Spoiler Alert: This story contains details from Sunday’s Season 1 finale of Paramount+’s 1883.

Larry McMurtry was a literary inspiration for writer-director Taylor Sheridan, who took a page from the miniseries adaptation of that late author’s Lonesome Dove by scattering the harsh terrain with the bodies of its most beloved characters in the Paramount+ 101 Studios MTV Entertainment series. Sheridan’s 10-episode odyssey, about the push to Montana by the ancestors of Yellowstone‘s Dutton clan, saw the death of the show’s bright young narrator, Elsa Dutton (Isabel May), the grizzled Pinkerton agent Shea Brennan (Sam Elliott), and most of the European settlers who made the trip from Fort Worth, Texas in a ragtag wagon train caravan.

While there has been speculation of another season with this iteration of the Duttons once they arrived in Montana, a conversation that follows here with Sheridan that can only make you think,...