As a matter of fact, while the Duttons are eating, Rip and the ranchers are out murdering two men and forcing another who they were supposed to murder but didn’t into hacking off chunks of his flesh. Admittedly, she has plenty to complain about since she has been fired, her chair now occupied by Willa Hayes since Market Equities have bought out her bosses, but you can tell that the scene only exists for the purpose of putting paid to John’s silly idea that this is one big happy family who don’t discuss business over dinner. It even wheels out one of the show’s longstanding tropes of Beth f*cking up the family mealtimes just so she can curse and kick off in front of Tate and Monica. You could maybe argue that the Season 3 Dutton ranch is indeed a bit softer than the place as seen in the first two seasons, but then the rest of “Meaner Than Evil” completely argues against that. But while she makes the point that the whole branding his sons business probably makes John a less than ideal teacher, she quickly accepts the idea that he has softened now and just inexplicably comes around to Kayce’s ridiculous Luddite logic.

At first, it seems like Monica is going to point this out, or at least argue that lots of rather despicable things tend to happen on the ranch, including but not limited to the permanent branding of its workers and the execution of its enemies and sometimes its employees. The former reckons there’s no point in Tate going to school since his future is tied up in the ranch and everything he’ll ever need to learn is right here this would be stupid even if the entire plot of the season wasn’t about the inevitable seizure of the land surrounding the ranch and thus the ranch being put completely out of business, but the season is about that, with a side helping of the place barely breaking even anyway for added context, so it makes considerably less than no sense that Kayce thinks Tate’s going to have a prosperous future running the ranch. Maybe that’ll be the case, maybe not, but nothing much comes of it here beyond Jamie finally realizing that floating his credentials as an introduction can’t get him what he really wants – it takes him breaking down a little and admitting the desperation he’s feeling for the old man to pay him any mind at all.Ī scene in “Meaner Than Evil” that I absolutely cannot fathom why writer Taylor Sheridan and director Stephen Kay included was shared between Kayce and Monica. That’s what he’s struggling with here, as he can’t quite get to grips with the fact that he’s adopted and that his junkie dad killed his junkie mother he has always felt different, ostracised, apart from the rest of the Dutton clan, and he feels that understanding this cranky old murderer is the only means by which he can figure out who he really is.

The main thing going on in Yellowstone season 3, episode 9 that doesn’t have much to do with anything else is the matter of Jamie’s biological parentage, though you have to imagine it’ll eventually factor into the broader narrative, one assumes by vindicating Jamie’s inevitable decision to turn against his “family”. John’s old buddy Wade and his son, whose name I still haven’t caught or bothered to research, feel like they were introduced entirely for this purpose, though we’ll get to them in due course. At least with the first couple of seasons, you had a good sense of who the Duttons were going to murder, if not necessarily when they’d get around to it, but since Season 3 has largely been about faceless venture capitalism, it hasn’t offered too many actual targets. In many ways, this feels like an odd move for so late in the season, but Yellowstone has always delighted in using murder as a convenient problem-solving tool, and there hasn’t been much of it in this year’s outing comparatively speaking. “Meaner Than Evil” took its title as a challenge, delivering an episode that could have easily been plucked from the shallower, pulpier days of the first season, when the Yellowstone ranch was depicted as a kind of nutcase cult where brands are seared into flesh, no slights go unpunished, and anyone who refuses to play along gets killed and chucked off a cliff.

Yellowstone season3