'1923' star Brandon Sklenar breaks down the heartbreaking season 1 finale and Spencer's outlook ahead of season 2: 'The stakes have just completely shifted'

• Warning: There are spoilers ahead for the season one finale of Paramount+ drama, "1923."
• Brandon Sklenar told Insider Spencer's latest setback is going to have a profound effect on him.

"1923" pulled out all the stops for its season one finale and delivered an ending which, as Brandon Sklenar put it to Insider, "doesn't answer anything" and instead "just opens up a thousand more questions."

Taylor Sheridan's roaring '20s-set drama concluded in spectacular fashion with an epic showdown between Sklenar's character Spencer and an adversary — but it wasn't the one fans were expecting.

Still miles away from Montana, where his aunt Cara (Helen Mirren) and uncle Jacob (Harrison Ford) are desperately awaiting his homecoming, Spencer found himself caught up in a confrontation of titanic proportions with Alexandra's (Julia Schlaepfer) scorned ex-fiancé and his royal-adjacent family while on board their England-bound liner.

In a few words, the hotheaded aristocratic Arthur (Rafe Soule) unwisely challenged Spencer to a sword duel and was promptly thrown overboard when he failed to win by fair means and pulled a pistol on his unarmed opponent.

As a result, newlyweds Spencer and Alex were heartbreakingly separated, with Spencer rowed ashore to the nearest port and Alex detained in her cabin as Arthur's family questioned the validity of their union. With the help of the one person on the ship who recognizes that the couple is the real deal, her former bridesmaid Jennifer (Jo Ellen Pellman), Alex managed to escape in time to proclaim from the deck that she will meet Spencer in Bozeman, Montana, the return address on all of the letters Cara has been writing.

"When we leave Spencer, he's under the impression that he may have lost everything at this point: her, his family, everything," Sklenar said as he sat down with Insider over Zoom to discuss the season finale.

The 31-year-old actor said that this devastating development is going to have a profound effect on Spencer in season two, and viewers are going to see "the weight that he carries" over failing to protect Alex and "what that does to him psychologically."

"It's going to be a version of him that we haven't seen yet," Sklenar said. "And hopefully he'll get to exorcise some of those demons and show up at the ranch in a pretty big way. That's what I'm hoping for."

Sklenar said that while he doesn't know "what that journey is going to look like" just yet, he feels pretty certain "that there will be a shift in the tone in the second season."

"The stakes have just completely shifted," he explained. "I had the feeling while we were shooting it. I thought, 'Man, people are gonna be waiting on bated breath for this next part,' because it just doesn't answer anything. It just opens up a thousand more questions."

Back home at the Dutton homestead in Montana, more tragedy unfolded as Spencer's nephew Jack (Darren Mann) and his wife Elizabeth (Michelle Randolph) discovered that the latter has some fertility issues following the gunshot wound to the stomach she sustained earlier in the series.

As for whether we are to take this as evidence that Spencer will be the one to carry on the Dutton line, Sklenar said that fans shouldn't get ahead of themselves.

"I wouldn't take anything for confirmation about anything really with Taylor, because I mean, at any point, he can turn it on its head," Sklenar said.

"I get asked this question often and I genuinely don't know," he said.

The mystery has had audiences second-guessing themselves ever since Spencer's older sister, Elsa Dutton (Isabel May), intoned in a from-beyond-the-grave voiceover in the season premiere that only one Dutton "would carry the fate of this family through the depression and every other hell the 20th century hurled at them."

Sklenar admitted that throughout the process of shooting season one and watching it with audiences, he himself has gone back and forth on which branch of the family tree he thinks will be the one to beget John Dutton II and, as a result, be a direct ancestor of "Yellowstone"'s John Dutton III (Kevin Costner),

"When we started, I went into it with my own opinion about it and since then, I've thought, 'Well, maybe I'm wrong. I don't know,'" he explained. "Everyone on the cast is speculating too, so we'll see."

"I'm not sure that he knows," Sklenar said of the show's creator and showrunner who notoriously writes alone and hasn't shared his season two storylines with the cast just yet.

"You know, it's a failsafe method," Sklenar said with a laugh."There's nobody out there that really knows where it's going and what that lineage is. It's going to be exciting when those episodes start coming out and when we get those scripts to see where he takes it."

"Everyone's just kind of waiting to see what Mr. Sheridan turns out."

"1923" is now streaming on Paramount+.