Well, we’ve been waiting nearly two years now for Yellowstone to return and finish off its fifth and final season, but

with the advanced news of Kevin Costner‘s premature exit from the series, many fans have wondered what the show

would do with John Dutton. Ever since the very first episode of the Paramount Network drama, Costner’s Dutton

patriarch has been the face of the entire Yellowstone franchise. It’s hard to imagine the show without him, but we won’t have to any longer. How did tonight’s Season 5 Part 2 return, “Desire Is All You Need,” answer the John Dutton problem?

‘Yellowstone’ Season 5 Writes John Dutton Off in a Brutal Way

Rather than keep audiences hanging or draw out a season-long elephant in the room, Yellowstone decides to kill John Dutton off-screen, and immediately as “Desire Is All You Need” gets started. No, we don’t see anything happen. Without Kevin Costner, we don’t even see John Dutton’s face (a body double stands in for the Western icon’s corpse). Rather, we watch in horror as both Beth (Kelly Reilly) and Kayce (Luke Grimes) arrive at the Dutton home, which is swarmed by flashing lights and emergency responders. It looks, for all intents and purposes, like John died by suicide, having shot himself in the head at approximately 3:53 am the very morning that his impeachment trial was set to start. If that all sounds too convenient — and not at all like the John Dutton you’ve been watching for the past 47 episodes — then you’re onto something.

It turns out that after Jamie’s (Wes Bentley) talk with his current lover/corporate shark, Sarah Atwood (Dawn Olivieri), at the end of Season 5 Part 1, the Market Equities stooge gets right to business. As “Desire Is All You Need” jumps between the present with John’s death and the recent past, we learn that Sarah met with a hired gun six weeks prior and hired him to make John’s death look like a suicide. Corporate espionage at its finest. To make things worse, when Jamie discovers on the news that John killed himself, he’s learning about it for the very first time. After all, when he and Sarah talked about “professional” options to get rid of Jamie’s problems, he was referring to Beth. Sarah, on the other hand, clearly had Market Equities (and their Paradise Valley development deals) on her mind. Their biggest opposition, of course, was always Governor John Dutton.

So John Dutton didn’t kill himself. More than likely, he put up some kind of fight before being executed, but right now, we don’t know all the details. And frankly, they don’t matter. John Dutton is dead. Taylor Sheridan has ushered Yellowstone, both as a standalone series and as the flagship narrative in a larger Yellowstone Universe, into a new age — and there’s no going back. Yes, Kevin Costner’s name still appears in the opening titles, but the John Dutton we know and love is long gone.