Recap of Season 2 Episode 4 of ‘1923’: Exploring the Iron Rivers

Spencer Dutton reflects on how the country has changed since the Great War in Episode 4 of Season 2 of “1923,” remarking, “The place I left ain’t the place I’m going back to.” The America depicted by Taylor Sheridan is a nation connected by innovation like railways and power, grappling with issues of wealth inequality and cultural conflicts such as race, class, and Prohibition. Spencer finds himself caught in a situation where he is forced to transport alcohol by Fort Worth law enforcement, ultimately evading capture as lawmen target the Italian mafia’s warehouse. Before making his escape on a freight train, Spencer also aids a sex worker who is being publicly shamed by members of the temperance movement.

In a parallel narrative in New York City, another member of the Dutton family, Alex, faces adversity as she rushes to catch a train to Boston. Despite being assaulted and robbed in Grand Central Terminal, Alex displays determination as she boards the train with only her essentials. As the train travels towards the west coast, Alex, even in her vulnerable state, demonstrates resilience with a protective hand over her pregnant belly, symbolizing the unwavering strength of the Dutton lineage.

Trains, once symbolic of American progress, are juxtaposed with the emergent oligarchy orchestrated by Donald Whitfield in Montana. At a lavish dinner, wealthy individuals are entertained by a mining magnate outlining plans for a luxurious resort development in Paradise Valley. This scheme involves attracting investors, securing government funding for infrastructure, and drawing in affluent individuals from urban centers through commercial airline connections. The evolving landscape of wealth and power illustrates the shifting dynamics of American society in the era portrayed in “1923.”

“That resort sits in the middle of Yellowstone,” Banner Creighton reminds his boss. “That’s Jacob Dutton’s land.” But Whitfield doesn’t see his funding up of the plan as premature. “Time to build that army you promised me,” he tells his enforcer/lackey. And as to Banner’s questions about motive – he needs a reason to gather sheepherders and other men in another bloody battle against the Duttons – Whitfield spits out a sinister, arrogant dismissal. “I’ll do it again” – pay Jacob’s tax bill – “and when he doesn’t pay me back, the land is mine.” Weaponized capitalism is the only reason Whitfield requires. Financing a gang of killers to exterminate his competition is just a rounding error. Rich take egg.

Beyond Whitfield’s sneering, murderous greed is another directive, one that should interest observers of 1923 as Taylor Sheridan’s branded “Yellowstone origin story.” He orders Banner to kill the Duttons and dump their bodies in a boundary area not beholden to any state or federal law. The pocket of land, which he indicates to Banner on a topo map, sounds a lot like the Train Station, the area controlled by the Duttons of the future as an extralegal depository for all their family foes. But for now it’s in Whitfield’s hands. And to test its value, he makes Banner carry out the dead body of Christy, one of the two local prostitutes Whitfield subjugated to his sexual perversions.

This week on 1923, we also have a segment we’ll call The Pitt: Vintage Trauma. It’s no-anaesthesia surgery time for Zane the wagon boss, who has his body strapped down and his head fitted into wooden restraints fabricated by Jacob and Jake Dutton. Pressed into service as nurses, they hold him straight as Zane huffs on a rag doused in chloroform and the doctor takes a hand-cranked drill to the clotted hematoma putting pressure on his cranium. Zane’s screams bounce off the mountains of the Paradise Valley, and Elizabeth covers her head with a pillow in the next room. But the improvised field procedure works. (After, the doctor takes a pull off his flask of illegal booze.) With the pressure lessened, an upright Zane is soon hugging his wife Alice. And in a second miracle for a ranch house that has seen the opposite for far too long, Elizabeth’s rabies screams and plans to leave are replaced by yelps of joy and hugs with Jake, because she is pregnant. 

But can that baby also fight? Like the yet-to-be-born Dutton currently on a train to Boston? Because while he’s barely recovered, and still with an Acme-style Looney Tunes bandage around his chin, there is one thing on Zane’s mind. “Are we going after ‘em? For what they done to us?” As Whitfield staffs up his new offensive, let’s hope Zane doesn’t miraculously recover from an improvised emergency medical procedure only to be shot down in the latest pitched battle of an ongoing range war. 

“Montana is the opposite of their convenient lives.” That’s what Donald Whitfield told his moneyed friends about the region’s new tourism allure. But for the Duttons, the inconvenience of the land always was and always will be its most hardening attribute. Their ranch is under threat, but it’s their entire way of life that’s under attack, a way of life itself threatened by the encroachment of modernity. (Elsewhere in this episode, a brief visit with Teonna Rainwater, her father, and Pete Plenty Clouds dwells on extended shots of a cattle drive, in another version of Taylor Sheridan’s adoration for cowboys at work.) While people like Whitfield wish to kill them all and take it all away, the Duttons will fight whoever they must to retain what is theirs, whether those fights happen in Montana or during journeys on rivers of iron. Somewhere west of Texas, after he had to kill two boxcar tramps who came at him for his rifle and bedroll, Spencer Dutton jumps off the moving train to continue his journey home, back to his family.

Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social) is a Chicago-based writer. A veteran of the alternative weekly trenches, his work has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork, The All Music Guide, and The Village Voice.