Were the Highs of 1923 Season 2 Worth the Pain?

[Warning: The following contains spoilers for the Season 2 finale of 1923, "A Dream and a Memory."]

Was the love worth the pain? 

You can only answer that question for yourself, in your own life and in 1923 Season 2. And in the case of the show, which ended after two seasons on Sunday, it comes down to how willing you are to forgive confusing writing and relentless, punishing misery if it makes you feel something. 

If you polled fans of prolific creator Taylor Sheridan's shows about what their favorite individual season is, 1923 Season 1 would rank near the top. Some of that is due to the movie star charisma of Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren as brave ranchers Jacob and Cara Dutton, but most of it is thanks to the swooning, star-crossed romance of Spencer (Brandon Sklenar) and Alexandra Dutton (Julia Schlaepfer). With apologies to Rip and Beth, Spencer and Alex are the greatest couple Sheridan has ever created. The passion in Sheridan's writing and Sklenar and Schlaepfer's performances is magnetic and real. The near-feral American lion hunter and the feisty upper-class Brit meet in Africa, she leaves her bloodless fiancé for him, and they survive an elephant attack, being treed by lions, and their ship capsizing as they try to journey back to Montana, where Spencer's home, the Yellowstone Ranch, is under attack from people who are trying to take it. In the Season 1 finale, they're separated after Spencer throws Alex's ex off the side of an ocean liner in self-defense, with Spencer being taken ashore in Marseille and Alex shipped back to London, vowing to find Spencer in Montana. Their storyline has the raw, overpowering emotion that keeps us coming back to Sheridan's shows even when they let us down narratively. 

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So it's painful that they're separated for almost the whole second season, because we're deprived of the most pleasurable part of the show. And it's torture to watch Alex go through hell with barely a moment of levity for truly the entirety of Season 2. This pregnant woman endures an absolutely excruciating journey across the Atlantic and the American continent, rife with constant violence and humiliation, before finally reuniting with Spencer. It's a beautiful, tear-streaked moment as he jumps off a train when he sees her standing nearly frozen to death in the Montana wilderness and saves her. But their joyous reunion is short lived, as she succumbs to frostbite shortly after giving birth to a son, John, who will grow up to be the father of Kevin Costner's John Dutton III on Yellowstone.  

On an emotional level, Alex's death makes sense. 1923 is a Shakespearean tragedy, and the death of this character the show got us to love as an individual and as part of a couple is the most devastating thing that could happen. 'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. To see Harrison Ford cry over this beautiful soul, and then describe her to Helen Mirren as "if a shooting star could talk," that's the juice. That's what we watch the Yellowstone franchise for — or any tragedy, going back to Romeo and Juliet and beyond. 

But the way Alex's death happens undercuts its impact. After giving birth, Alex refuses to undergo surgery to amputate her feet and one of her hands to prevent the spread of necrosis. The charitable explanation for this choice is that there's no guarantee either she or the premature baby will survive, and she wants to spend whatever time she may have left with him. But she also says she doesn't want to live as a burden, unable to adequately care for her child due to her injuries. This does not pass the smell test, and there are many mothers on the 1923 Reddit right now insulted by the implication that a mother would rather die than be an amputee. If there's any mother who would choose to die rather than fight to survive on behalf of her child — a big if — it wouldn't be Alex, whom we just watched go through near-literal hell for the chance to see her husband one more time. Her death simply does not square with the character we know. And it didn't even have to be this way — if she had to die, she could have died trying to stay alive. Ultimately, it's just a really depressing ending for a character who deserved much better. She was tortured all season, and then she died. 

In general, the amount of suffering made 1923 Season 2 something to be endured rather than enjoyed. The sexual sadism of villainous industrialist Donald Whitfield (Timothy Dalton) was hard to watch but served a character-establishing purpose in Season 1. In Season 2, it was excessive and gratuitous. There were scenes of sexual violence in every episode. At a certain point, it stops feeling like a "this is what really happens in a brutal world" narrative choice and starts to feel like torture porn. 

It isn't just the bleakness of Alex's storyline or the ever-present sexual violence in multiple storylines that makes 1923 a tough hang, either. Native American teenager Teonna Rainwater (Aminah Nieves) is subjected to constant punishment throughout both seasons, and any time something good happens to her, there's a dreadful feeling that the other shoe is about to drop and things are going to get 10 times worse. Nathan Kent (Jamie McShane), the U.S. Marshal pursuing her, is a cruel racist who wantonly kills Native Americans like a character out of Blood Meridian, and every moment spent with him is a grim one. At least he gets what's coming to him in a very satisfying way, gunned down by not-quite-as-evil priest Father Jacques Renaud (Sebastian Roché). Teonna's story ends in a baffling way, too, as the charges that she murdered nuns in North Dakota are dropped and she's free to go, with the show seeming to conveniently, inexplicably forget that she killed a marshal in front of two other marshals, who don't even seem to care. If it doesn't matter, why is it in the show?  

Odd choices abound. Even though the finale runs nearly two hours, there are still rushed moments. The discovery of Jack Dutton's (Darren Mann) death isn't given room to sink in. We don't even see his widow, Liz (Michelle Randolph), find out, therefore depriving the show's other love story of an emotionally cathartic ending. Narrator Elsa Dutton's (Isabel May) mention of another woman after Alex whom Spencer had a child with but never married comes out of nowhere (perhaps that will be relevant to 1944, which was just confirmed as the next Yellowstone prequel). To be fair, there were great moments, too, like greedy shepherd Banner Creighton (Jerome Flynn) using his final moments to find some measure of redemption, Spencer symbolically trading away his lion's tooth for a more Montana-practical pocket knife, and Spencer shooting three henchmen with one bullet. 

There's a line in the finale that might sum up what Sheridan was trying to do with 1923 Season 2. "The parts you wish would end magnify the pleasure," Whitfield tells Mabel (Virginia Gardner), a sex worker he and his accomplice Lindy (Madison Elise Rogers) are tormenting. "The pain is only for reference." In other words, watching the characters suffer makes their rare moments of victory or love that much sweeter. Does it? If 1923 had stuck the landing better, this would have been an unambiguous "yes." But in the finale that exists, the answer comes down to whether your heart can override your mind, and you can feel the ending in a way that overpowers your thoughts about what you didn't like getting there. It has a flawed ending, but 1923 still made us fall in love with Spencer and Alex, and was it worth it for that?

1923 Season 2 is now streaming on Paramount+.