Warning, spoilers ahead for Yellowstone season 5, episode 3.
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The heat is on at the Yellowstone Ranch this week, with both Rip and Beth facing off with law enforcement in a brand new episode. Meanwhile, Kayce is done with his role as a cattle cop, telling his dad he needs to choose his young family instead of the badge.
Let's save that for later, though: At the beginning of "Tall Drink Of Water," we find Josh Lucas's young John Dutton out for a trot with young Rip and some other guys. They're looking for the herd, which seems to have gone missing somehow, and they learn quickly that things have gone awry. Rip finds a dead mother-calf pair, and John finds another gored animal. When a hand suggests perhaps the deaths occurred because of a pack of wild dogs, John finds tracks on the ground. They're as big as his hand, and thus he concludes, "it ain't dogs."
Wolves were reintroduced into Yellowstone in 1995, and while it was a great move for wolves overall (this episode of This Is Love is a particularly good listen about the whole thing) it did change the ecosystem in and around the park. Ranchers are still dealing with occasional depredation, even now, and so it makes for an especially fruitful topic for Yellowstone to dive into. I'm interested in where the whole thing is going, because there does seem to be a parallel between young John's run-ins with the wolves and what's going on with Rip and company getting rid of those wolfy intruders last week, but I'm not sure where the intersection will be just yet.
Either way, it was pretty alarming when Fish & Wildlife showed up at the ranch looking for answers from Rip, who did a pretty good job at going along with their non-requests while still being pretty damn stoic. I would say I thought it was smart that they plowed the fields where the wolves had been, but that would imply I support covering up felonies, and I don't, really. Those dudes will probably get theirs one way or another—or not. You can never really tell with Yellowstone.
Speaking of getting theirs: After a quick discussion with her dad about threesomes and how he should "find someone who can love you back while you're still young enough," Beth takes off for Salt Lake City, looking for revenge against Market Equities. In the bunkhouse, there's shaving and shower sex going on, and it's Lloyd's big 5-8. Carter is bottle-feeding a cow in the barn, but then he gets to ride out with the rest of the crew. Rip seems bound and determined to make him a cowboy, which is pretty sweet if you think about it. It's better than shoveling shit for the rest of his life, that's for sure.
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Over at Kayce's house, he and Monica are still planning the funeral for their son, who died four days prior. (How has it only been four days? The rest of the family has seemingly done a month's business in that time.) Mo and Thomas are there to help them plan, telling the pair they'll need a horse spirit to help guide their son into the afterlife. Death, the elders tell the pair, is perhaps the one thing we do alone, reminding them that the ceremony should be a private thing rather than one held for the benefit of the rest of the Duttons. It's not for grieving, they say, but for "sending that boy off in the right way." There's plenty of time for grieving later, they tell the couple, then Monica retreats into the house to grieve in her own way, which involves cutting her hair.
Kayce then tells Thomas and Mo that his vision told him that he'd have to choose between his badge and his family, and he's choosing his kin, no matter how much good he did or could do with the badge. He asks for a job on the rez and is quickly turned down, though Mo points out that Jamie could make Kayce some sort of state investigator for the region, even though no one's held that role for decades.
Meanwhile, at Jamie's office, he's been served with papers as the Market Equities attorneys sue the state. He has at it with Ellis and Sarah, with Ellis doing some big acting about how mad the company is, blah blah. Jamie nails him to the ground and tells him he has no case, which he already knows, and Ellis storms out, getting hot coffee all over Jamie's assistant in the meantime. Sarah lingers, wearing a much, much too short skirt for the office, telling Jamie, "You're better than I expected." She tells him she knows he's not happy with what his dad did, because it'll grind all building in the state to a halt as everyone waits for construction permits that take forever to come. Montana doesn't even have a sales tax, she reminds him, so how in the world is the state going to make any money? He doesn't say anything, but he agrees to have dinner with her the next night when she suggests looking for a soft landing, and when she leaves, it's pretty clear that he's getting himself in hot water pretty quickly, whether he knows it or not.
