Taylor Sheridan has always been armed and ready to take Yellowstone to new heights. But his epic plan flopped earlier than expected after the writer-director’s show took a turn for the worse midway through its journey on Paramount.
Launched in 2018, Yellowstone was prophesied to be one of the best modern epics made for television. The interplay of characters, plot, and drama mixed wonderfully to create a perfect story. However, it all went downhill after Season 3 — both in-universe as well as for the fans in reality.
Taylor Sheridan Invents a Twisted Sibling Rivalry
If one was to liken Taylor Sheridan to a modern day mastermind specializing in cowboys and power politics, one would be right. The Oscar-nominated writer put his best thinking hat on when he came up with the plot of Yellowstone.
However, the process became filled with a bit of drudgery after Kelly Reilly’s Beth Dutton turned Wes Bentley’s Jaime Dutton into her extra-special punch bag for seemingly no conceivable reason. The sibling rivalry that teetered between hatred and murderous rage then became a regular dinner-table topic of conversation after Sheridan exploited this festering hatred since Season 1 Episode 1.
Unfortunately, the writer-director held the secret that fueled the hatred between Beth and Jaime for 3 whole seasons before playing it out for the audience. The scene justified Beth’s rage in a much clearer light but it also robbed the audience of understanding her internalized trauma resulting from the incident since the very beginning, instead chalking up her attitude as bratty childishness and a fractured mental health.
Kelly Reilly Confiscates Some Info on Beth Dutton
The character of Beth Dutton in Yellowstone could not be more polar opposite to that of Kelly Reilly’s in real ity. Often, the actions of her fictional alter-ego are ghastly enough to leave her reeling. However, there was one tiny piece of information that Reilly went out of her way to seek out in order to get into the head of her character.
In an interview with Express UK, Reilly revealed what it was that made her so impatient to learn on the first day of the job.
I needed to know what that thing was in order to play these scenes with him. This isn’t just sibling rivalry. Taylor told me. He told me what it was. I’ve always known since season one pretty much what that was.
“That thing,” on Reilly’s part turned out to be Beth’s inability to have children. As was revealed in a flashback sequence in Season 3, after getting pregnant at age 14, Beth asking for 16-year-old Jaime’s help didn’t go over swimmingly.
I was like: ‘Okay, there’s enough for her to be fierce about him, but there’s something deeper. There’s something else. There’s something really at the core of it, something really painful.’
As fans got to witness, to keep the Dutton name out of a scandal, the siblings went to a clinic at the nearby Broken Rock Reservation where Beth was sterilized while getting an abortion, making her unable to ever have biological children.
Later, she learned about Jaime’s involvement in making that decision without her consent, turning her hatred into a paralyzing and venomous toxicity toward Jaime. On the other hand, for Wes Bentley, the past was still a secret until the Season 3 flashback sequence.
I knew she knew! No, no one told me. But you know, part of that is Taylor. I’d probably said to him, I don’t like to know more than I should know. And in my opinion, for Jamie, that made sense for this because I feel like he maybe had repressed this. I was OK with not knowing.
So far, the Yellowstone fans are yet to see a resolution to the escalating drama between the siblings, and quite honestly, it seems highly unlikely that Sheridan can provide a vindicated closure to his characters and their storylines within 8 episodes of the finale.
Yellowstone Season 5 Part 2 will premiere on Paramount+ in November 2024.