A 1923 Time-Twist Sets Up an Exciting Back Half of the Season

[Warning: The following contains spoilers for the fourth episode of 1923. Read at your own risk!] 

What an inopportune time for 1923 to take a month-long hiatus. The latest episode of the Yellowstone prequel seems to have finally gotten us to where the series is going, as at least two of the big things we've been waiting for have finally happened. Spencer (Brandon Sklenar) is (probably) heading back to Montana to save the ranch, and Teonna (Aminah Nieves) has finally escaped her boarding house of horrors and is on her way home. She's not out of the woods yet due to the horrific (but kinda deserved) murder she committed as she left, but at least she's out, and she's pissed. Bye bye, torturous nun. You will not be missed! 

Back on the ranch, Jacob (Harrison Ford) is actually not yet dead. He and Liz (Michelle Randolph) both seem to have survived their gunshot wounds, though Liz is in much better shape than Jacob and defiantly declaring that she does not want to go back east with her mother. Jacob is still very much bedridden, but he can speak, and he's giving orders that Cara (Helen Mirren) has to convince everyone else to follow. No, they should not go fight the sheep herders again to recover their stolen cattle. Nobody else needs to die for livestock here. The problem is that Cara doesn't want to reveal her husband's vulnerable state to the rest of the livestock commission, and Creighton (Jerome Flynn) believes he killed the ranch patriarch, so she has a bit of trouble getting her fellow ranchers to listen to her. She also forges Jacob's signature to start a police force, and she's basically hanging by a thread, desperate for Spencer to come home and handle things while Jacob recovers (or in case he doesn't).

What the 1923 Premiere Tells Us About the Dutton Family Tree and the Family's Future

Spencer, meanwhile, has been living his best life in Zanzibar with his new fiancee Alex (Julia Schlaepfer), splashing around in the ocean and having sex on the beach. After days of romping around and contemplating visions of their future together, Alex discovered a pile of letters from Cara, all of which had gone unread. Spencer explained that his feelings about his family became complicated after the war, and he didn't want to be reminded of everything he left behind. Alex decided she was going to help Spencer defeat his demons, so she sat and read every letter out loud to him. He had fallen asleep by the time she got to one particular letter, the one we had just seen Cara send, which revealed that James Sr. had died and Jacob was likely also dead. The letter was dated three months ago, meaning we have no idea what has happened since it was written. Is Jacob still alive? Have Jack and Liz gotten married? Is the ranch surviving? Have the sheep herders exacted even more revenge? 

At least in the Yellowstone universe, Taylor Sheridan doesn't often play with time in this way. We got a little flashforward in the premiere episodes of 1883 and 1923, but this little twist with the letter felt like something new and oddly exciting, and a little sad. All this time that Spencer has been living a sort of dream life with Alex, his family has been grieving and he had no idea. He was already feeling guilty. How much worse can that feeling get? 

And in what feels like a whole other world, Teonna was being literally tortured and is now free to have her storyline intersect with the Duttons in some way or another, or not at all. Either way, I've never been so excited to see someone commit a murder, and I'm kind of hoping we get to see that priest die too. (Sorry not sorry.) This is going to be a long month of waiting! 

1923 returns Sunday, Feb. 5 on Paramount+.