If you haven't watched this series yet I would encourage you to not read any further because there are going to be some major spoilers in this writeup.
Know that I think this series is excellent. It is at least as good as the other 2 series that are involved in the Yellowstone "Dutton" franchise of series that are all on the Paramount Network and I strongly encourage you to watch all of them. If you haven't seen any of the Yellowstone series I am actually a bit envious of you because you have a solid 35-40 hours of viewing excellence ahead of you.
The latest series called 1923 is the newest addition to the lineup and it has a powerhouse cast including Harrison Ford and Hellen Mirren.
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Different people are going to have different opinions about how a series ends and the way this one ended leaves you on such huge cliffhangers involving all 3 of the major storylines that are taking place and none of them end in a way that see the Dutton family being on top of whatever happens to be going on. To many this will be frustrating because of the fact that we now have to wait at least another 8 months before we get any sort of start towards retribution. This is a good thing for others because they have done an excellent job of getting the audience involved in the characters and actually caring about the individual stories.
In the other series there were similar situations at the end of seasons but none of them quite as grim as this one. In Yellowstone the seasons would normally end with some sort of bad something or other that had happened to the Dutton family but in other seasons they would end with everyone happening in a way that see the family on top of the situation. In 1923 we see all of the major players in the story in a very bad way. Of course we know that at least 2 of the 3 stories are going to end up turning out alright because if you have already seen the one with Kevin Costner that takes place in modern times, the Duttons are very well-established and successful so the one situation involving Harrison Ford where it appears as though the family is about to lose their entire legacy to the baddies will obviously work out in their favor.
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At the end of episode 8, which is the season finale, Donald Whitfield (played by the excellent Timothy Dalton) has let the Duttons know that he has paid their property tax on their behalf because the Duttons have fallen on tough financial times and couldn't afford to pay it themselves. I am not sure if this law exists in modern times and I certainly hope it isn't, but back in 1923 if you paid someone else's property tax for them and they couldn't pay you back before a certain period of time, they would now have a legal right to the property that they paid the tax on. What this means for the Duttons is that they are about to lose their entire massive property to Donald Whitfield and his cronies.
Obviously Whitfield is eventually going to be unsuccessful in this plight but I thought it was a very creative way to establish a sense of dread in the audience and really make us want for rather extreme revenge upon this man and also upon Banner Creighton who earlier on in the season killed a bunch of the Dutton ranchers with a machine gun and grievously wounded Jacob Dutton (Ford.)
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It took me a while to make the connection because the person playing Banner is one of those actors that I was thinking "I know that guy from somewhere" so I looked it up and he played "Bronn" in Game of Thrones. I think that most people would agree that Bronn was one of the best characters in that particular series and his excellence continues in 1923 as well in a brutal manner.
While I thought it was a bit strange at the start of the series, the youngest member of the Dutton family Spencer, has spent the entire series over in Africa, where he had decided to become a traveling professional killer rather than have anything to do with the Dutton ranching operations.
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While at first I didn't like how they would skip from snowy and cold Montana over to Africa in what at the time seemed like completely unrelated material, it all kind of comes together in the end and establishes Spencer as an up and coming major player in what is bound to happen in season 2. Instead of being involved in the Dutton ranch problems, he is completely unaware of them happening at all until around the mid-way point of the season. He encounters his own problems by accidentally getting involved with a young woman and marrying her, angering members of the British Royal Family in the process because his now wife "Alexandria" was engaged to one of them and broke it off by running away with Spencer.
Their part of the story ends in a bad way as well as the Royals use their influence to separate the two on different boats after a skirmish between Spencer and Alex's ex-fiancé results in one of the Royals getting thrown overboard. I did find it a bit strange that the boat didn't simply stop and pick him up since there were plenty of people who were there when it happened. Perhaps things were different in the early 20'th century and if you fell overboard they just left you there because they gotta keep that schedule!
The only major plotline that has an even somewhat happy ending is the story of Teonna Rainwater, who is the American Indian schoolgirl who had gotten filled up with her social reprogramming on the part of the church and ends up killing two of the nuns who were charged with "beating the savage" out of her.
She is one the run with fellow Indians and at least as the season ended, they were in the clear although it is established that the authorities who are themselves very corrupt except for maybe one of the officials who I would be willing to bet makes a turn when he finds out all of the information.
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Teonna, her father, and another Native named "Pete" who quickly became her love interest, are currently headed south to an Indian reservation in order to seek shelter from the law. I would imagine that this is going to lead to a showdown between USA and Reservation warriors of sorts and if I had to guess I would say that this is where they end up meeting with the Duttons somehow. It all needs to tie back to the modern-day Yellowstone and person Teonna Rainwater end up becoming the parents of someone powerful that is associated with the Duttons. That is just a guess based on the fact that if they do not, it doesn't make sense that the series would spend so much time focusing on them in the series at all.
All in all I would say that 1923 has been wonderfully made and I am a bit disappointed that I have watched them all already and now have to wait for such a long time in order to see what happens next that I will likely forget what I have already seen up to this point. I will be very excited when a release date is established but as it stands now the best information I can find is that it, like most everything else in the USA cinematic universe is being indefinitely delayed because of the writer's strike that is taking place. At the moment the actors and actresses don't even know (or so they claim) where the story is going from here and all of us are just going to have to wait probably well into 2024 before we get to find this information out.
1923 was the most-watched show on television in 2022 and the start of 2023 averaging 7.4 million viewers per episode. You can watch all of them on the Paramount Network if you so choose but if you made it to this point in my writeup you have seriously screwed yourself by ignoring the SPOILER ALERT!