How does the Lonesome Dove series end? Four parts, and the last one is simply called "Return"
The 1989 miniseries ends with a promise, a wagon, and a three-thousand-mile trip in the wrong direction. Here's how Lonesome Dove closes out its four parts and what Woodrow Call is actually doing in the final one.
The cattle drive that gives Lonesome Dove its plot is finished well before the story is. What the fourth part is about is a journey in the opposite direction, undertaken by one man for no practical reason whatsoever.
CBS aired the four parts across consecutive nights from 5 to 8 February 1989 — 384 minutes total, directed by Simon Wincer on a $20 million budget, with roughly 44 million people watching the premiere. It took seven Emmys. The final part is titled "Return," and the title is literal.
Getting to the last part
Three of the major deaths happen before "Return" opens or early inside it, and each one costs Call something specific:
- Jake Spoon — falls in with a gang that murders wranglers and farmers in Kansas. Call's posse catches him, and his old friends hang him. Jake decides he'd rather be hanged by friends than strangers, and spurs his own horse.
- Joshua Deets — killed in Wyoming Territory during a confrontation over stolen horses, speared by a tribesman who misreads him trying to help a blind child. He dies in Gus and Call's arms.
- Blue Duck — captured in Santa Rosa, New Mexico Territory. On the way to the gallows he grabs Deputy Robert Hofer and throws them both out a window.
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Gus makes the request
Scouting ahead of the herd in Montana, Gus McCrae takes arrows in the right leg. A doctor in Miles City amputates it. When the same doctor tells him the left leg has gone septic and needs to come off too, Gus refuses, on the grounds that he'd rather be dead than legless. He asks Call for two things before he goes: bury him in the orchard in Texas where he courted Clara Allen years earlier, and acknowledge Newt as his son.
Call agrees to one of them.
What "Return" is
Call loads the body onto a wagon and hauls it roughly 3,000 miles south, through blizzards, broken axles and a winter, to bury Gus in the orchard. The drive to Montana took a season and built a ranch. The trip back accomplishes nothing except keeping a promise to a dead man, which is the point — it's the only unambiguous act of love Woodrow Call performs in six and a half hours of television.
He gives Newt his horse, his rifle and his father's pocket watch. He does not say the word.
Everything else lands where it lands. Lorena stays in Nebraska with Clara. July Johnson stays too. Newt keeps the Montana ranch with the hands, and the acknowledgment he wanted never arrives.
The last scene
Call rides back into Lonesome Dove, where a newspaperman has been waiting to interview the famous Texas Ranger who drove cattle to Montana and carried a corpse back. The man calls him a man of vision.
"Yeah. A hell of a vision," Call answers, and keeps moving.
For the record: the follow-ups kept coming — Return to Lonesome Dove (1993), Streets of Laredo (1995), Dead Man's Walk (1996) and Comanche Moon (2008) — and Larry McMurtry only wrote two of them.
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