Are you fucking kidding me? That’s the phrase I typed out multiple times while watching this week’s penultimate Yellowstone. I generally know what to expect when it comes to this show, especially in this final season, but “Give the World Away” is even duller than usual. There’s no reason an episode this close to the end should be this boring, and there’s certainly no reason it should contain so much Taylor Sheridan.
Broadly speaking, this is an episode centered around the auction that will help determine how long the Duttons can hold onto the ranch. Rip wants to hold onto Lloyd and Carter for the daywork once it ends, but otherwise, all the ranch hands should start looking for jobs. It should be nostalgic to watch these conversations happen; we’ve been watching this team work together for five seasons, with countless bunkhouse shenanigans and an unbelievable number of wordless herding montages. This is truly the end of an era. Instead, though, it all just feels listless. The most emotion-provoking parts of this episode for me are the Travis segments, and the main emotion those scenes provoke is irritation.
Travis making one last appearance here isn’t totally unjustifiable; he’s in charge of selling the most expensive Yellowstone horses down in Texas. For some reason, Beth takes it upon herself to pop down there to make sure the sales go okay, distrustful of Travis. And it turns out she’s right to be skeptical, based on his lateness to the meeting. When she shows up to Bosque Ranch (owned by Sheridan himself, of course), Travis is caught up playing strip poker with a bunch of young women, including his much younger girlfriend Sadie (played by a newly Texasified Bella Hadid).
While Travis shows off a horse to his Brazilian buyers, Beth chats with Sadie, asking her why she’s with such an arrogant, sexist man. “You ever seen him ride before?” Sadie replies, a true eyeroll moment only matched by Beth amending to “Okay, yeah, I get it” after watching him work a cow for a minute. He gets the price of the horse up to $3 million by pitting the buyers against a fake second interested party played by the maintenance crew. Impressed and recognizing how much his skills could help the ranch, Beth asks him to come up to Montana and help with the auction itself. He’s always down for basically any favor to the Duttons, so it’s a foregone conclusion that he’ll say yes. But first, we’re treated to another strip poker scene where he gets Beth to strip for him (and his phone camera!) just to fuck with her. He stops her before she gets very far, but our perception of him as a creep remains strong.
It doesn’t seem like the show really sees Travis as anything other than a lovable scamp, though, even if we hear Beth insult him over and over. When she asks Rip why Travis would be his friend, he tells her a story about a time back in the day when the two of them got beaten up after Travis defended him from some aggressive railroad workers. He later went back in and got Rip’s hat for him, and I guess that simple act of dude friendship shows that he’s a loyal guy. Not sure that story is enough to offset decades of sliminess, but Beth seems convinced.
I haven’t always been the biggest Travis hater, but so much of this episode feels like a tribute to a supporting character who never did anything to deserve it … besides be played by the creator and writer of the show. Travis is basically always framed as a Cool Guy — his most unflattering quality 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. Pretty much any Jamie scene is guaranteed to be more entertaining than anything else in the show at this point, not because he’s a brilliantly written character but because it’s fun to witness each step of his inevitable downfall. After Dillard gets proof of Sarah Atwood’s office at Market Equities, Jamie watches a news report about their personal/professional relationship. His panicked reactions from the couch are hilarious: “How could you know that!? What evidence!?”
Beth still doesn’t personally go after Jamie in this episode, but they do have a phone conversation where she calmly and implicitly reminds him she’s going to kill him. His only other scene is a visit to his baby mama and former assistant Christina, who agrees to help him for the same reason she always helps him: They share a kid. Her brilliant political advice amounts to deny, deny, deny, though she also suggests investigating John’s murder and positioning it as the symbolic murder of Montanans’ freedom. He thanks her, like these are ideas that never would’ve occurred to him, but it feels way too late for him to wriggle out of this one.
The auction takes up the rest of the episode, and I have to say, these last 30 minutes felt hours long to me. The Texas crew are finally back at the ranch now (what was even the point of that whole narrative detour to the Four Sixes?), and Teeter is still processing the loss of Colby. Beth rescues her with a trip to a tourist bar where she often goes when she’s upset. For Beth, there’s no medicine like fucking with 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 one used to be a huge part of Yellowstone, and I can’t say I’ve totally missed them. Kelly Reilly’s performance is the best of the show, and Beth is always watchable, but there are never any consequences for her actions, so it’s hard to enjoy her takedowns. And it always goes the same way: She takes one look at some visitor from “L.A., San Francisco, New York … all the failing cities of our nation” and immediately pegs every miserable detail of their existence. This time, she identifies poor Aaron as a finance guy with two kids who bailed on his wife after fucking his interns, moved to Miami to “bang wannabe models,” and sucked dick one summer while abroad. “You suck one cock, and you are a cocksucker for life,” she says, which isn’t very progressive.
Beth and Teeter are a fun pairing, in theory, and I would’ve liked to see a subplot like this one earlier in the show. It has its moments, like Teeter trying out Beth’s technique herself and then immediately threatening the guy with physical violence after he tries to buy her a drink. But it’s only marginally more tolerable than what’s going on at the ranch.
The auction does better than expected, but as Beth points out, it’s only delaying the inevitable. Luckily, Kayce suddenly has a plan that he knows in his heart will work! It involves some property tax loophole — giving the ranch away in order to save it, possibly with the help of Rainwater and the tribe. It’d be a little easier to stomach his sweet moments with Monica if we hadn’t watched 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 stuff to enjoy in next week’s (most likely) series finale. The final Beth-Jamie showdown should be enjoyable. Series finales can be difficult, but with a show like this where vibes are the priority, there aren’t many plot requirements; playing on our long-term emotional investment should be easy. Then again, this final half-season has been kind of a shitshow, and not in an entertaining off-the-rails way. After this series-low episode, I can officially say I am ready to be done with Yellowstone.
