[Warning: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for 1923 Season 2 Episode 6, “The Mountain Teeth of Monsters.”]

1923 Season 2 k!lled off seven characters (and a horse) in its penultimate episode. Their deaths will reverberate throughout the Episode 7 finale, a nearly two-hour episode that comes out next Sunday, April 6, on Paramount+. In the absence of a renewal, these could be the final episodes of 1923 ever. Whether this is the final season or not, Season 2 is going out with a brutal bang.

Every plot line, except Spencer’s (Brandon Sklenar) train ride home, had major deaths in this episode. The Duttons lost another family member in their fight against Donald Whitfield (Timothy Dalton). Teonna Rainwater’s (Aminah Nieves) story with Father Renaud (Sebastian Roché) reached its climax. And Alexandra (Julia Schlaepfer) caught a lucky break on her journey west that ended in devastation.

The English couple that saved Alex from arrest in Episode 5, Paul (Augustus Prew) and Hillary (Janet Montgomery), drove the pregnant Alex from Winnetka, Illinois, with the intention of making it all the way to Emigrant, Montana, where she would then find the Dutton home. It was a three-day journey by car (around 1,500 miles), but they only made it to somewhere near Sheridan, Wyoming, before their car ran out of gas in a snow storm and Paul and Hillary froze to death. Alex somehow survived, but the episode ended with her completely destitute, her only way to travel now being her own two feet.

Paul and Hillary are just two of this episode’s casualties. Five of the season’s main cast were k!lled off by the episode’s end. Here, we break down four of those major character deaths, in order of appearance, with the actors who play them.

Pete Plenty Clouds (Jeremy Gauna)

Lauren Smith / Paramount+

Pete’s fate after the Episode 5 cliffhanger shootout with Marshal Kent (Jamie McShane) was revealed early in Episode 6. Pete was k!lled in the duel, as was his horse. But Kent wasn’t long for this world after that. Father Renaud had enough of the marshal’s extrajudicial k!lling seen throughout the season (he murdered several indigenous people, including a young child, for no reason but to threaten others).

The priest murdered Kent with a shot to his chest and head and set about to find Teonna and Runs His Horse (Michael Spears) by himself.

Gauna took over the role of Pete Plenty Clouds after the death of actor Cole Brings Plenty, his longtime friend. Viewers may recognize Gauna from the other Yellowstone prequel series, 1883. He played the Lakota warrior who fired the arrow that k!lled Elsa Dutton (Isabel May), a shot she returned with gunfire that k!lled him, too.

Gauna knew that Pete would die in Season 2 after reading the scripts ahead of filming. He tells TV Insider that creator/writer Taylor Sheridan said he always intended for Pete to return in Season 2, but Brings Plenty’s unexpected death made him reconsider how the character’s story would end. Sheridan briefly considered having Pete “ride off and then just disappear,” Gauna shares, but that idea got scrapped.

Sheridan offered the role to Gauna over the phone, revealing on this call that the Brings Plenty family consented to his casting. His friendship with Brings Plenty seems to have been part of their faith that he’d take on the role with respect.

“[Sheridan] didn’t reach out to me because I look like Cole or because I act the same way as Cole or anything of that nature,” Gauna tells TV Insider. “He said he didn’t care that I worked on 1883 before and that people might recognize me. He wasn’t worried about any of that. He just wanted to make sure that the family and everybody signed off on me to be the fit and the proper one to come in and honor [Cole] the way that I did. And that is such a huge compliment to me as a human being.

When Taylor tells me this over the phone, I couldn’t get a breath in or a word out because I’m just sobbing, crying. And he’s telling me, ‘I’m glad you had that reaction. I might’ve felt a little bit different had you not had that reaction.’ The way that it happened, it was just unreal. It’s unfortunate, but it’s also a great opportunity and I’m very blessed to say that I get to go and talk about Cole and just keep his memory alive and use him as a staple for all of the missing and murdered indigenous people, women, men out there that are lost and dealing with this.”

Brings Plenty was found dead on April 5, 2024, about one week after his family reported him missing. He was 27. While law enforcement ruled out foul play in his death (his cause of death was sealed by a court order at the request of his family), his family is still advocating for a “fair investigation” into his passing.

Jack Dutton (Darren Mann)

Trae Patton / Paramount+

Mann tells TV Insider that Jack’s only crime was being “naïve.” After abandoning his assigned post keeping watch of the Dutton home to protect his pregnant wife, Elizabeth (Michelle Randolph), and grand-aunt Cara (Helen Mirren), Jack was too trusting of strangers on the road to the train station to meet up with grand-uncle Jacob (Harrison Ford).

