In the “Yellowstone” recap, Beth gets an interesting job offer and Kayce goes to Jamie for help, which leads to a shocking revelation about the person who ordered the hit on the Dutton family…
By Damon Martin — Editor/Lead Writer
The likely identity of the person responsible for ordering the hit on the Dutton family was revealed in the latest episode of “Yellowstone,” although it’s hard to imagine justice will be coming quite so soon.
After season 3 ended with an orchestrated attack on the entire Dutton clan including John being shot on the side of the road, Beth nearly blown up with a package bomb and Kayce gunned down by would-be assassins, it’s understandable that a certain amount of payback has been expected.
While the militia responsible for actually carrying out the hit have been dealt with — and by dealt with we mean wiped off the Earth with a bloody trail left in their wake — but the person who actually ordered everything has still not been uncovered … until now.
Meanwhile, Beth’s ongoing fight to save her father’s ranch took an interesting twist this week after she took a meeting with Market Equities chairwoman Caroline Weaver, who made her an offer she may not be able to refuse.
Elsewhere, Jamie flexes his muscles as Montana Attorney General as he celebrates the purchase of his new ranch, which he now shares alongside his birth father who he says gave him the strength to finally stand up for himself after he was browbeaten by his other family for so long.
As for Kayce, he’s going to end up calling on Jamie for help at the request of their father and he’s also finally forced to deal with the ever-widening fissure within his own marriage after Monica had to watch their son shoot a man dead in order to protect their lives.
With that said, let’s get to the “Yellowstone” recap for the latest episode titled “Winning or Learning”….
Our Kind of Monster
After going head-to-head with Market Equities for most of season 3, Beth Dutton is still fighting her father’s battles in order to preserve the ranch that means more to him than just about anything else in life. Beth has essentially taken a blood oath to protect that land until the day he dies and then she will gladly offer up every blade of grass and speck of dirt to the highest bidder.
This week, Beth gets called to an interesting meeting where she sits down with Market Equities CEO Caroline Weaver, who has a new plan of attack when it comes to expanding her company’s interests in the state of Montana.
After Beth berates Ellis and sends him running for a closet to cry into, she then goes face-to-face with Caroline as these two formidable women begin sizing each other up.
Rather than make threats or start shouting, Caroline instead offers Beth a chance to choose her own fate.
Behind door No. 1, Caroline tells Beth that she’s going to have an SEC investigation opened on her for stock manipulation and insider trading after she helped to tank Market Equities’ stock last season while helping her bosses at Schwartz and Meyer then profit from her actions. If she chooses Door No. 2, Beth can come work for Market Equities by essentially naming her own price while simultaneously protecting her father’s precious ranch.
As Caroline has come to realize, the entire Dutton family motto is “not for sale,” which is why Jamie leasing her company the land needed to build at airport is still far, far less than they could have made by selling but he refused to burn that bridge with his father. Now after Beth refused to sell off the land she helped secure through her old employers at Schwartz and Meyer, Caroline knows that there’s no dollar amount big enough that will make the Duttons just willingly give up their land as Beth puts it so eloquently.
“His dream is my Alamo. I will die on the fucking wall defending it”
~ Beth Dutton
So Caroline makes Beth a different kind of deal — she can work for Market Equities and find them better locations to build future resorts, casinos and retail shops. Caroline sees Montana as the next great state that desperately needs to undergo a facelift but unlike a place like Colorado that embraced that ethos a long time ago, this particular place is still holding onto the past a little too tightly.
In order to change that and make a lot of money doing it, Caroline wants Beth to help her build Aspen and Breckinridge style resort towns in Montana. While Beth is out headhunting for new locations, Market Equities can leave the Dutton ranch alone because for now the only thing they truly need is the airport, and that piece of land has already been leased to them so she doesn’t necessarily need to keep battling them for more.
Beth is impressed that Caroline would go that route so she makes a counteroffer — she will come to work at Market Equities so long as the company hands over the majority share of Schwartz and Meyer that they bought a year ago. Beth has vengeance on her mind and her old boss Bob Schwartz needs to pay with everything he owns.
Beth: “I want your piece. You give me that, I’m yours.”
Caroline: “You’re going to fire him”
Beth: “I’m going to bankrupt him first. I want his fucking grandchildren on welfare. You break your word to me, lady, I’ll do the same to you.”
Beth leaves as Ellis returns and he look at her as a walking lawsuit just waiting to happen but Caroline sees her as a means to an end. Caroline knows they are going to run into similar battles throughout the state as they attempt to expand their business into Montana but using Beth as a weapon to go after the weak ranchers not smart enough to employ somebody like her is exactly what she needs right now.
