Julia Schlaepfer, an American actress who plays the feisty British aristocrat Alexandra on the Yellowstone prequel 1923, is as light-complexioned as the driven snow, blond as a baby in a children’s book, a true “English rose.” In the first season, Alexandra, in Kenya on safari with her lordly wimp of an English fiancé, meets and romances American World War I vet and big-game hunter Spencer Dutton (Brandon Sklenar, perhaps now most familiar as the childhood friend who helps rescue Blake Lively from Justin Baldoni in It Ends With Us). In the course of their African idyll, Alexandra, narrow-hipped in her safari togs, is constantly out in the full sun, spending days and nights on the savannah, looking flushed and on the verge of heatstroke—but she never gets so much as a tan. The show plays with the contrast between Alexandra’s looks and everyone else’s, using her paleness to mark her out as a main character.
1923, which is the best show in the Yellowstone universe mostly because it’s not totally set on the suffocating confines of the Yellowstone ranch, spent about a third of its first season following Spencer and Alexandra’s love story. 1923’s second-season premiere set records for Paramount+, according to the streamer. (Obligatory stipulation that the original Yellowstone is the only Taylor Sheridan show that’s not on Paramount+, so it wasn’t part of the competition that 1923 vanquished.) People who aren’t me also seem to enjoy the ambitious global reach and pulp-novel feel of 1923’s storylines. Or maybe they’re likewise dorks who think this time period—when there were plentiful boxy automobiles and unevenly distributed electricity; when tycoons like 1923’s Donald Whitfield (Timothy Dalton) were pivoting from extraction to the service economy and making plans to open up ski resorts; when germ theory was finally working its way into public consciousness; when some, but not all, Americans had telephones, such that the Yellowstone ranch’s lack thereof is still plausible and enables interesting plotlines—is an excellent one for historical fiction. (The 1920s! It’s way more than just flappers.)
Alexandra’s fun little time in Africa also stands out from Yellowstone’s typical Montana-based arcs because Sheridan usually specializes in writing stoic, suffering women. Spencer’s Aunt Cara (Helen Mirren), who is stuck back at home handling the threats to Dutton ownership of the ranch that come from every corner in every Yellowstone show, is the suffering type. Teonna (Aminah Nieves), the Crow teenager who escapes from an abusive boarding school in Season 1 and is on the run in Season 2, has also suffered a lot (though, happily, this season is treating her a bit better thus far). Elizabeth (Michelle Randolph), a city girl who marries Spencer’s nephew Jack and chooses the ranch life, has been suffering and suffering; in last week’s episode, she gets bitten by a wolf, and her husband’s family holds her down to compel her to get rabies shots, old-school, through her stomach. (That episode’s title was “The Rapist Is Winter,” information that made me laugh out loud when I first received it. Taylor Sheridan cannot be stopped!)
Alexandra fits into a rarer category of Sheridan girl: the sassy character who’s always coasted on privilege, whether it comes from nepotism or beauty or both. This is Kelly Reilly’s Beth Dutton, a daddy’s girl through and through, on the OG Yellowstone; this is Ali Larter’s trophy wife Angela Norris on Landman. On 1923, Alexandra has always looked wealthy, a fish out of water, but she is, as we found out at the end of Season 1, also a literal lady—the daughter of the Earl of Sussex, on rumspringa with a Dutton. It made sense that Alexandra always seemed to believe that she could go anywhere, do anything she wanted. Sure, have sex on a tropical beach with your man, 15 years (as Vulture recapper Amanda Whiting pointed out) before sunblock was invented! It always turns out fine!
This season, though, they’re doing something interesting with Alexandra—something that gets at the heart of why 1923 hits for me in a way Yellowstone never did, and while also doing a bit more to flesh out Sheridan’s often totally incoherent politics. In Sunday’s episode, the third of the season, Alexandra—separated from Spencer, thanks to her former fiancé’s family and her own, while carrying his child—tries to get into the United States by herself, and has what I can only describe as a traumatic experience at Ellis Island.
