Yellowstone

We didn’t catch this train, until a month ago, when we connected Susan’s Amazon Prime membership to our TV. Now we have just 4 episodes to go before season 5 takes off down the line in November.

In my experience, this television show is more violent than any spy thriller has ever been. (And, just to put this into perspective, I won’t watch horror shows.) Violence may seem justified in some instances, but it is a very old, old way of dealing with the encroachment of modern society on the Old West. This show has lots of metaphors about modern warfare (hostile corporate takeovers, for example) and it seems also to be a way of explaining what is going on in the States at the moment.

It struck me last night, during one of our marathon viewing sessions, that ‘catching the train’ was a euphemism for being run out of town on a rail. In Yellowstone, this metaphor is employed as a way of dumping an unwanted body on the Wyoming side of the border between the two states. There must be the bones of untold numbers of murdered individuals at the bottom of that ravine. Murdered and missing.

How the West was won and lost is chronicled here.