Dutton Ranch Recap: Stories We Could Tell

Dutton Ranch
A Cowboy Saint
Season 1 Episode 6
Editor’s Rating ★★★
Previous Next
Previous Episode
Next Episode

About halfway through this week’s Dutton Ranch, Beth Dutton tells a story. With Beulah Jackson by her side, Beth strides into the Chicago offices of Zane Nash (Marlon Young), the head honcho of a string of high-end steakhouses. After dispensing with the boring business-speak — tossing out some mostly irrefutable facts about the quality and price control that could come from dealing with one big beef supplier — Beth closes the deal with Zane by explaining the way he can sell his customers on the 10-Petal brand. Who wouldn’t want to eat a steak from a ranch that was founded 190 years ago, around the time of the Republic of Texas?

Beulah picks up the story from there, spilling the colorful and ribald saga of how her family — originally named Sullivan, from Ireland — migrated west and got caught in the middle of the Texas revolution. According to the lore, one of the Jackson patriarchs rustled a herd of cattle and snuck off to some unused land, changing his name along the way to match the moniker of the whore he took with him. Zane, who fell in love with John Ford films as a kid, watching double features at the Music Box — and who owns a pair of spurs worn by John Wayne in The Searchers — eats this tall tale up with a big wooden spoon.

Or maybe — just maybe — the real marketing opportunity he sees in front of him isn’t the Jacksons’ name, but the Duttons’. “Your father was a legend,” Zane says to Beth, who tries to remain gracious while also maybe hoping to make it clear from her reticence that the Dutton story is not for sale here.

The Zane Nash scene is far and away the highlight of this episode, which is otherwise too low energy, especially in comparison to the much more charged action over the past two weeks. It doesn’t help that a fair chunk of these 40 minutes (the shortest running time yet!) is devoted to the drippy, slackly paced interactions between Carter and Oreana, who spend an afternoon lazily fishing and making moony eyes at each other. Their romance is on a low boil right now, kept simmering by the Dutton Ranch writers until the moment — sure to come by season’s end — when the Dutton-Jackson feud resumes and Carter chooses sides. He shows some early signs of where he may land here, first telling Oreana he doesn’t want to belong to “anyone” (meaning his adoptive parents), but then later saying he loves her.

The Carter-Oreana story line is going nowhere right now. That said, it’ll undoubtedly be more relevant and more dramatically fruitful once Oreana’s father formally reenters the picture. For now, Rob-Will Jackson is lying low and making plans. We find him this week hanging around with Chet, delivering a lot of big talk about how he’s not going to let himself get pushed off his family’s ranch … let alone get pushed out of the family. While Joaquin is insisting to Rip that Rob-Will is safely sequestered in rehab — and that he’ll be shipped off to Botswana to slaughter elephants whenever he gets out — we see him and Chet getting all swaggy with an arms dealer and buying essentially an entire arsenal. 

This is where the tension — finally — creeps into the episode. On one side, we have Beth and Beulah’s vision of the 10-Petal, a venerable piece of American history. On the other, we have Rob-Will’s take on the ranch: a haven for hard-asses that he will by God protect! Both Beulah and Joaquin try to explain away the whole Rob-Will situation to Beth and Rip in ways that seem disingenuous. Beulah tells Beth that when she became a mother, she swore she’d put a bullet in the skull of anything that threatened her boys. But, she says, “You can’t shoot addiction.” Joaquin, meanwhile, tells Rip that the dead man, Wes, who was dropped onto Dutton Ranch property, was Rob-Will and Chet’s drug dealer, and that things “spun out of control.”

It sure feels like there are parts of the story that Joaquin’s not telling. It’s the parts that lead Chet to walk onto the 10-Petal in the dark of night and shoot Joaquin in the hand, before getting gunned down himself by 10-P security. (Rip hustles Joaquin to Everett’s house for stitches, to avoid the kind of questions they might get at a hospital.) It’s also more than a little suspicious when Beulah tells Beth that Rob-Will’s daddy “died in an awful flood” before his son was born, and that Joaquin was “dropped in my lap” by a ranch hand who “got on the wrong side of the law.” Something’s not adding up. 

How much of this “something” does Beth suspect — or outright know — when she’s painting the Jacksons as the last cowboy heroes? And how much does Beulah know about Beth? They share a drink and a bonding moment after wooing Zane Nash, talking about what it was like to be raised by fathers so obsessed with holding on to their land. (“It’s hard to watch a man love dirt more than blood,” Beulah laments, as Beth stares straight ahead and sips her whiskey.) 

But then Beulah touches a nerve when she tries to compare their respective families’ habits of “taking in wayward sons,” like Joaquin, like Carter … like Jamie. Beth tries not to react when Beulah wonders aloud what happened to the adopted brother Beth secretly murdered. 

One of those John Ford westerns that Zane likes contains a famous quote: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” But what happens when there are two legends: the Jacksons’ and the Duttons’? Whose gets printed? Probably whoever still has access to the ink, when the shooting subsides and the dust clears.

The Last Roundup

• Something to file away for later: Beulah is planning a big party to celebrate the 10-Petal’s 190th anniversary. And she wants Everett there as her date, since he is apparently now sleeping over at the ranch occasionally. 

• I don’t know that this episode needed the scene where Joaquin buys a new hat (a Republic!), but I admit that I enjoyed the details of him trying it on, checking himself out, and then hearing the clerk say, admiringly, “Most folks let the hat wear them.” (“I’m not most folks,” Joaquin replies, before the clerk begins the process of steaming the hat to get it fitted.)

• I do, however, think the episode needed the scene where the 10-P’s ranch hands and Azul and Zachariah from the Dutton Ranch compete in a one-handed calf-roping competition. It’s nice to see them playfully sparring with their new co-workers, and it’s nice to see Rip letting the boys have some recreation at the end of a long day of branding a new herd of Angus. 

• Beth and Beulah take a private jet to their meeting, which should be no surprise. The 10-Petal is a big operation, so why shouldn’t they have a PJ? But it does whisk me back to how Yellowstone evolved. In the first season, the Duttons were depicted as filthy rich Montana royalty, with their own helicopters and private-security army. And then over time, Taylor Sheridan decided it would suit his vision better if John Dutton were land rich but always on the brink of financial ruin. Anyway, I’m just saying: If Sheridan and Dutton Ranch showrunner Chad Feehan really want me to believe that the Jacksons are in serious trouble, maybe next time Beth and Beulah should fly commercial.