On Sunday, Yellowstone finally returns and delivers the second half of the fifth and final season, almost two years after the first half of the season began airing. But all is not well in the land of the Duttons.

Since its debut in 2018 Yellowstone– a compelling family drama that is often compared to Successiononly if instead of the Roy family making Fox News, they instead committed extralegal murders near cattle in Montana – it has become one of the biggest shows on television. At its heart is Kevin Costner, who plays family patriarch John Dutton, a role for which Variety reported in 2022 that he is paid more than $1 million per episode.

At this point, Costner’s feuds with creator-writer-director-producer polymath Taylor Sheridan and Paramount Network are public knowledge. Since the first half of season 5 ended, there has been a steady stream of stories about the Yellowstone star’s break from the series. Reports indicated that Costner wanted more creative control over the show, and more space to work on his Western passion project Horizon. Multiple media outlets reported in 2023 that the actor had demanded narrow shooting windows: 50 days for the first half of season 5 and just a week for the second half. (Costner’s rep called this last claim “an absolute lie.”)

Now, finally, Yellowstone is back. But will Costner join the highly anticipated series finale? Well, take a look at the trailer:

Initially the answer seems yes, if it is in a lesser form. “Everyone’s forgotten who runs this valley,” Costner growls at the start of the featurette, adding that it’s “time to remind them”; “This war has only just begun,” he growls at the end. In the 60 seconds between these proclamations, there are three fleeting shots of Costner totaling a whopping five seconds, all without dialogue. In place of the nominal star of the show, we see other feuding factions: the three Dutton children and their assorted lovers, grizzled ranch hands and leaders from the Broken Rock Reservation.

But even that meager presence is deceptive. Costner’s “everyone has forgotten who runs this valley” line isn’t new: It dates back to Season 1. This summer, Costner confirmed reports from last year that he wouldn’t appear again in the future. Yellowstone episodes. “I will not be able to continue Season 5B or beyond,” he said in an Instagram video. “I just wanted to let you know that I won’t be coming back.”

So despite how the trailer makes it seem, there apparently won’t be any new Costner footage: Over the past week, the cast has been making the rounds about how different it felt to film episodes without him. Maybe the season will insert some old scenes – perhaps via flashbacks or even something legitimately unseen on the floor of a previous cutting room, although that feels contractually strange. But Yellowstone There are still six episodes to go, and there’s simply no way the show can stretch its vintage Costner clips that far. In short: John Dutton has to go, and quickly.

It is almost a farce to imagine what is sure to happen. Yes, Succession Logan Roy was killed off early in the final season. But it’s hard to overstate how much more central John Dutton’s character is Yellowstone. Naturally, we spend a lot of time with the Dutton kids and their individual dramas, just like we did with Kendall, Roman, and Shiv (and, um, Connor). But John Dutton isn’t just the star the Dutton children revolve around; he is the parent, lover, direct employer or business rival of almost every character in the film. Yellowstone; many scenes take place in his home in Dutton.

Indeed, the show has always been an explicit Kevin Costner vehicle. Watch the season 1 trailer, which starts with the text “ACADEMY AWARD WINNER KEVIN COSTNER,” barely lasts a few seconds without showing it on screen, and then reminds you once again at the end that this is ACADEMY AWARD WINNER KEVIN COSTNER is. What about the promos for seasons 2 and 3? That’s right: it’s ACADEMY AWARD WINNER KEVIN COSTNER.

By the time the first half of season 5 debuted in 2022, Costner’s name had been removed from the trailer and Sheridan’s appeared instead. Perhaps that’s due to the show’s growing popularity and the increasing visibility of Costner’s costars (not to mention Sheridan’s); perhaps Costner was already starting to chafe at the demands of the series behind the scenes. But Costner is everywhere in the trailer anyway: he appears in or does a voiceover in 45 of the trailer’s 90 seconds.

Making matters worse is the fact that John Dutton was elected governor of Montana in the first half of season 5.

And yet. No one since Poochie and Joey Tribbiani has so brazenly dared a show’s writers — er, writer — to kill him off. Not that he’s made it easy: last year, Puck News reported that Costner had included a “moral death” clause in his contract. Yellowstone contract that explicitly forbade his character from dying in a way that would cause his character “shame or shame.” So there goes the tumbling down an elevator shaft. And Sheridan has all but ruled out the popular theory that your father’s favorite farmer died in a car crash.

In theory, John Dutton could survive off-screen. Tell him to get real Real invested in the Montana State Legislature and moves to Helena full-time, or the FBI finally discovers his many, many crimes and he runs away somewhere with no extradition policy. Maybe he’ll just go get a pack of cigarettes and never come back.

But it’s far more likely that the Dutton patriarch is about to meet his sudden end — with an additional hint in the fact that Paramount Network refused to make advanced screenings available to reporters. Unfortunately for that YellowstoneJohn Dutton is not only the star of the show, he is also canonically somehow almost invincible. So far, he has survived a cancer scare, a ruptured stomach ulcer that required a vet to perform an impromptu intestinal surgery, being shot and left for dead on the side of the road, and countless other near misses.

So how do you kill John Dutton? Thanks to Costner, we’re almost certainly going to find out.