WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Yellowstone Season 4, Episode 1, "Half the Money," which aired Sunday on Paramount Network.

Yellowstone's Season 4 premiere immediately contends with the violent cliffhanger from last season. John Dutton uses his own blood to write a message on the ground identifying his shooter's vehicle, while Kayce uses a grenade to distract his assailants and is able to shoot his way out of his office. A singed and shaken Beth survives the bomb blast at Schwartz & Meyer as emergency services gather outside of her building. Rip finds John dying on the side of the road and passes his final message along to Kayce while rushing him to the hospital. Kayce uses his dad's blood testimony to track down the the gunmen, leading to a shootout that leaves all the assailants dead but Kayce himself shot as well.

An assassin also invades the Dutton house to try to take out Monica and Tate. While Monica fights valiantly, with the wild abandon of a mother protecting her child, it's Tate who picks up a gun and kills the man in perhaps the most traumatic scene of the episode. Rip gets an unresponsive John airlifted to a hospital, hoping that it's not too late to save his life, but learns that his cabin has been burned to the ground. The wranglers violently contend with the remaining assassins who attempted to invade the Yellowstone, but Jimmy is still lying unmoving on the ground after being bucked from a horse. By the time the title sequence plays, the Yellowstone crew have emerged victorious against the masked assassins, but it remains unclear whether John, Kayce and Jimmy survived.

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Flashing back to 1893, the episode shows early Dutton settlers meeting up with a group of Native Americans who have set up camp on their newly-claimed land. The group has come to ask permission to bury a member of their tribe on the land that used to be theirs, and the Dutton family sympathizes, granting permission and offering a calf to help the group through the hard winter. The flashback is setting the stage for later ritual finds on the land, but also points to the Yellowstone prequel series coming soon from Paramount+.

Jumping back to the current timeline, John wakes up in the hospital where he sees Beth, mostly recovered from the bomb. She reveals that doctors said John would never wake up, but gets rowdy when the doctors try to put John back to sleep so he doesn't damage himself any further. Beth storms off to smoke, where she meets a young boy who is at the hospital to watch his dad die from heroin addiction. She offers the kid advice, a ton of vulgar language and a cigarette before learning that he's only 14. With no one else to accompany the kid to his father's deathbed, Beth guides him through saying goodbye and tries to offer comfort in an uncharacteristically gentle way, laying the groundwork for one of Beth's first truly human connections.

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Rip stands in front of hills with hands on hip

Meanwhile, in the casino, a patron brags about helping to set up the attack on the Dutton family. Chief Rainwater compares the assault to the violence perpetrated against his own people, and orders the gambler to be broken until he spills all the information he has and identifies the parties responsible for the attack. Mo takes on this task and drags the man behind his horse until he's bleeding and begging for death.

As John prepares to leave the hospital and convalesce at his own ranch, he sees Jimmy in physical therapy with his girlfriend Mia and learns that Jimmy has been injured by falling from a horse, effectively breaking his word to John that he wouldn't try to ride rodeo anymore. After an ambulance ride home, he's confronted with a hospital bed and a chipper nurse, both incongruous with the Yellowstone aesthetic. John quickly dismisses the medical equipment and staff before sitting down with Beth to discuss the aftermath of the attack, still uncertain what exactly happened and what has been taken from him. At this moment, Kayce stands up from his hiding place in the fields dressed in a ghillie suit , finally revealing that all the Dutton's did survive the assault.

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But there's still one sibling unaccounted for. Beth goes to confront Jamie in his Attorney General's office, thinking that he had ordered the attack and was responsible for trying to take her family from her. She reveals that Jamie never visited his father in the hospital and throws a rat trap at his face. Jamie pushes back against Beth's claims, saying that he had called to check in just hadn't called Beth. It's unclear whether Beth believes him, but ultimately it doesn't matter -- Beth comes to a decision in this moment and  promises to kill Jamie personally.

After an earnest and heartfelt apology to the wranglers for the danger he's put them in, John thanks the group for standing up for him and his family. He then joins the group for a night of beer and poker. Beth talks a bar patron into asserting herself in her relationship, the bit of cheering up she needed after her confrontation with Jamie, before going home to join Rip. The next morning, Rip heads off to deal with Roarke, the Market Equities lackey who's been trying to take the Yellowstone's land. Rip throws a rattlesnake at his face while he's fishing in a river, and Roarke succumbs to the venom within seconds. In an episode filled with gun violence and a high body count, the visceral death-by-snakebite still somehow manages to surprise. The episode then ends with Rip walking away from the site of the grisly murder as a jaunty country song plays in the background.

New episodes of Yellowstone air Sundays at 8 p.m. ET on Paramount Network.

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