Does the Latest Yellowstone Death Avenge John Dutton’s Murder? What We Know About Kevin Costner’s Character’s Fate So Far

Warning: This story contains spoilers for part 2 of Yellowstone season 5.

The Dutton family is continuing to unravel the secrets behind the death of their beloved patriarch.

On Sunday, Nov. 24, a new episode of Yellowstone‘s final chapter revealed how Kevin Costner’s character John Dutton died — and saw justice at least partially be served to the person behind his murder.

Fans and the Dutton family themselves were suspicious when John died and his death was ruled a suicide in the season 5B premiere on Nov. 10, as he appeared to have died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in his own home, and now they finally have answers as to how exactly the patriarch was killed.

The third episode of season 5B continued with the season’s dual timelines as it was revealed how John was killed in his home — and where all of the rest of the family was at the time. With the power to his home cut, John was strangled in his bed by a group of masked men and dragged into the bathroom, where he was injected with a drug in between his toes that fully knocked him unconscious. The men planted a bottle of Oxycodone nearby and fired a bullet into his head to finish the job, leaving the gun in John’s hand to stage the death as a suicide.

Both Beth (Kelly Reilly) and Kayce (Luke Grimes) are hit with a gut feeling and know immediately that their father is dead.

In the present timeline, Kayce continues fighting to have John’s death investigated as the family doesn’t believe it was a suicide, and they finally get their way as the medical examiner reneges the ruling of the death as a suicide and it is now being investigated as a homicide.

The investigation is bad news for Sarah Atwood (Dawn Olivieri), who is responsible for hiring the hitmen to kill John, and the episode ends with a brawl between her and Jamie (Wes Bentley) that prompts her to storm off and drive away. She was then shot in the head, almost out of nowhere, by a car that pulled up beside her and asked her name.

Justice has at least partially been served for John Dutton now — though, with the Dutton family, there’s no telling how far they’ll go for revenge — but it’s still unlikely that Costner, 69, will be tuning in.

Following the season 5B premiere, Costner revealed that he’d learned of his character’s fate with the rest of the world, as he is not involved in the final installment of the series and “didn’t realize” it was already premiering.

“I heard it’s a suicide, so that doesn’t make me want to rush to go see it,” Costner said on SiriusXM’s The Michael Smerconish Program. “I mean, I’ve been seeing ads with my face all over the place and I’m thinking, ‘Gee, I’m not in that one.’ I’m not in this season.”

He continued, “My focus has been on what I was having to do, and I’ve got a few calls to make. So you think – sometimes I’m like just a passenger in my life, you know, there’s a lot going on. And somebody said, you know, it played last night? And I said, ‘Hmm, okay.’ So no, I found out about it this morning actually.”

When Michael Smerconish said that John Dutton doesn’t really seem like a “suicide kind of guy,” Costner weighed in on what he thinks could happen next. “Well, they’re pretty smart people. Maybe it’s a red herring. Who knows? They’re very good. And they’ll figure that out.”

New episodes of Yellowstone air Sundays at 8 p.m. ET/PT on Paramount Network.