Jack didn’t once think that the livestock commission officers he encountered on the road would betray him, given that they wore the same badge. The men worked for Banner, and one of them shot Jack twice after he sang his and Spencer’s gunslinging praises.

Jack didn’t tell Elizabeth and Cara that he was leaving to join the other cowboys. “The thought was that if I went to the house, Elizabeth and Cara would stop me from going,” Mann explains, “but that everything’s going to be fine. He’s naïve in the best ways, not because he’s ignorant, but because he’s just such a wholehearted, loving guy and he expects everybody else to be the same…He has just the most pure intentions. He thought they would hold him back and that he really needs to make sure that Jacob’s OK and that he’ll be back.”

Jack’s youth made him less battle-tested than Uncle Spencer, Jacob, and his father, John I (James Badge Dale). “He’s a different personality than them, too,” Mann says. “He wears his heart on his sleeve. And I think the message that Taylor’s saying is, a guy like him, unfortunately, I wish he could survive in a world like that, but he gets taken advantage of. That beautiful part of him is what eventually ends up getting him k!lled.”

Mann reveals what he felt when reading his death scene for the first time. “Gut-wrenching, angry, pissed off, sad. All of the emotions flying through my head at once,” he says. “I’m never happy about it. I love playing Jack. I never would want that to be his fate. I wish that he could ride off into the sunset and live happily ever after with Elizabeth and raise their kid…

But that’s just unfortunately not the way it crumbles for Old Jack. But when I sat on it for a while, I feel like this is very telling of a guy like him in a world like that, that just unfortunately, that beautiful, pure soul of his got taken advantage of and gets eaten up in this dark world. And also, I think it’s a reminder of back then, not everybody died some heroic death in battle. Sometimes you just died. You just got knocked off like that.”

To that end, there was never a plan to have a scene where Jack and Elizabeth get to say goodbye to each other like Jacob and Cara had in the episode. There would be no promises of return for this couple in a ritual farewell before a conflict. For Jack, his death represents the shocking reality that death can happen in a flash after decisions that seem simple and even safe, similar to Runs His Horse’s sudden end later in the episode.

Mann shares what he had Jack thinking in his final moments. “I was just flashing through some of Jack’s favorite moments and thinking about his wife, thinking about his family, Jacob, Cara, his favorite animals, and just like, holy f**k, how did this happen? Just staring into the sky, really disbelief. And tragically, feeling himself slipping away from his loved ones.”

“That being said, I’m very happy that he got to be at peace with [Elizabeth] before he was taken out,” Mann adds, sharing his hopes for Elizabeth’s plot in the finale. “I hope that she decides to stay around the ranch.

That’s my hope in the future, is that she decides to stay around, show my future kid the life I had growing up. And hopefully she learns to love it too, and sees the great part of it,” he explains. “I know it is really challenging and it’s hard, but there’s a lot of beauty to it. And I just hope that she eventually falls in love with it like Jack was.”

The finale may reveal whether Jack and Elizabeth’s child or Spencer and Alex’s child is John Dutton II, who will one day grow to be the father of Kevin Costner‘s John Dutton III.

Runs His Horse (Michael Spears)

Lauren Smith / Paramount+

Runs His Horse told Teonna upon their discovery of Pete’s body that he died for her freedom. Teonna later sobbed that she felt she had nothing to live for. Her father comforted her in a tender moment by a small fire, a fire they started because they believed the danger of the marshal to be gone. What they didn’t know was that Father Renaud was traveling with him and still on their trail. This fire, though small, revealed their location to Renaud, who was off his rocker with religious zeal by the time he found the father and daughter. Renaud approaches while they sleep, and Runs His Horse barely has time to lift his gun before Renaud shoots and k!lls him and points his gun at Teonna.

Spears didn’t know when signing on for the role pre-Season 1 that his character would die. It was just going to be one season at first, and then they got picked up for Season 2. “When I did find out [about Runs His Horse’s death], I started a little grieving process,” Spears tells TV Insider. “That gave me the strength and the courage to voice what I needed to be added or put into my character…to honor him and his connection to the Yellowstone world.” The Rainwaters are ancestors of Gil Birmingham‘s Thomas Rainwater, who eventually gets the Dutton land back for his people in the Yellowstone series finale.

Spears sees the tragedy of telling Teonna and Pete that they can’t light fires on the plains while they’re being hunted and then dying because he wound up making a fire. “I was like, man, he let his guard down when they had it up for so long and finally felt the relief of thinking that they weren’t being chased anymore,” Spears says. “[That] was my only understanding that I came to, but I was for sure disappointed. It’s ultimately not my vision that we’re doing. I’m not a writer or anything like that on the show, so I was just like, man, I was just forced to deal with it.”

