Well, the midnight headlight might blind you on a rainy night. But in 1981, on the strip in Fort Worth, TX, as Eddie Rabbitt’s “Drivin’ My Life Away” plays on the radio, Young Beulah Jackson (Rebeca Robles) is out to have the best possible time. The Sheridan-O-Verse gets heavy with flashbacks — remember meeting Young Beth and Young Rip in Yellowstone Season 5? — and in Episode 7 of Dutton Ranch (“Den of Sin”), Beulah and her friends are chaperoned by young Mariano Reyes (Bobby Soto), top 10-Petal hand, who answers directly to her father. Country music, clinking bottles, mechanical bulls, and line dancing, all scuffed up with the boot marks of foreboding, because while the bartender distracts Mariano — we learn about Joaquin, his little baby son, back at the ranch — a cowboy sexually assaults Beulah. When Mariano finds her, she makes him promise to tell her father only that she fell off the mechanical bull.
For characters around these parts, flashbacks always display a decision or incident which informs the rest of their lives. Mariano was Young Beulah’s ally against her overbearing dad, who loved the ranch more than his own blood. Mariano was the first one she told, after the assault produced a positive pregnancy test. And Mariano drove her to that cowboy’s trailer. He didn’t know she was gonna shoot and kill him. But Mariano didn’t tell Buelah’s father about that, either.
And so we’re in the present day at the 10-Petal, where Beulah, in an immaculate Nudie-style western suit, nitpicks every detail for the ranch’s big 190th anniversary party. Rio Paloma will be out in style. Even Zane Nash is attending. Oreana is on her best behavior — “I know how important this is for you, Mama B” — and Beulah keeps turning over her speech in her mind. It will not be the normal one, full of historical hokum. This year’s speech will settle all questions of succession, with Joaquin, Mariano’s boy who she raised, taking over the 10-P. That is until Rob-Will makes his reappearance official. Her other son, the product of that fateful night in 1981, has his boots on Mama B’s desk. He’s still an erratic loose cannon addict, and he still hates Joaquin. “My name is Robert William Jackson III, and this ranch is my legacy. I’ll never let Kino have it. Ever.”
“This is fucking cowboy.” Led by Beth Dutton in her own best fit of the season, the Dutton Ranch fam ride their horses to Beulah’s big event. At first the evening is cordial, and Everett McKinney works the room as Beulah’s date. But Carter offers another sign of trouble. He’s pulling hangdog faces as Oreana chats up a frat bro college type, and she’s not having it. “You walk around with this wound, Carter, and you expect me to do something about it.” Guess those I-think-I-love-yous from last time were premature. She proceeds to destroy the kid with an extended Texas metaphor about bulls and steers and which side of the castration question he is on.
The thing about Beulah is that she did not push back at all when Rob-Will barged in. She did say her blood prince squandered every second chance she ever gave him. But in her office, as he trashed her original speech, she knew Rob-Will was correct about what her father taught him. To be clear-eyed about consuming the competition. To be ruthless. To be a killer. A mentality like her own, which Beulah knows the ranch will need, even with the infusion of Beth and Rip’s professional acumen. This is something we have alluded to since the beginning of Dutton Ranch, from the poison pill of an infected bull to Beulah receiving cryptic phone calls about “doing what’s right” for the ranch. Remember her drunkenly crying out “I can’t!” to Joaquin, as if there was some deeper level of control beyond her own? If there is a criminal aspect to the 10-Petal solvency, then perhaps a criminal like Rob-Will should still be in charge.
“This is my 38th time for some proper speechifying,” Beulah begins, and in the party audience, Joaquin looks ecstatic. This is his moment! Instead he is crushed when Buelah discards her prepared remarks and announces Rob-Will as her successor. In five years’ time, she says, her only son by blood will take over the 10-Petal’s ranch operations. A startled murmur breaks out, roughly translated as, “Isn’t he a murdering cokehead fuck-up?” But before anyone can react, Carter returns to the party. After Oreana dressed him down, he stole a bottle from the bar, and now this dude is drunk as a skunk. She wants him to grow a pair and be a bull? Barring that, will she accept Carter stealing some Longhorn taxidermy from the wall in Beulah’s office and tossing the cow head onto the lawn? You mess with the bull, you break the horns.
Beth makes a beeline for Beulah while Rip extricates their son from the party. But nobody has time to be mad at Carter’s drunken antics, or wonder about Beulah’s strange and sudden succession announcement, because she reaches for her chest in pain before keeling over. Has the ballad of Mama B reached its final verse?
The Beth Parts for Episode 7 of Dutton Ranch (“Den of Sin”):
- That Dutton Ranch flashback to 1981 Fort Worth had some real nice touches. Rabbit’s “Drivin’ My Life Away” went gold that year on the country charts, and before everything went bad, Young Beulah line-danced to “Good Hearted Woman” by Waylon Jennings. We also liked the more primitive 10-Petal logo painted on Mariano’s boxy 80s F-150.
- “Your son is a drug addict.” At the party, before she collapsed, Zane Nash was not happy to hear about Beulah’s succession plans. Frontier Hospitality Group bought into her family’s ranching story, not the sordid adventures of her wayward son.
- And as Beulah’s 10-P party went south, the bunkhouse boys were getting into barfights down at the Split Heart, where Cowboy Austin, true friend of Dead Foreman Wes, finally spoke his truth. “The 10-Petal’s dirty. Corrupt. We’re all fucked, and we never say shit about it.”
Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social) is a Chicago-based writer. A veteran of the alternative weekly trenches, his work has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork, The All Music Guide, and The Village Voice.