Yellowstone returned with a big swing on Sunday night by giving viewers the answer they were hoping to get right out of the gate. How would the hit Western saga handle the exit of star Kevin Costner and the fate of his revered show patriarch John Dutton?

Taylor Sheridan, the writer and mastermind of the Yellowstone-verse, did something rather unexpected when he quickly revealed during the season 5B premiere — and return of TV’s No. 1 show — that John Dutton has indeed died. That fate was likely expected, given Costner’s high-profile and abrupt exit from the Paramount Network series between the first and second half of season five. But the fact that it was revealed so quickly was a surprise.

Here’s how it played out: Beth Dutton (Kelly Reilly) and brother Kayce Dutton (Luke Grimes) arrive at John’s Governor’s mansion, which is swarming with police, and eventually see for themselves that their larger-than-life father has taken his own life. Costner is never shown — viewers see a limp body laying next to a gun — but the look on his children’s faces says it all. They oscillate between guttural grief and blinding vengeance, before the show then flashes back to six weeks earlier and catches up with the majority of the ensemble. That includes Sarah Atwood (Dawn Olivieri), the fixer girlfriend of estranged Dutton brother Jamie (Wes Bentley), who is revealed to have put the hit out on John following the explosive midseason finale; she instructs her murderer-for-hire to make John’s death appear to be a suicide. The episode ends with Beth vowing once again to kill Jamie, before she lets out an animalistic scream when reunited with her husband Rip (Cole Hauser), who has returned to the ranch following the news of John’s death. (By the episode’s end, Costner is never shown; he reacted to what he heard about the episode on Monday.)

When speaking to executive producer Christina Voros, who directed the hour, it takes her a few attempts during our conversation below to adjust to being able to speak out loud, to someone outside the Yellowstone fold, about John Dutton’s fate.

In our previous conversation, she had detailed the top-secret protocols put in place in order to keep every twist and turn of these six episodes a surprise for fans until they air (weekly, Sundays at 8 p.m. on Paramount Network, followed by an encore at 10 p.m. on CBS). Voros, who helmed four of these six episodes, is among a small group who knows how everything plays out. She redacted scripts for the cast (only the main cast knows the ending); they filmed alternate scenes and used code words in scripts.

“It’s so weird to talk about it all, because it has been so clandestine for so long,” she now tells The Hollywood Reporter, revealing the codes for the John Dutton death scene. “We didn’t talk about it as a death. Any time there is a death or some sort of event, we called it an ‘arrival.’ And we gave John’s character a pseudonym. We called him ‘Crosby.’ We were calling the opening scene, ‘Beth discovers that Crosby has arrived.’ It was on call sheets and the crew were like, ‘Who is Crosby? And, where’s he coming from?’ I did some random research: [John Schuyler] Crosby was the last governor of Montana before Montana was turned into a state, in the 1880s. It was a very random, obscure, esoteric reference [by Taylor Sheridan].”

As Voros settles in to unpack this first episode — which may or may not usher in the end of Yellowstone (a sixth season has been in talks since season 5B was first announced to be the end of the flagship series) — she applauds Sheridan for how he handled the fate of Costner’s character after the behind-the-scenes saga around his role made headlines during the nearly two years the series has been off the air. (Costner eventually confirmed his exit, over a scheduling dispute around his film saga Horizon, though he remains a credited executive producer; but his onscreen involvement has never been made clear, given that he was alive when viewers last saw him on the series.)

“I think Taylor’s decision to begin this way was incredibly brave,” says Voros. “I think it is testament to his faith in the characters and the actors who embody them to go, ‘Let’s not make this about the incident. Let’s make this about how these human beings exist in the aftermath.’ That was more interesting to [Taylor] than the incident itself.”

She continues, “Death and birth are the two constants in our human experience. They are the most pivotal moments in our lives, and yet they are the most pedestrian elements of being a human being. What’s interesting about birth and death is not the birth and death itself, but the way it affects us as people. To me, I think that was the driving force in telling the story this way. He’s asked, ‘How does everybody else survive and what do they do?’ And that’s where the mystery is. That is where the unraveling is. That is where the story is.”

Read on below to see what else Voros says about the shocking yet contemplative premiere (which was the show’s biggest-ever first-night audience), how John’s death propels the story forward and how the cast stepped up to shoulder the show’s legacy — whether these episodes are really the end, or not.