What You Need to Know About Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren’s ‘Yellowstone’ Prequel, ‘1923’

Ford plays the patriarch. Does that mean Mirren plays his meek helpmeet?

No. Jacob calls her “the boss.” In the first scene, she blows a guy away seconds before he shoots her.

These Duttons are childless. So, do they have anything to do with Montana’s youngsters?

Plenty. Jacob tells a young man he’s got to defer his wedding by two weeks to get the cattle up the mountain to safety. The lad thinks it’s no biggie — she’ll understand that this is what she gets for marrying a rancher. “That may be true, but you gotta find a better way to tell her, or there ain’t going to be any wedding at all,” says Jacob sagely.

Who could be wiser than that?

Mirren’s Cara Dutton, who bossily tells Jacob, “The weddin’s for the woman, Jake. If it were for men, we would have spat on our hands and shook on it, and then you would have bent me over the first thing you could find that would hold our weight. It’s the one day in a woman’s life that is dedicated solely to her, and you’re going to let that boy tell her that moving cattle is more important?”

Is Cara that brusque with the sobbing bride-to-be?

She’s firm but warm: “You will miss more than weddin’s for cattle, my dear. If you give birth during calving season, it’ll be a month before he sees his first child. You will drive wagons through blizzards with hay for cattle and hear them screaming their gratitude when you approach — and you will be free in a way that most people can barely conceive. If this is not the life you want, you must tell the boy now because you have to want more than the boy, you have to want the life too. Because in this life there’s no debatin’ which is more important, the weddin’ or the cattle. It’s always the cattle.”

Native Americans are important in the modern-day Yellowstone show. What happens to their forebears in 1923?

Teonna Rainwater (Aminah Nieves), an ancestor of Yellowstone’s Chief Thomas Rainwater, is in a boarding school where nuns and a still-scarier priest try to beat the Native American out of their captives so they’ll be civilized. The school’s brutish, warden-like priest also beats nuns. To young Teonna he coos, “I have compassion for you, my child, I do. But I have no mercy.”

Besides ruining the Montana ranching economy, what does World War I have to do with it?

Jacob’s nephew Spencer Dutton (Brandon Sklenar) is a World War I vet tormented by PTSD and flashback dreams of killing countless Germans in the trenches. Wake him up and he sticks a gun in your face, then apologizes. “I don’t wake up well.”

Instead of coming back to the ranch after the war, he’s in Nairobi, using his sharpshooting skills to kill lions. Mirren’s Cara pens him a letter: “This house is empty now and I have no chores left. And so I think of you and wonder why won’t you come home to us? I can’t help but think your absence is punishment, that somehow we are the reason you won’t return. … I can only assume you’re seeking the part of yourself you lost, and I can only pray that you find it and come back to us.”

Brandon Sklenar as Spencer Dutton.

Emerson Miller/Paramount+

So, will Spencer slay his own demons as well as lions, and leave Africa for Montana?

In the last scene of Episode 1, a lion jumps up and knocks him down. He’d shot a lion that jumped him before, then wriggled out from under its corpse. Did he survive the second attack, so he can go back to the ranch — and enlist in the Dutton clan’s war against nature and their fellow man?

Only the second episode, coming up in January, will tell.

Watch it: 1923, on Paramount+