Yellowstone EP talks finale, that major death: 'It needed to be the fight to end all fights'

Warning: This article contains spoilers for the Yellowstone season 5 finale, titled "Life Is A Promise."

Yellowstone as we know it has ended.

The Paramount Network drama aired it series finale on Sunday, and although there's already talk of a Rip-Beth spinoff, we are at least saying goodbye to a very important chapter for what has become an entire universe.

In its final episode, Kayce (Luke Grimes) sold the ranch to the Thomas Rainwater (Gil Birmingham) and the reservation, the cowboys peeled off and found new jobs, and Beth (Kelly Reilly) killed Jamie (Wes Bentley) before moving to a new ranch and starting over with Rip (Cole Hauser).

But when it came to the big Beth versus Jamie fight, executive producer Christina Voros says she wasn't surprised when she read how it all went down in creator Taylor Sheridan's final script. "I feel like Beth is a woman of her word," Voros says. "So when she said it, I believed it. Their relationship feels almost Shakespearean to me. There was no way that was ever not going to end in some kind of tragedy."

"They earned it because they are fairly equal adversaries," Voros continues. "If you knew who was going to win going into that fight, it wouldn't have been interesting and it wouldn't have been worthy of all the effort that has gone into creating that rivalry over all these years. It needed to be the fight to end all fights, and that was very important to Taylor from the beginning. He had a very clear vision of what that fight needed to be to do justice to the relationship."

Although Sheridan directed the finale, Voros, who directed 12 of the series' episodes, was on set in order to say goodbye. "Everyone wanted to be on set," she recalls. "We knew that our days were numbered and we knew it was the end of an era. So you saw cast showing up on days where they weren't in scenes just to be around people as they were wrapping or as they were doing these sort of massive final emotional beats. I wouldn't have missed it for the world. I think it was beautiful that Taylor came back to do the final episode. It felt very fitting. It felt like a really wonderful element of closure for everyone that he was at the helm for that."

And yet, the final scene of the series — Beth and Rip at their new ranch — was not the last thing the show shot. "We finished shooting the finale and then had to go do three weeks of work in Texas," Voros says of the shooting schedule. "But we knew we were going to Texas, so the last of Taylor's finale stuff was really the last week that we were in Montana. And so it felt like saying goodbye to that place, even though we still had more work to do on the season."

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Voros can't say anything for sure about future series, but regardless of that, this was still, in many ways, a goodbye. "It was a very special thing to be a part of," Voros says. "That group's never coming back together again. Wes is gone. Denim [Richards] is gone. So even in a world of spinoffs or future stories or whatever, there are people who are not coming back to us, and there is a profound sadness and longing and deep appreciation to have been able to be a part of this story together for as long as we have."