<i><em>Dutton Ranch </em></i>Season 1, Episode 8 Recap: Secrets Revealed

Spoilers below.

Over the course of its first season, Dutton Ranch has set out to distinguish itself from Yellowstone as a sequel series. Much of that effort has thus far taken the form of table-setting and world-building, familiarizing fans with an expanded cast and a new location. But with this week’s episode—the season’s penultimate installment—the action finally ramps up, and the secrets come tumbling out.

“Whiskey Limits” opens right where we left off last week: Beulah, after collapsing at the 10-Petal Ranch’s anniversary party, is airlifted to the hospital with Rob-Will riding alongside her. Carter, who just drunkenly embarrassed himself in front of the entire community, trots home with Rip via horseback, though he can barely stay upright in his saddle. Does drunk horseback riding count as impaired driving?!

The next morning, Beth wakes her hungover adopted son with some ibuprofen and coffee, and they have a chat on the porch. Carter finally admits it: He quit school, but he can’t exactly explain why he hated it so much. Beth doesn’t consider this middling excuse to be an adequate one. Carter finally admits to her that his dream is to be a cowboy—to be like Rip and her dad, John Dutton III, not to sit in classrooms reading Animal Farm. (For what it’s worth, Carter might actually enjoy Animal Farm if he gave it a chance!) Hearing Carter actually express how he feels about something seems to shift Beth’s perspective, and she agrees to send him to the 10-Petal to get to work…immediately. Hangover or not, there’s a ranch to feed.

Rip isn’t thrilled to be driving Carter back over to the 10-Petal, especially when he’s forced to pull over to let the kid puke on the roadside. Azul, riding shotgun, calls Carter “borrachín,” a boozehound. It’s going to be a long day for this guy. At the 10-Petal itself, none of the other cowboys seem hungover or bruised, though they probably should be after the night they just had. Meanwhile, Carter can barely keep his hands on the reins; while riding out for the day, he leaves the cattle gate ajar in his hungover haze.

That’s not his only challenge for the day: Later, he has to fix up some barbed wire with his bare hands after having forgotten to pack his gloves. Carter, c’mon! This is Cowboy 101 here! Rip throws him a bone and offers him his own gloves, but we’ll see how this special treatment will land with the other cowboys. Austin would probably throw a fit if he knew, but he’s too busy confronting Miguel—at gunpoint, no less—about what happened to both Wes and Chet. As Miguel rightfully puts it: Why is Austin asking questions about what he can already piece together on his own? Zachariah rides up on them before they can shoot each other, and he convinces the men to lower their rifles…for now. Austin probably needs to let the mouse go!

Soon enough, more trouble arrives: The cattle bust out of the gate Carter neglected to lock up properly. Worse yet, he’s thrown off his horse as he tries to rope a runaway calf. Embarrassed and bruised, he utters “fuck this shit!” and rides off. Rip is not impressed with this temper tantrum, and he later finds Carter in the horse stables back at the Dutton Ranch. Rip tells Carter that if any other cowboy tried to pull that kind of behavior, he’d fire them on the spot. Fists clenched like the Arthur meme, Carter seems ready to fight his adoptive father.

“We don’t get to choose the pain,” Rip tells him. “But we get to choose how we build from it.” They’re wise words, and they sound a lot like something John Dutton himself might have told a young Rip back in the day. In Carter’s case, he has plenty of pains he didn’t get to choose: the trauma of losing his parents and the heartbreak over Oreana’s rejection are just the most obvious ones. Still, Carter is resistant to Rip’s advice, and he informs his father figure that he’ll never be his actual father. Ouch. Just last night, Carter was telling Rip how thankful he is to have Beth and Rip’s care. He’s flip-flopping between emotions just as any angsty 19-year-old would.

Carter grabs his keys to angrily drive off when Beth catches up to him. She promises to try harder; she’s not a natural at “this shit,” i.e. parenthood. In my opinion, Beth and Rip have been nothing but supportive and caring! Frankly, Carter could stand to be less of a brat. Nevertheless, he storms away and soon finds himself cracking open a beer on Dwight’s property, hanging around by Xena’s empty cages. Wade is there, for some reason, and he informs Carter that Xena is now at a zoo. Carter asks Wade for a job with the sheriff’s office, a role he attempts to negotiate via…blackmail? He knows he needs education to work with the sheriff’s department, but he reminds Wade that he saw the man shoot Dwight. He doesn’t want that getting out, does he? Yikes. Can’t Carter keep a job for, like, 12 hours without looking for a new one?

Over at the hospital, Joaquin arrives to join Everett and Oreana as they wait to hear about Beulah’s condition. There’s good and bad news, according to Rob-Will: Beulah suffered a heart attack and had to get an angioplasty, but she’s recovering well. In fact, she’s doing so well that she beckons Joaquin and Rob-Will into her room for a chat: She wants them to make peace. Instead, Rob-Will threatens to fire everyone and Beulah calls him weak. She says leaving him the ranch was actually a way to protect him—to box him into a job where he can be surrounded by people who actually know what they’re doing (Beth and Rip included). Why can’t we all just get along?

Later, Beth pays Beulah a visit with a bouquet and apologizes on Carter’s behalf for his drunken tirade. She also brings up Beulah’s surprise retirement, to which Beulah claims the transition won’t happen overnight. Still, Beth is clearly worried about Rob-Will; she rightfully considers him a liability. Everyone heads out for the day—everyone except Everett, who stays at the hospital to read the Western crime fiction novel The Far Empty by J. Todd Scott at Beulah’s bedside. (It’s his favorite book. See, Carter? Reading is fun!)

Everett finally asks the question on all our minds: Why Rob-Will? It all comes down to flesh and blood, Beulah says. And if he runs the ranch into the ground? Well, she’s too tired to really care. Everett tells Beulah that seeing her almost die made him finally change his mind about their situationship—he’s ready to be with her. That’s enough to get Beulah up and out of that hospital bed, discharged or not. They scuttle out of the hospital together and head over to Everett’s house like giggling teenagers.

Elsewhere, Joaquin is busy with his own plans. He stops by Sheriff Wade’s office with a handgun—the very same murder weapon that Rob-Will used to kill Wes. Suffice it to say, Joaquin did not take Beulah’s words at the hospital to heart: He wants to take Rob-Will down. Wade isn’t sold on Joaquin’s crusade, though, especially since they don’t have possession of Wes’s body. Joaquin is starting to spiral a bit; we later see him yelling “fuck!” out into the night, parked by a graveyard. He takes what seems to be a step he’s been avoiding: He picks up a burner phone and calls…his dad? Does this mean Luke is alive after all?

At Morgan Wade’s bar, Austin and Zachariah bond. Zachariah shares how he ended up in prison; Austin asks him if he can trust him and Rip. Zachariah tells Austin he can. Naturally, this all leads to a meeting among Rip, Beth, Zachariah, and Austin. Austin shares everything he suspects is going on with the 10-Petal Ranch’s shady business, which leads to quite the plot twist: As it turns out, the 10-Petal has a cattle smuggling business based in Mexico that forges paperwork for cattle brokers in Texas. And thus my theory that Beulah was somehow involved in the Dutton Ranch’s foot-and-mouth fiasco seems to be proven correct. Confrontations certainly await in next week’s finale.