After a long, nauseating voyage in the bunk room of third class—the only ticket she can afford after selling her family’s jewelry on the black market—Alexandra stands on the deck of the ship that brought her over from England and watches wealthier passengers get right off and go into the streets of New York. Why, she asks a ship official, do they get to “wander” into the city, while she’s been funneled onto a ferry to immigration processing? “They secured their travel documents at the United States Embassy in London prior to departure. Had you done the same, you’d be free to wander as well,” he says, acidly.
We, the viewers, can see that Alexandra is different from the huddled masses; her hair alone, which has retained a glossy, bouncy curl across the course of this sea voyage in steerage, would do it, but she’s also wearing expensive clothes, including these beautiful cream-colored stockings with embroidered flowers on them, while the extras that surround her are covered in practical “looks just like an old photograph of Ellis Island” wool coats. But everything that happens in the next stretch of the show depends on people working the immigration system misunderstanding her aristocracy and treating her like a plebe. After all, Alexandra has no papers, no proof of her shipboard marriage to Spencer, and very little money—and, as the doctors soon discover, she is hiding a pregnancy.
The medical inspection Alexandra undergoes in this episode, which includes her being punched, prodded, asked to undress, and spoken to crudely by a series of doctors (“America has no need for mongrels or invalids,” one says), is fairly true to what happened on Ellis Island historically. Actual medical inspections were probably briefer and less complex, and the writers of 1923 thankfully spare us the sight of the eversion of the eyelids that used to be used to check for trachoma. But it’s not just the substance of the inspections that’s so awful on 1923; it’s the fact that the doctors are extremely rude, mean, and short-tempered. When Alexandra balks at a request to open her legs for a vaginal inspection, the doctor says, “It gives me no joy to look between the legs of another Mick immigrant for venereal disease, which I find at an alarming rate.” You want to leap at the screen in incredulity: Can’t you see this lady’s genteel stockings?
Indeed, it makes little sense that a series of immigration clerks and public health doctors living in New York City in 1923 would hear Alexandra’s posh accent and mistake her for Irish. She first introduces herself to a clerk—before remembering that she and Spencer got married and she’s now a Dutton—as “Alexandra of Sussex,” for God’s sake! In 1923, England was actually one of the only countries to which America allowed a very generous quota for incoming immigrants, so maybe we’re supposed to believe that this is a natural mistake—that nobody at Ellis Island could have conceived that a fancy English lady would actually end up coming through the system this way, and so they would allow themselves to see her in a different light.
Alexandra eventually talks her way into the United States, in a final meeting with an officer in which she scornfully recites Emma Lazarus’ “The New Colossus” and demonstrates her ability to read by picking up a volume of Walt Whitman and doing great credit to her girlhood tutors in the arts of elocution and declamation. “This is the least free I’ve ever felt in my life,” she rages to this man, contrasting the pro-American rhetoric in these two poems to how she’s been treated at Ellis Island. He, stunned, stamps her documents. She’s in.
Behold, another confusing “does Taylor Sheridan even have politics?” moment. Is the Yellowstone creator, also recently the writer of extremely fake-news speeches about the economics of clean energy for Billy Bob Thornton on Landman, actually critiquing the cruelty and short-sightedness of the American immigration system in this episode, which comes at a time when the White House is publishing TikToks inviting us to enjoy the “ASMR” of migrant deportation flights? Is he standing up for the huddled masses? (The people must ask again: Is Taylor Sheridan secretly woke?)
I understand it like this: The immigration process is portrayed on 1923 as demeaning and bad, much like the boarding school Teonna escaped from last season. That’s because Sheridan, at his core, will always side with the individual over the system—that is his most defining political ideology. These immigration doctors are high on their own authority, so much so that they don’t use their judgment, or look a person in the eye. They are creatures of the “new” part of the 1920s—the money, the organization, the government, the science—and Sheridan, in an extension of his other defining political ideology, will always be on the side of tradition, even if (as on Landman) that “tradition” pollutes the world.
The proof is in the pudding: This new system missed the fact that Alexandra is special. But, of course, she is very special indeed. Sure, she’s an old-world aristocrat. But even more importantly, she’s a Dutton now.
