In a Reddit thread discussing the season finale, one fan posited that the Duttons will survive their respective onslaughts for one simple reason: Game of Thrones showed that while killing major characters is simple, there’s a certain way to do it, and Yellowstone didn’t go in that direction. “Plot armor is too strong,” the commenter explains. “They all will survive — if Game of Thrones taught me anything, it’s that it is easy to kill main characters. If you want them dead from a writing standpoint, you don’t do it in the last five minutes. Those scenes always turn into survival arcs and are shot to create off-season hype.”
Indeed, Game of Thrones included a notorious example of this type of writing by killing off Jon Snow (Kit Harington) in the season 5 finale, then resurrecting him early in the sixth season. Meanwhile, some of the HBO show’s most epic deaths — Ned Stark (Sean Bean), the Red Wedding and the like — have come at a point where there’s plenty of time to show the aftermath before the season ends.
No matter what, it looks like Yellowstone season 4 will start as a whodunit. “They made everyone, Jamie, Market Equities, Reservation, look guilty for a reason. The first half of season 4 will be finding out who was behind it. My money would be on a collaboration of Jamie and Market Equities,” the fan thinks. Season 3 indeed leaves Jamie Dutton (Wes Bentley) in a prime position to become an antagonist. The commenter suspects that he will actually be the first Dutton to perish. “That being said, the first main character that dies will be Jamie. Probably at the hands of Rip; one of those thousand men he mentioned.”
