After recently remembering I’m still paying for this goddamned Paramount+ subscription months after the first season of the Halo series ended I decided to see what all the hype over Yellowstone was about. But why start with Yellowstone itself when I could go back to the “beginning” with the 1883 prequel series? That way I know all the history behind the 2020s-era Yellowstone family and them shooting other people to protect their geyser or whatever before I start watching that one.

1883 is okay. Kind of good even. Sam Elliot is awesome as always and still a freaking badass cowboy at 78. Tim McGraw and Faith Hill are likable enough leads, even if country music sucks. The Billy Bob Thornton cameo was way more violent than the Tom Hanks cameo. Both were pretty good cameos.

The plot is basically like playing Oregon Trail in elementary school when you fuck up on purpose just for laughs. The time-honored old wagon train headed out west, people getting killed by dysentery, rattlesnake bites, nihilistic and deeply pointless violence and misery story.

It’s real pioneering. It’s also real fuckin’ anachronistic too they way I done reckon. Hooooo-ee there’s a hole in the historical context you could drive a cattle herd through, boy lemme tell you.

So this wagon train started in Fort Worth, Texas in 1883 and as far as I’ve seen – in the fifth episode of this series – they’re somewhere in West Texas, headed to Oregon via Wyoming, I guess. But for all these extras playing Bavarian immigrants suffering and getting killed along the trail it kind of raises the question: If they already had a railroad that could take them to Oregon in 1883, then why didn’t they just take it instead of walking the whole goddamned way?

Seriously. This wasn’t 1849, during the real wagon pioneering days. They had a fucking railroad that was right there. You can see it on the map above. A passenger could’ve traveled from coast to coast, on steam powered train, without having to drown in a river they were crossing on foot. This whole goddamned show is just one long suicide mission for all these characters. That poor lady getting bitten on the ass by the rattlesnake didn’t have to die. That German guy forced to leave his piano on the river bank because it was too heavy to take in the wagon could’ve just had it shipped in a railcar. And don’t say a rail ticket would’ve been more expensive. There is no way in hell in 1883 that a cross-country train ride cost more than a wagon, four horses, and several months’ worth of food and supplies to walk with across the goddamned prairie all the way to Oregon.

Fucking hell man. I haven’t been this frustrated by fictional characters since those stupid Gen Xers lost in the woods in Maryland didn’t just follow the sun to find their way back to their car.