Teonna and Runs His Horse’s final scene before his murder depicted their differing perspectives on living under the oppression of white Americans. Runs His Horse tried to inspire Teonna to keep their people alive so that they can care for the earth years from now when the forces of capitalism have decimated it. This serves as a foreshadowing for the day when their descendant, Thomas, gets the Dutton land and becomes its steward. Teonna justifiably asks why she or any indigenous person should help white people at all in their time or the future after they committed genocide against their people and stole their land. Spears says these differing perspectives are “a real conversation that happens between a father and his children.”

“This has definitely taught me and helped me to be a better father and storyteller to my children,” Spears explains. “I believe that the key to rebirth is education and the courage to explore and find new ways to remain strong in who you are in our identity as indigenous people. And the conversation is powerful. Our words have the power k!ll and to create life. So, I think that that just shows the power of connection that they do have in their lived experience, whether it was trauma or the beauty of seeing his children fall in love and everything is just self-evident to the changing world around them to today’s world. The bridge between our past and our future is alive and well because who we are is our collective memory.”

Teonna is the bridge for her people’s future and the return of their land in the Yellowstone universe. Following Teonna and Pete’s romantic tryst earlier this season, we predict that the finale will reveal Teonna is pregnant, thus continuing the Rainwater lineage that will eventually lead to the birth of Thomas. 1923 and 1883 are origin stories for the indigenous characters just as much as they are origin stories for the Duttons. Because as shown in Spotted Eagle’s (Graham Greene) prophecy in 1883 and the Yellowstone series finale, the Duttons and Rainwater’s legacies are forever tied.

Father Renaud (Sebastian Roché)

Paramount+

Father Renaud k!lled Marshal Kent for his extrajudicial k!llings, and then he turned around and started k!lling extrajudicially when murdering Runs His Horse. He intended to k!ll Teonna instead of having her arrested, but Teonna fought back and k!lled the head of her abusive residential school herself. She did so by rubbing the burning cow patty across his face and shooting him several times. It was the most violent of the episode’s deaths, but it wasn’t the last (Paul and Hillary’s deaths by freezing would close out the episode). Amid the conflict, Renaud tried to get Teonna to repent her “sins” so she could be saved in the afterlife. She refused, which Roché tells TV Insider Renaud never expected. He also says Renaud had developed on obsession with Teonna during this cross-country hunt, and that her “rejection” of his offer of salvation drove him mad more than her k!lling the nuns ever did. It was never really about justice for the nuns (who certainly earned their fates). It was about regaining control of someone who escaped from under his oppressive rule.

Kent’s murders aren’t what makes Renaud k!ll him, Roché explains. It’s the fact that he wasted his time. This highlights the true villainy of the character and his “complexity” and “contradiction,” the actor says. The explanation for Renaud’s justification of his extrajudicial k!lling is “purely his religious motivation and his religious extremism,” Roché tells TV Insider, adding, “It really is all about wasting time in finding my purpose, my goal, my ultimate goal in finding that woman. That scene with Marshal Kent, for me, is the embodiment of his contradiction. It’s staggering to me that in a way, in a normal world, he wouldn’t care about this man.”

The root of Renaud’s evil is believing that anyone who rejects his religious beliefs are worthy of death. “Within the rigidity of the residential school, I think that like any extremist ideology, if you do not bow down to the rules of the religion that you are supposed to be practicing or have been forced to practice, you are expendable,” Roché says. “There is an aspect of that. The fascinating thing about Father Renaud is that he truly believes that he’s right in his quest to save these people’s souls. Otherwise, they are basically vessels of the devil, and vessels of the devil are basically people that you can get rid of.”

Roché explains Renaud’s twisted obsession with Teonna. “I think he thinks there’s a bond” in their final scene together, he says. “When he sees that she basically rejects him completely, as happens in life with people who get obsessed with someone and they’re rejected, they resort to violence often because that’s the only way they can express themselves.”

The patty fire smeared across Renaud’s face, complete with burning embers, was done through practical effects, not CGI. “This appendage on my face was actually fitted to my face, and they managed to illuminate it,” Roché shares. “[The makeup department] did such an extraordinary job of applying these lights on my face so that when she crushes the embers into my face, they remotely lit it up. It added really to the drama of the situation.” It was a fire and brimstone ending for this religious figure. “It was fire and then being hacked to death. If this was playing in a movie theater, I think people would be applauding,” Roché says with a laugh. He called his character’s final story in this episode “the rebirth of Evil Father Renaud.”

Now, we just need the most evil presence in this series (and one of the most detestable Yellowstone villains overall), Donald Whitfield, to meet his end. Find out how these Episode 6 deaths change the surviving characters’ lives in the 1923 Season 2 finale.

1923, Season 2 Finale, Sunday, April 6, Paramount+