“Behind every milestone of human history stands a monster and that’s our monster
~ Caroline Weaver
Later that night, Beth returns home to have a drink with her father where she tells him about this offer from Market Equities while telling him that if Caroline Weaver somehow concedes to her offer, this really might be the best way possible to protect the Yellowstone ranch — and unlike her brother Jamie, Beth tells her father than loyalty is the one thing he’ll never have to question about her.
Before leaving to help Rip decide on a new birthday — he never had one after he left his family and started living on the ranch — Beth tells her father that he really needs to get laid. Just as John starts to protest that this isn’t the kind of conversation he needs to have with his daughter, Beth is already promising to find him a girlfriend to satisfy his every need.
You Wanna Fight Somebody?
Tension in the bunkhouse has been at an all time high this season largely due to the simmering rivalry between Lloyd and Walker after the latter returned and promptly starting hooking up with Laramie, the young rodeo rider who invited herself to stay at the ranch alongside Mia aka Jimmy’s sort of girlfriend.
At first, Laramie was all over Lloyd but that all change once Walker return to the ranch.
The problems between the two start in the fields earlier in the day when Lloyd suggests driving a herd of cattle back to the barn to deal with an outbreak of pink eye. Walker believes they should stay put in the field, take care of the pink eye problem so none of the other animals get infected.
Lloyd refuses to bend for Walker so he drives the cattle back to the ranch only for Rip to tear him a new one for making such a stupid error. Rip then orders Lloyd to take the cattle back into the field where they can deal with the pink eye without any other animals being harmed.
Back at the bunkhouse as Teeter makes a dinner filled with every part of a cow that even the butchers won’t take, Walker makes a brief attempt to make amends with Lloyd while Mia tells Laramie that they need to get back on the road for the rodeo sooner rather than later.
A bowl full of food being left for him is enough to set Lloyd off as he ends up in a huge brawl with Walker in the middle of the bunkhouse. Hearing all the commotion from the barns, Rip rushes down into the bunkhouse where the fight gets broken apart and then he’s forced to take action by the law of the Dutton ranch.
Lloyd knows there are no fights allowed on the ranch and Rip makes him pay for it by giving him a savage beating that leaves the veteran cowboy laying motionless on the ground. He then warns Walker that there will be no more fights and if anybody else is desperate to fight somebody, Rip will gladly offer himself as a reward.
Before returning home to the love of his life, Rip stops by to offer Carter some words of advice after the stunt he pulled last week when Beth tried to take him shopping. Rip tells the boy that there are two roads he can travel down in life — winning and learning or losing all the way to the grave.
Rip puts it on Carter to decide which path he’ll take but he tells the boy that he better make up his mind pretty fucking quick.
Finally, Jimmy stays on the road with Travis and his team as they make their way down to Texas where he will soon join the Four-Sixes ranch as a new helping hand. Along the way, Jimmy goes to the office for a horse show where he’s going to collect the checks that will be sent back to the Yellowstone as payment.
It appears the checks are quite large, which John is happy to receive later as it confirms his plans to turn Yellowstone into the top breeding ground for quality horses.
Before mailing the checks, Jimmy contemplates sending a letter to Mia along with it but he can’t quite come up with the words. Later that night on the road as Travis explains how “Road House” is the greatest movie in history — and let’s be honest, he’s not exactly wrong — he ends up passing along a little philosophy to Jimmy about what it means to become a cowboy.
Travis tells him that just like the relationship that Jimmy tried to make with the rodeo, it all comes down to just you and your horse. If you can trust in that beautiful but potentially deadly creature and that horse can trust you back, then the bond will get you through everything else a cowboy needs to do.
If not, that horse will send you flying back into a hospital bed, which is exactly where Jimmy ended up on two different occasions.
Once they finally arrive at the new ranch, Travis drops off Jimmy and tells him good luck because he’s certainly going to need it if he plans to survive the crash course in cowboying that he’s about to receive from the Four-Sixes ranch.
The Man Behind the Curtain
A morning ride has become part of a ritual between John and Kayce except on this particular day, they have some family business to discuss.
After leading him out to a rock on the property where his own father died and where he proposed to Kayce’s mother, John tells his youngest son that it’s time to find out just how loyal the one missing member of the family is to the people who raised him.
