Yellowstone

Give the gift of the world

Season 5

Episode 13

Editor’s Rating

1 star

*

Photo: Paramount

Are you kidding me? That’s the sentence I typed several times while watching this week’s second to last film Yellowstone. I generally know what to expect from this show, especially in this final season, but “Give the World Away” is even more boring than usual. There’s no reason why an episode should be so boring so close to the end, and There’s certainly no reason why it should contain so much Taylor Sheridan.

Broadly speaking, it’s an episode centered around the auction, which will help determine how long the Duttons can keep the ranch. Rip wants to keep Lloyd and Carter for the day’s work once it’s over, but otherwise all the ranch hands should start looking for jobs. It should be nostalgic to watch these conversations; For five seasons, we’ve watched this team work together, with countless shenanigans and an incredible number of wordless hat montages. This is truly the end of an era. Instead, everything just feels listless. For me, the parts with Travis are the most emotional parts of this episode, and the main emotion these scenes evoke is irritation.

Travis’ final appearance here isn’t entirely unwarranted; He is responsible for selling the most expensive Yellowstone horses in Texas. For some reason, Beth takes it upon herself to stop by to make sure sales are going well and is suspicious of Travis. And it turns out she’s right to be skeptical, considering he was late to the meeting. When she shows up at the Bosque Ranch (which, of course, belongs to Sheridan himself), Travis is caught playing strip poker with a group of young women, including his much younger girlfriend Sadie (played by recent Texas native Bella Hadid). .

While Travis shows off a horse to his Brazilian buyers, Beth chats with Sadie and asks her why she is dating such an arrogant, sexist man. “Have you ever seen him ride a horse?” Sadie replies, a real eye-roller moment only topped by Beth switching to “Okay, yeah, I get it” after watching him work on a cow for a minute has observed. He inflates the horse’s price up to $3 million by pitting the buyers against a fake second prospect played by the maintenance team. Beth is impressed and realizes how much his skills could help the ranch. She asks him to come to Montana and help with the auction itself. He’s basically always willing to do the Duttons a favor, so it’s a foregone conclusion that he’ll say yes. But first we’re treated to another strip poker scene where he makes Beth strip naked for him (and his phone camera!) just to fuck her. He stops her before she gets far, but our perception of him as a creep remains strong.

However, it doesn’t seem like the show really views Travis as anything other than a lovely guy, even as we hear Beth continually insult him. When she asks Rip why Travis is his friend, he tells her a story about a time when the two of them were beaten up after Travis defended him from some aggressive railroad workers. He later went back in and got Rip’s hat for himself, and I guess that simple act of friendship shows that he’s a loyal guy. I’m not sure this story is enough to make up for decades of sliminess, but Beth seems convinced.

I haven’t always been the biggest Travis hater, but much of this episode feels like a homage to a minor character who never did anything to deserve it… other than being played by the show’s creator and writer. Travis is essentially always portrayed as a “cool guy” – his most unflattering trait is that he sleeps with a lot of women – and the sense of self-aggrandizement is worse than ever in this episode, especially with the Bella Hadid of it all.

“Give the World Away” isn’t all bad. At this point, pretty much any Jamie scene is guaranteed to be more entertaining than anything else in the series, not because he’s a brilliantly written character, but because it’s fun to witness every step of his inevitable demise. After Dillard obtains evidence of Sarah Atwood’s office at Market Equities, Jamie watches a news report about their personal/professional relationship. His panicked reactions on the couch are hilarious: “How could you know!?” What evidence!?”

Beth still doesn’t go after Jamie personally in this episode, but they have a phone conversation in which she calmly and implicitly reminds him that she’s going to kill him. His only other scene is a visit to his infant mother and former assistant Christina, who agrees to help him for the same reason she always helps him: they have a child together. Her brilliant political advice amounts to deny, deny, deny, although she also suggests investigating John’s murder and positioning it as a symbolic murder of Montanans’ freedom. He thanks her as if they were ideas that had never occurred to him, but it feels far too late to snap his way out of it.

The auction takes up the rest of the episode, and I have to say that those last 30 minutes felt like hours. The Texan crew is now finally back at the ranch (what was the point of that whole narrative detour to the Four Sixes anyway?), and Teeter is still processing the loss of Colby. Beth saves her with a trip to a tourist bar, where she often goes when she’s upset. For Beth, there’s no better medicine than fucking rich, entitled transplants (because being filthy rich and from Los Angeles is a million times worse than being filthy rich and from Montana).

Scenes like this used to play a big role Yellowstoneand I can’t say I missed her completely. Kelly Reilly’s performance is the show’s best, and Beth is always good to watch, but her actions never have consequences, so it’s hard to enjoy her defeats. And it always plays out the same way: She takes one look at a visitor from “LA, San Francisco, New York… all the failing cities of our nation” and immediately recognizes every pathetic detail of their existence. This time she identifies poor Aaron as a financier with two kids who left his wife after fucking his interns, moved to Miami to “bang wannabe models,” and sucked cock abroad one summer. “You suck a cock and you’re a cocksucker for life,” she says, which isn’t very progressive.

Beth and Teeter are a fun couple in theory, and I would have liked a subplot like this earlier in the series. There are moments where Teeter tries out Beth’s technique himself and then immediately threatens the guy with physical violence after he tries to buy her a drink. But it’s only slightly more bearable than what’s happening on the ranch.

The auction is going better than expected, but as Beth points out, it’s just delaying the inevitable. Luckily, Kayce suddenly has a plan that he knows in his heart will work! This involves a property tax loophole – giving away the ranch to save it, possibly with the help of Rainwater and the tribe. It would be a little easier to endure his sweet moments with Monica if we hadn’t seen him point a gun at a child’s face last week, but at least there’s hope for the ranch.

I’m sure there will be a lot to enjoy in next week’s (most likely) series finale. The final showdown between Beth and Jamie should be fun. Series finales can be difficult, but with a show like this, where mood is at the forefront, there aren’t many plot requirements; It should be easy to play with our long-term emotional investment. Then again, this last half-season has been kind of a shit show, and not in an entertaining way. After this series-deep episode, I can officially say I want to call it quits Yellowstone.

• An impressive scene for Thomas Rainwater and Mo, and it’s almost similar to their last conversation with a view of the pipeline. This time Rainwater seems to be proposing to mobilize his people to sabotage the project.

• I guess we’ll see John’s funeral next week? I’ve always liked Lynelle Perry, so it’s nice to see her get an invite from Beth.

• Walker meets Laramie again, which is sweet. Jimmy and Emily are still together too.

• Any other predictions for the final? One final Tate moment of “getting a room” on the road?

• Apologies to anyone who enjoyed this episode. For the record, this is the first time I’ve given a one-star review on Vulture.