This article contains spoilers for the premiere of Yellowstone.
During Yellowstone‘s fifth season premiere, a layered storyline unfolded to an excited yet cautious audience. Fans know not to expect joy and bliss with a complicated series, but we still hope.
John Dutton swore in as Governor of Montana as we saw the unrelenting fight that the Yellowstone Dutton Ranch is still up against, showing no signs of stopping. So when Kayce Dutton called his wife, Monica, to let her know he wouldn’t be coming home, he was surprised to hear a pained voice.
Monica was experiencing cramps weeks before their baby was due, and she was worried that she couldn’t wait for her husband to make it home and get her to the hospital himself. She decided to drive down the road while Kayce called an ambulance to meet her. Of course, this is Yellowstone, and fans knew something terrible was on the horizon.
The cramps got worse as she traveled, and a devastating accident occurred within moments. It took moments before we saw John Dutton find out he must travel to Billings because of a tragedy. Upon his entry to the hospital, we see Tate sitting in a chair, meaning he survived the devastation.
We hear him speak to his grandfather, and that’s where the pieces fall into place. Monica survived the crash, but their baby did not. We also learn that the newest addition to the Dutton family would have been a boy with a meaningful and impactful name: John Dutton.
Fans have taken to the news about as well as you’d expect; see also: not well at all. The heartbreaking premiere episode couldn’t let us off without the tears flowing, could it? If the earlier conversation between Rip and Beth didn’t hit you, this one certainly did.
This fan summed up all of our emotions without saying much.
They can’t ever seem to hold onto happiness.
The beginning of the season is kicking off with more tears than we expected.
We’re all emotional; it’s fine — everything is fine.
Does anyone have extra ice cream? You know, for us to cry into?
Perhaps the most devastating tweet we saw out of the heartbreaking moment was this one: Tate Dutton had to sit down with his grandfather and exclaim that, for a moment, he had a brother. Well, he had one for an hour. We’re all crying.
John Dutton, after the patriarch of the family, is the one who keeps it all together, the one who keeps them together. Having a son with the same name would have bestowed a regal sense of existence upon him, given him someone to look up to, and given the ranch, another John Dutton to one day take over if he so decided to.
The loss is heartbreaking for more reasons than we can put into words, and it’s going to take a long time for healing to come to Kayce, Monica, and Tate. Here’s hoping the path to it doesn’t break them.
Yellowstone will continue airing new episodes on Sunday nights on Paramount.