As Mo and Thomas Rainwater pull up to the casino, they're confronted with a massive protest outside. Native peoples are frustrated with their quality of life, and the organizer is making a speech about how "the only ones who will make money with Rainwater are white people and Rainwater himself." The men enter the building, where they find basically no gamblers. They do see Angela Blue Thunder at the bar, though, enjoying a nice club soda and shooting visual and verbal daggers at the men. She's pissed about all the freedoms her people don't enjoy, from getting to choose their own doctors to getting to open a business on their own land. Native peoples don't even get to choose their own banks, she says, telling the men that they're "enforcing slave rules" and she's "going to teach [them] the master rules, and that lesson will not be pleasant." While I know the two guys aren't all that blameless, it's still just a little sad to see them get destroyed so easily.
Down in Salt Lake, Beth welcomes visitors from Burson International to the board room at Schwartz And Meyer. She's looking to unload her controlling stake in the company and her old buddy Rob is interested, but he also acknowledges it's too good to be true. "There's a rattlesnake somewhere in this death, Beth," he tells her. The two clear the room and share a smoke as Beth comes clean, telling him roughly that she's about to be sued by Market Equities, who will say that she was fired for cause and thus forfeited her severance package. There's some stuff about breach of contract and conservation easements, but basically, she's looking to screw them over and she's looking for someone to help her do it. "I'm the rattlesnake in the deal," she tells Rob, "but you're not the one I'm going to bite."
After a little hesitation and hemming and hawing about attorneys, Rob signs the one-day-only deal, telling Beth, "They might send a hitman after you for this." Beth jokes back, "After this, the hitman will be after them," then quickly files the documents and issues a press release letting everyone know what's gone down. Twist that knife, Beth!
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Over at Market Equities, there's steam coming out of Caroline Warner's ears as she watches CNBC. Ellis slinks in with news of the conservation easement and a request from the board that she returns to New York. The team there would like to drop the legislation, as well, as they don't want to throw good money after bad. Caroline is super duper pissed, understandably, telling her lackey, "Find a way to ruin this family, Ellis. Ruin them, starting with her." She reiterates that Sarah should remain on her path as well, telling him, "There are no rules for Sarah. Turn her loose." (Insert ominous music here.)
After Beth returns home (seemingly) triumphant, she decides to drag all the ranch hands out for a night in Bozeman, despite Rip's assertions that "take real cowboys and put them in a bar with fake cowboys and there's going to be fighting." She insists it'll be fine, that they'll be home before midnight, and says she's buying, and all of a sudden, we're in a bar in Bozeman. Lainey Wilson is back as Abby, the young singer who's been flirting with Ryan, and everyone is dancing. Isaac Hoskins steps up for a set later, and Rip goes to the bar for another round. He runs into an old cowboy from the Bar M and the pair reminisce about how Bozeman has changed.
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Here's where things start to go sideways: As Rip returns to the side of the dance floor to watch his wife, some drunk chippie sidles up to him and starts to flirt. He tells her he's married, and she responds that she is, too, but that her husband's back in Sacramento. "Where's your wife," she asks him, and he tells her, "My wife is standing right over there, staring at you." One could argue that he should have known this would go sideways a little before the girl headed over to smooth things over with Beth, but he acted just a bit too late and called for Lloyd right as Beth brought her beer bottle down over the girl's head. (Classic Beth.) Soon enough, the whole bar was in a knock down drag out fight, Road House style.
Soon enough, we're outside, with everyone from the bar lined up against the wall as the Sheriff's Department tries to figure out what's what. Though Rip tries to lay some pressure on the new Sheriff, telling him, "You know who that is, don't you?" he doesn't seem to care. The hands argue that they had to defend Beth after the bouncer put her in a chokehold, but the girl who hit on Rip is dead set on pressing charges and so off to jail Beth goes, leaving us to wonder how it's going to look when news comes out that the governor's daughter and chief of staff was arrested for a boozy brawl.
We'll have to find out next week, and from the preview, it looks like Beth's arrest isn't the only thing that's going to have ol' John hog-tied. "I stepped on a few land mines," he says at one point, while Jamie is encouraged to make Beth's accuser go away. We also get a glimpse at Sarah telling Jamie, "We don't have to win. We just have to assassinate your father's reputation," and Thomas Rainwater telling someone (John?) about how he's been dealing with "a lot of very unhappy people." All in all, everything seems very dramatic in next week's Yellowstone, and I'm here for it.
READ MORE: 'Yellowstone' Star Wes Bentley on Jamie and Beth's Relationship: 'He Might Have Lost Any Love for Her'
