![]() “Only reason to ride a bull is to meet a nurse,” John says and, “First man to ride a bull might be worth meetin’… It’s the second man I wonder about.” ![]() When John Dutton chats with his helpful pal at the rodeo, for example, they swap folksy laments about how boys are self-sabotaging dopes by nature and they share these thoughts in the context of their exasperation with bull-riders. As noted last week, Sheridan has a bad habit of letting his dialogue drip with what his characters consider to be Great Truths but if nothing else, that makes his dialogue memorable. That said, quite a lot of those moments are striking. There’s just not much of an easy, organic flow to “Kill the Messenger.” It’s an anthology of moments, sloppily threaded. But it’s still a waste to kill off such a memorable character the first time he appears. The scene between Rip and the medical examiner doesn’t pop up out of nowhere exactly John and his son Jamie have already talked about how the man’s not going to be easy to sweet-talk, and how he has a problematic history they can exploit. The explosion and its curiously healing aftermath come abruptly, with minimal setup. Putting the charred man out of his misery turns out to be a bonding experience for the couple, leading Monica to make one last, persuasive plea for her husband to stay, saying, “There’s nothing you could do I won’t forgive you for.” Kayce, of course, knows better … because he knows what he’s already done. (He even calls up his former CO, who lets him know that he’d probably be deployed in Yemen, which is the Middle East’s key “domino.”)īut while Kayce and Monica are driving down one of Montana’s dusty roads, arguing about his plan to ship out, they’re interrupted by a trailer in the middle of nowhere that explodes, severely burning its occupant. While all this is going on, Kayce is considering fleeing the scene of the crime - and his own guilt over killing his wife’s brother - by reenlisting in the military. Last week we met Rip Wheeler (played by Cole Hauser), the Duttons’ thuggish “fixer.” This week Rip corners a stubbornly honest medical examiner, in a jarring scene that sees the goon needling the doc about his depression and his drug addiction (the man smokes hand-rolled cigarettes spiked with embalming fluid!) before eventually persuading him that the best thing would be for Rip to set fire to the coroner’s office with him inside, at once ending the ME’s miserable life and destroying any damning evidence. Some of his moves are more subtle, as when he persuades a preacher at another investigator’s church to give a sermon redefining the biblical commandment against “bearing false witness against thy neighbor” to mean “don’t say anything that would make life tougher for our community’s best friend John Dutton.”īrute force fixes what remains of the problem. Some of it’s just “old boy network” stuff, like when he sits next to one of the investigators - a longtime friend - at a rodeo, and very easily gets his word that the record will reflect whatever the Duttons need it to. The ways John wields power is fascinating. Much of this week involves John Dutton calling in favors to stop this inquiry from becoming a problem. At times it feels like there are huge chunks of the episode missing, perhaps dropped to allow more time for the show to muse about What It Means to Be a Man.Īnd that’s a shame too, because the fundamentals of this episode are strong. In the wake of the climactic shoot-out in “Daybreak,” the Dutton family are finding that their official story - that any casualties were just shot in the crossfire, while acting out of self-defense - is undercut by the crime-scene photos, which implicate the military-trained Kayce Dutton in a professional-style execution of his own brother-in-law. As with last week’s series premiere, this week’s “Kill the Messenger” practically lurches from scene to scene. Yet when it comes to Yellowstone’s storytelling - at least in the early going - the writer-director appears to be less certain about what belongs in the frame and what doesn’t. If this genre has one defining visual element, it’s those vast and mostly empty landscapes, where any sign of human existence tends to catch the eye. Yellowstone has frequently featured some classically “Western” shots - in particular the ones where two men share the screen in profile, with the outlines of their hat brims overlapping, against the backdrop of an endless sky. Say this for Taylor Sheridan: At the very least, he knows how a Western should look.
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