Summary
Dutton Ranch shakes up the dynamics in “Peaceful Find Peace” by putting Beth and Rip on the back foot and weaving their plight in with the 10 Petal more explicitly.
It occurs to me that despite this show being titled Dutton Ranch, there isn’t a great deal going on at the titular ranch. Frankly, it has been nothing but disasters since the very beginning, culminating in the traumatic extermination of an entire herd thanks to an outbreak of foot and mouth disease. But in Episode 5, “Peaceful Find Peace”, Beth and Rip being on the back foot thanks to the failure of their own endeavours reworks a lot of Season 1’s dynamics in interesting ways. You can’t run a ranch without any animals, so in order to keep the lights on, they have to make a deal with the devil.
This intertwines Beth and Rip’s plight with the 10 Petal plot more explicitly, which is objectively a good thing. It’s easy to forget, but Rip found Wes’s body on his land and dumped it, so he’s already pretty intimately connected to the mess that murder has made of the 10 Petal Ranch. Now he’s personally involved in the internal politics that caused the murder and tried to cover it up. The return of Rob-Will, whom Rip has already had a disagreement with, builds tension. And it’s just flat-out fun to watch Rip terrorise the 10 Petal bunkhouse, which is populated almost exclusively by deeply unlikeable characters.
This is because Rip’s idea to put food on the table in lieu of a herd is to petition Beulah for a job. Everett happened to mention that her current foreman is useless, which gives Rip an in. A quarter-century of running a ranch four times the size of the 10 Petal is a pretty good resume. Beulah might have clashed with Beth already, but she knows a good deal when she sees one. And, to her, keeping Rip close is a good way to learn more about — and potentially gain leverage over — Beth.
Rip takes to the job like a duck to water, whipping the cowboys into shape and immediately upsetting Chet, for whom being upset seems to be something of a default state. He lets Austin wail on him about the Wes thing, mostly so that Rip can get a bit more of a sense of what they’re beefing about, but if you ask me, he misses a golden opportunity to drop his whole “There’s no fighting on this ranch” Yellowstone spiel. Nevertheless, when Rip later sits down with Austin, he gets the lowdown on Wes and his family being missing, and clearly puts two and two together about whose body he found on his land. He also fires Chet on the spot, which is hilarious.
Chet’s still going to be a problem, of course. He immediately confronts Joaquin and not-so-subtly threatens to out Wes’s murder, and then towards the end of Dutton Ranch Episode 5, Rob-Will turns up at Chet’s place, having clearly checked himself out of rehab. These two are clearly going to be the small-scale villains of the piece, though it seems like Beulah is still the Big Bad, even if it doesn’t necessarily appear that way at a glance.
Beulah recognises she needs Rip, and by the end of “Peaceful Finds Peace”, she realises she might need Beth, too. Not one to sit at home cooking dinner for men who can’t be bothered to come home, Beth approaches Beulah with her own pitch, based on a day’s worth of research into 10 Petal’s history. While Rip is foreman, she proposes selling premium steaks to high-end buyers on 10 Petal’s behalf, in exchange for 20% of the profits. She’s the kind of shark that the enterprise is badly missing, and Joaquin’s strategic abilities leave a little to be desired. In five years, she and Rip will be out, but the ranch will have been saved. Beulah can’t help but see the logic, and hires Beth on the spot.
With both of our heroes now working for the villains, the dynamic has pivoted pretty drastically. But given what Rip has discovered about Wes — which he finally shares with his wife this week — it’s clear they’re still in the midst of a war with a ruthless outfit, just one being fought on a new front. As Beth says, peace will have to wait.
Elsewhere, Carter continues bunking off school to hang out with Dwight, though this subplot takes some weird turns here. Carter introduces Oreana — still being babysat by Miguel — to Xena, Dwight’s illegal pet leopard. He then spends the rest of the day sitting around and drinking beer again, largely ignoring Dwight’s surprisingly sage advice about not growing up too fast.
But then the police arrive in a sudden, unexpected raid, and while Dwight rushes to try and get Xena out of there, Wade shoots him dead — in the back, clearly on false pretenses. Thus far, Wade has seemed like a decent enough guy who is regrettably on the take because the Jacksons essentially paid for his position, but here he takes on a more sinister contour. He even tells Carter, in so many words, to keep his mouth shut about what he saw, lest his parents find out that he hasn’t really been going to school.
I can’t help but find it just a little bit suspicious that the police just so happened to turn up the day that Oreana learned the leopard was there. Is she playing double agent to sabotage the Duttons at Beulah’s behest? Was it Miguel who snitched? Or are — less likely, granted — the two events not even related, the whole thing just a coincidence?
With Wade, it’s difficult to tell. He does seem to have extrajudicially murdered a man for a fairly minor crime, but there’s also clearly no love lost between him and Joaquin, and he doesn’t relish the power the Jacksons have over him. Time will tell. But what I know for certain is that neither Beth nor Rip realising that Carter isn’t at school when he hangs around at Dwight’s place until nighttime every day is making them look kind of stupid. How long do they think school lasts?
