But he also fails to tell her about his bloody raid on the rustlers (which made the front page of the local paper and wounded two of his men… so I’m not sure either his reticence or her ignorance make a lot of sense). She initially avoids telling Kayce about her plans to help Chief Rainwater with the sting, because she doesn’t want him to worry.
The payoff to the Monica storyline is a letdown, though.
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Monica was baiting a serial killer and rapist, who’d previously eluded capture. But it turned out the whole sequence was a payoff to the missing-persons investigation from two episodes ago. When a stranded Monica gets picked up on the side of the road by some creep, I prematurely winced at what was to come. … There’s always another way.”Īfter last week’s dispiriting lack of action, it was satisfying to see such a greater sense of urgency and import in “I Killed a Man Today.” Sheridan and this episode’s director, Guy Ferland, even overcame my early skepticism toward a subplot that - for its first few scenes - looked like it was setting up a gratuitous scene of sexual assault. So what does he order her to do about the land sale? “Not an inch. “Everything I do is for you,” Beth reminds John. Yet despite all that - and despite telling her dad just how hopeless his cause is - she still lets him know that she’ll keep advancing his interests if he wants her to. (“After I get this bitch fired, we should hire her,” Willa sighs.) In return, she gets crushed by Roarke Morris’s boss Willa Hayes. In this episode, she pulls out all the stops in trying to scare Market Equities out of Montana: short-selling their stock spooking the markets by planting rumors of takeovers partnering with the reservation’s resident financial hawk Angela Blue Thunder the works.
Finding a fella and asking for his hand in marriage hasn’t dulled her edge. (“Respect and loyalty,” he says, “But not that.”) The two Dutton boys then share a sweet moment when the adopted Jamie asks if he can still call Kayce “brother.” Kayce says, without hesitation, “’Til the day you die, you’d better never call me anything else.”īeth, though? Beth’s still pretty batty. Jamie tells him that John never earned that kind of genuine admiration. He finds dozens of ranchers lining up at his Livestock Commissioner’s office, to thank him for risking his life to bring the rustlers to justice. A big part of this season’s arc has been about Kayce’s development into a Fine Young Man. He can hold onto his home and business, and will have enough liquidity to keep ranching until he dies.) That’s where it helps that Sheridan’s spent so much time over the past two seasons establishing John as a stubborn son-of-a-bitch, with crazy kids. (As Beth points out, he doesn’t even have to sell the ranch. The problem, from a dramatist’s point of view, is that the solution here seems obvious. And they’re plenty real, regardless of John Dutton’s perception of his own socioeconomic status. But here’s the larger context (hinted at before but now clearly expressed): With ranching revenues down and property taxes rising, the Yellowstone Dutton Ranch can’t survive in its current form for more than a few years. Here’s what we already knew: Market Equities and their real estate partners are offering the Duttons half a billion dollars for 50 acres of land and if John declines, they’re going to enlist the state government to seize it anyway. Still, I liked that in “I Killed a Man Today,” the characters stop talking around the situation that John Dutton’s facing, and instead just lay everything out for each other directly. Put it this way: With what they own and with the resources at their disposal, they can get things that most of us can’t. I’ve been complaining a lot this season about the reframing of “John Dutton, Rich and Powerful Super-Rancher” as “John Dutton, Cash-Strapped Working Man.” And even after this week’s chapter, I still think Yellowstone’s creator Taylor Sheridan - perhaps influenced by the proud ranch-folk he may have talked to before pitching this show - has a skewed sense of the American caste system if he thinks that the Duttons aren’t wealthy. Let me start, then, by eating some of my words.
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At its best, Yellowstone is a little like a 21st-century Bonanza, using the over-the-top melodrama of the classic TV western as the backdrop to an honest re-examination of how the great American ranching dynasties of 150 years ago are getting along. But I can’t recall a turnaround as dramatic as the one between last week’s frustrating nothing of an episode and this week’s “I Killed a Man Today,” which exemplifies what this show can be when everything clicks. By now I should be used to Yellowstone stumbling through half-realized storylines and banal mythopoetic navel-gazing in the middle of its season, only to rally toward the end.
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