John informs Kayce that he’s discovered the person in prison who ordered the hit on them but this Riggins character is serving a 20-year sentence and they’ve never met before, which means he was ultimately just a middle man for the real person responsible for trying to wipe them off the face of the Earth.
John asks Kayce to take this file to Jamie and ask him to set up a meeting to investigate this prisoner to find out who he’s been working for this entire time. If Jamie willingly goes along with the demand, that means he wasn’t the person who ordered it all. On the flipside, if Jamie stonewalls Jamie or refuses to help, then sadly John will have his answer about the person who tried to have the entire Dutton family killed.
Of course, Jamie’s got plenty on his mind right now including the new ranch he just bought with the help of his birth father, Garrett Randall, who now has a permanent fixture in his life. Jamie thanks Garrett for giving him the strength to finally make something of his own away from the Dutton family, which is what this ranch signifies.
At work, Jamie first obliterates a lawsuit attempt from a group of attorneys hoping to stop the Marquet Equities expansion into Montana but after telling them in the nicess way possible to fuck off, he’s then greteed by his younger brother.
Kayce first questions why Jamie never bothered coming around after the family was attacked, especially when it came to their father who was in a coma for two months.
Jamie then explains that he’s been helping his family every step of the way, even if he’s still trying to figure out just how much of a Dutton he truly is.
Jamie reveals that he ordered the cops to stay by his father’s hospital room while he was recovering and he’s the one who brushed all of the killing under the rug when the bunkhouse boys strung up one of the armed assailants at the ranch and Kayce personally led a hit squad after the people sent to assassinate his family. As much power as Kayce might wield as Livestock Commissioner, it’s not enough to ram into a vehicle and then start a shootout in the middle of a major road where every potential suspect was massacred in the middle of a major street in broad daylight.
He also explains that reaching out to his father or brother could be seen as collusion, which is why he had to stay radio silent while keeping John, Kayce and everybody else out of prison for what was ultimately payback for the attack led on the family.
Kayce seems to appreciate that effort so he then hands over the file on Riggins while informing Jamie that this is the man responsible for setting up the hit on the Duttons. Of course, Kayce knows that Riggins isn’t the mastermind behind it all so he asks Jamie to lead the investigation personally, which will mean an in-person interview with lawyers and a detective from the local police.
Jamie stands in almost stunned silence when Kayce tells him that John was the one who requested his involvement and now he’s trusting his brother to find out who tried to kill the entire Dutton family.
Before leaving, Kayce tells Jamie that he loves him and Jamie says the same back as he starts to feel that pull back into the family that raised him even if they weren’t blood related.
After returning home, Kayce is confronted with another problem that’s been staring him in the face for weeks. Monica and Tate have basically become shut-ins, who are terrified to come out of their room for fear that more masked gunman might be waiting for them.
At the urging of his father, Kayce finally concedes to allow Monica and Tate the time and space they need to heal. That means moving everybody back to her grandfather’s house on the Brocken Rock reservation until they can find something together that will still be much closer to home for her.
Monica is overjoyed that she can finally leave a place she’s deemed as evil and Tate is happy to find out that Kayce will be going with them.
Following a quick packing of suitcases, Kayce loads up his family to leave for the reservation but not before telling his father that none of this is his doing. Instead, Kayce knows this is just the best way to deal with his family problems even if it means leaving the home that is supposed to belong to him one day.
While John has no choice but to accept Kayce’s decision to move — even if it’s temporary — he can’t help but wonder why his children always seem to leave him in the worst possible ways.
Beth offers her father a bit of an explanation, which speaks to the kindred spirits shared by the majority of the Dutton family.
“Because there’s no peace in this place, dad. Never has been. It doesn’t bother you or Kayce because you’re not peaceful men. I guess I’m not peaceful either.”
~ Beth Dutton
Finally, Jamie gets a report back from the Montana state prison system that will give him a better idea about this Riggins person and why he was going after the Dutton clan.
A quick look at Riggins’ former cellmates tells Jamie the awful truth he likely never imagined he would see.
It seems a few years ago while they were both locked up, Garrett Randall shared a cell with Riggins and that seems to explain who is responsible for starting a blood feud with the Duttons. In order to remove Jamie from John Dutton’s life forever, Garrett likely ordered the hit just to ensure that his son will remain only his son until the day he expires.
Jamie can only utter the words “oh my god” as he stares down at the sheet of paper about the man who orchestrated the hit to kill his entire family and the biological father who likely ordered it.
“Yellowstone” will return for a band new episode on the Paramount Network next Sunday night at 8 p.m. ET to find out what happens next!
