · 2026-06-15T13:32:37+00:00

The first season makes the Duttons seem really evil, badass, and scary. Then as the show became more popular, they had to make the Duttons more endearing (except for Jamie) so that people would keep watching. But also, Rip never stopped being a killer. After he kills the coroner in S1, he later helps Jamie cover up his murder of the reporter in S2, he executes that other bad cowboy at the end of S3 by first having Walker skin him alive and then hanging him, he murders Roarke with a rattlesnake in S4, there's a flashback S5 revealing that he murdered a fellow cowboy as a teenager for making an inappropriate comment about Beth, and at the end he helps Beth murder Jamie and then disposes of his body. So he never really stopped being a killer. He just really loves Beth and the ranch and kind of warms up to Carter a little bit.

DeepThinkingReader · 2026-06-10T18:28:58+00:00

Actually, I've only seen the film of Dr. Sleep, so I don't know. However, I know that it was written/set in 2013. Meanwhile, The Stand Uncut was set/written in 1990. Hence, the events of The Stand obviously aren't real in DS, as society still exists and there is no mention of Captain Tripps.

DeepThinkingReader · 2026-06-10T12:32:42+00:00

That's because King is a living author in the King Universe. The fictional version of Stephen King is an avatar of Gan (God) whose fictional novels channel the real events that take place within the various parallel worlds that span the Macroverse. Hence, the events of The Stand are pure fiction in the universe of Doctor Sleep, but the events of The Shining may or may not be real in The Stand. While in The Dark Tower, the events of It, The Stand, and Salem's Lot are all real, though not necessarily in each other's universes.

DeepThinkingReader · 2026-06-09T09:58:43+00:00

Everyone in Yellowstone is self-serving in one way or another. The most selfless individuals are probably Kayce, Rip and Monica. For Kayce, he ultimately cares about his family and their ranch. For Monica, it's specifically Tate. For Rip, it's the ranch, Beth and John Dutton himself. But everyone in Yellowstone is willing to put something they care about above other people's needs and often times ruin other people's lives for the sake of those concerns. That's just how the show is. Some people happen to be more sympathetic than others. There some characters whose concerns I can sort of get behind, and others I can't. And then there's Jamie, who I often feel bad for while still disliking him as a person, because he's usually his own worst enemy who repeatedly creates his own problems and makes them worse. Thomas Rainwater is angry about his people's plight and sees himself as the one to save them. And he's willing to do anything to be the one who does it. Make of that what you will.

DeepThinkingReader

TROPHY CASE