Critic’s Rating: 3.5 / 5.0
3.5
If you’d hoped we were done with slow scenes celebrating cowboy culture, you’ll be disappointed with Yellowstone Season 5 Episode 10.
The first half of the episode took another long-winded detour to Texas, where Beth showed up out of the blue to insist on a date night with Rip.
Some of the Texas stuff was interesting, and I love Beth and Rip, but come on, Yellowstone! We have a murder to avenge.
Rip’s Warnings About Snakes On Yellowstone Season 5 Episode 10 Were Symbolic Of The Real Threat, But That Wasn’t Enough
The opening scene confused me. I couldn’t figure out if this was another flashback to before John’s death or if Rip was back in Texas in the present.
It was an interesting scenario that I probably would have enjoyed if I wasn’t so busy trying to figure out the timeline and how snakes getting into Teeter’s tent was connected to the end of Yellowstone Season 5 Episode 9.
In retrospect, the beginning of “The Apocalypse Of Change” was symbolic of the battle ahead.
The cowboys’ camp was on top of a viper’s nest and the snakes got in Teeter’s bed because she left her tent open instead of doing everything she could to protect herself.
Obviously, that could happen to the ranch if Rip and Beth aren’t careful. Beth even called Summer a viper later in the episode.
Still, this part of the episode crawled along. The only thing moving fast was Beth’s car.
It was especially disconcerting considering how strong a cliffhanger we were coming off of.
I wanted to know what was next in the investigation into John’s death and Beth’s desire to get revenge on Jamie, and that didn’t happen until near the end of the hour.
What The Heck Was All That Talk About Giving Up The Ranch On Yellowstone Season 5 Episode 10?
I always love Rip and Beth, so their date was fun even though this story didn’t follow logically from where it left off.
My favorite part was Beth’s insistence they make their own dance floor if there wasn’t one. Beth’s refusal to let someone else’s lack of a path dictate her own is one of the things I love best about her.
Still, all of Beth’s talk about being unshackled from the ranch was weird.
She seemed to want to give up the Yellowstone Ranch and move to Texas, but that just didn’t seem like Beth.
Rip’s declaration that he chose to be “shackled” to the ranch on Yellowstone Season 5 Episode 10 made a lot more sense.
I thought after all his talk about cowboy culture dying, he would be more determined than anyone else to save the ranch, and I was right.
Rip loved John, who was both his father-in-law and surrogate father, so he’d want to keep the ranch in family hands out of respect for him.
However, the ranch also represents the way of life that Rip loves.
That’s why I didn’t mind all that talk about the death of the cowboy profession on Yellowstone Season 1 Episode 9; I knew it was setting up Rip’s strong feelings about the ranch.
He’ll fight to the death for it. I have no doubt about that, and his attitude on Yellowstone Season 5 Episode 10 proved it.
Beth will too. She’s her father’s daughter and was fighting the good fight before his death. The only mystery here is why she was talking about giving it all up and moving to Texas.
Jamie is Way Too Confident, And It Will Come Back To Bite Him
Yellowstone Season 5 Episode 10 picked up in the last fifteen minutes when Beth confronted Jamie.
That coward stood there and let her slap him in the face over and over, neither fighting back nor moving, then told his assistant not to call the cops.
He probably knows that the cops are going to be on his family’s side, not his. Still, it takes a special person to be super confident he’s going to win after Beth proved her dominance over him so quickly.
I don’t know why Jamie thinks it’ll be easy to negate the land trust, reinstate the lease, and sell the property to developers.
Nothing is easy when Beth is involved, and he knows it.
His overconfidence is great news… for Beth.
Their battle over John’s death is supposed to be a fight to the death. Jamie has no fight in him and never has; all he has are claims that he probably knows are BS about how simple it’ll be to screw everyone over now that John is gone.
Jamie seems to have gotten over whatever guilt or horror he felt about John’s murder VERY quickly.
He’s ready to run for governor in his place as well as undo everything John did to protect the ranch. He can’t possibly believe that nobody will oppose him, especially not with Beth on the warpath.
More of this, please. Stop limiting it to the last few minutes of the hour.
Kayce Is Stuck In The Middle… Again
Yellowstone Season 5 Episode 10 established that Kayce is where he always was: stuck between Monica’s desire that he live an ethical life and his need to be loyal to John.
In this case, Beth is the proxy for John, asking Kayce to help her get to the bottom of their father’s death and telling him she knows for sure that Jamie is involved.
The only difference between this and all the Kayce/Monica storylines while John was alive is that Tate is old enough now to understand what’s going on.
It’s hard to believe he was once a seven-year-old obsessed with dinosaur bones. Now, he’s a teenager whose mother wants him to keep an eye on his father so that Kayce doesn’t go down a bad path.
Tate can handle being in the middle.
As a little boy, he killed a snake he was stuck in a pipe with (there are those rattlesnakes again!), so as a young adult, he can handle this conflict. However, it doesn’t seem fair for Monica to insert him into this.
I liked the scene between Kayce and Tate when they talked about John.
Kayce: There’s a lot you don’t know and a lot I can’t tell you yet, but just know this. You can focus on the way he lived or focus on how he died. Your heart can’t do both. You can either miss him or you can be mad at him.
Although Tate doesn’t know half the things John was into, he probably knows that his grandfather wasn’t usually on the up and up.
When he was little, he was always sent away so that Monica could lay into John without him hearing, and now that he’s too old for that, he can quickly add two and two together.
Tate’s decision to miss John rather than be mad at him points to the special relationship they had, the one Monica was so afraid of them having all these years.
It was also an interesting parallel with Carter, who felt like John’s death meant he had been abandoned yet again.
Over to you, Yellowstone fanatics.
Did you find the first half of “Apocalypse of Change” as slow as I did, or was it just right?
Vote in our poll to let us know how many spurs you give Yellowstone Season 5 Episode 10, then hit the comments with your thoughts.
Yellowstone airs on the Paramount Network on Sundays at 8/7c and on Peacock on Mondays.
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