Dutton Ranch Recap: Here’s the Beef

Dutton Ranch
Act of God Business
Season 1 Episode 3
Editor’s Rating ★★★
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After seeing three full episodes of Dutton Ranch, I have a question. So, it’s obvious that the Jackson family’s 10-Petal Ranch is up to no good, and that some of the ranch’s employees are committing crimes, with Beulah’s blessing. But, like, what are they actually doing? Drug smuggling? Human trafficking? Money laundering? All of this and more? Maybe there’s a good reason why showrunner Chad Feehan won’t tell us anything, and in the broader storytelling sense, I’ll grant that it only matters that the Jacksons are bad, not how. But as this vagueness drags on — and given that we spend roughly a quarter of this week’s overstuffed episode dealing with Beulah’s business — the lack of specificity becomes increasingly baffling.

Annette Bening does her best with all the hazy innuendo her character has to deliver. In this episode we get a brief but intriguing conversation between Beulah and Ria Paloma’s Sheriff Wade, during which she reminds him how much money she donated to his campaign, while suggesting he should worry less about her mysteriously missing ranch hand and more about her out-of-control granddaughter Oleana. We also get a tense scene in which Beulah visits one of her hands at the hospital and shuts him down when he complains that he wants to go back to doing his job “the way it was before” — implying that the 10-P’s heel-turn may be relatively recent. We also listen in on an ominous phone call between Beulah and some stern man, who warns her, “I have a lot of cattle moving this month, I expect no surprises.” 

I do look forward to learning more of the backstory that led Beulah to becoming Ria Paloma’s wicked cattle baroness. But given that I doubt there’s some huge surprise yet to be sprung, maybe Feehan could just… go ahead and tell us?

This week’s other four — four! — storylines fare better, although every one of them could’ve benefited from more screen time. Probably the richest of the bunch involves Carter’s infatuation with the problematically coquettish Oreana Lynn Jackson, who leads him astray very quickly. She gets him to skip school and drive her to her boyfriend Hoyt’s house, where they vandalize Hoyt’s truck while he’s having sex with another woman. Later, Carter takes Oreana back to the Dutton Ranch, where they smoke pot and fool around. This can’t end well!

The standout Carter/Oreana moment comes when Sheriff Wade pulls them over, reluctantly following Beulah’s commands. First, Oleana urges Carter to ignore Wade’s siren. Then she insults the sheriff, prompting him to grumble that there’s only so much he’s going to take from the Jacksons before he starts using his legal authority against them. At this point in Dutton Ranch, we’re still sorting out the good guys from the bad guys, and it sure seems like Sheriff Wade’s one of the better ones. That makes it all the more chilling when he tells Carter, “I want to like you. Do not give me one more reason not to.”

Beth misses all of this drama with her son because she has strapped on her Neiman Marcus stiletto heels to spend the day in Dallas, to try and persuade the high-end restaurateur Giles Moore (Sebastian Arcelus) to start buying Dutton Ranch steaks. Moore’s a smug dope who cheats his staff out of tips. But he has heard of the Yellowstone Dutton Ranch, and he knows that Beth and Rip just bought a purebred herd in Ria Paloma that is the stuff of myth. 

It’s fun to watch Beth at her most confident, finding angles and flummoxing lummoxes. (A classic showboating Beth gambit: She pays Moore’s kitchen double their missing tips to get them to grill one of her ribeyes medium rare, so she can slide it in front of their overwhelmed boss.) And this is clearly just the beginning of the steak-selling storyline. Moore mentions something called the Frontier Hospitality Group, and a man named Zane Nash who can be “difficult.” Also, the 10-Petal’s money man, Joaquin, introduces himself to Beth in Dallas, making it known that she is not going to win this business so easily. 

Plus, there’s another complication that Beth doesn’t learn about until the end of the episode. While she’s trying to make it in Dallas — and while Carter’s trying to make it with Oreana — Rip’s dealing with a mounting crisis with the herd. One of their bulls is showing signs of foot-and-mouth disease, which we’re told is typically rare in American cattle. (The vet Everett bitterly blames the return of FMD on “Anti-vaxxers.” God bless Everett.) Rip and all of the Dutton Ranch hands from A to Z — meaning Azul and Zach, the only Dutton hands — have to spend the day and night out on the range, monitoring the animals. 

As if all of that wasn’t enough plot to pack into 40 minutes, this episode wedges in one more little chunk. (The D story? The E story, maybe?) While Rip and company are still in scramble mode, a woman named Anna Dupree (played by the great Dale Dickey) comes roaring onto the property with her gun drawn, aimed at Zach. It turns out that the reason the ex-con was in jail was for drunkenly running over Anna’s daughter, Terry Jane, his true love. 

Hauser is terrific in this scene, as Rip de-escalates the situation by acknowledging that Anna has a right to her fury, while also asking whether killing Zach will solve anything. Terry Jane will still be dead, Anna will spend the rest of her life in jail, and the born-again Christian Zach might actually feel a sense of peace, knowing he got what he deserved. 

I briefly worried that Rip was going to keep following this self-righteous line of thinking, hypocritically condemning Zach while conveniently forgetting how many people he’s had a hand in killing — all of whom were some mother’s child. But later, when Everett calls Zach “a good man that’s done some terrible things,” Rip nods and says, “Reckon that describes most of us.” It’s refreshing to hear such an expression of nuance in a show where so many of the villains — like Rob-Will and Hoyt and maybe even Beulah and Joaquin — are full-on, black hat evil. 

I also must note how dramatically effective it is to hear a mention of Zach’s tragic past and then immediately find out exactly what he did, rather than having to wait a few weeks — or longer. I mean… I’m just saying. 

The Last Round Up

• One of my favorite moments in this episode is one I’ll attribute to the director, Greg Yaitanes, an Emmy-winning prestige TV stalwart. For about the first 20 seconds of the scene with Anna, we hear the incessant pinging of an open pickup truck door, before Rip yells at Azul to close it. I doubt that was in the script. The pinging probably popped up during the shoot, and either Cole Hauser ad-libbed that line or Yaitanes suggested it. Either way, it adds to the scene’s tension and feels very real. Nice work, everybody! 

• There’s no real follow-up this week to episode two’s ending, which saw Rip dumping a body while Beth fretted at home about where he might be. She does mention to him that she noticed he was gone (“Just got shit on my mind,” he explains), but doesn’t press it. Later in the episode, Rip reaffirms that he’ll never lie to Beth, so maybe that’s why she doesn’t ask him what he was doing. If she asks, he may tell her, and then she’ll be involved. 

• I wondered if Beth’s Dallas business would give us the first full “Beth verbally flays some incompetent, overconfident dope” scene of the season. But the closest we come is when she disgustedly honks at some “girls’ trip!” divorcées, who are taking selfies and blocking the valet parking lane. 

• Joaquin tells Beth that the Jacksons took him into their family when he was young, to which she sneers that his story “reminds me of my father’s attorney… not ideal.” She is referring of course to her adopted brother Jamie, whom she murdered in the Yellowstone series finale.

• We get a nice moment between Beth and her San Antonio butcher, where he lets her borrow his cooler — with a “Don’t Be A Shitass” sticker slapped on it — to transport the steaks he cut for her to Dallas. I confess that I’m more heavily invested in the Dutton Ranch’s meat business than I am in anything the 10-P is doing… whatever the hell that may turn out to be.