It’s hard to build a growing sense of dread when there’s an inevitability to this kind of thing happening week to week. As horrifying as the car sequence between Jamie (Wes Bentley) and Beth (Kelly Reilly) is, where the former threatened to shoot himself in the head, it’s a prime example of the show putting its characters in harm’s way as a test case rather than a meaningful statement on what’s driving the multi-family dysfunction brewing under the surface. (Although between this and “The Handmaid’s Tale,” it’s been an interesting year for testing viewers’ emotional fortitude.) What matters when you put your characters in danger is an understanding of consequences and having people to care about in the first place. This is not to say that witnessing horrific acts of violence are antithetical to well-crafted TV storytelling. It also had to be a battle against nature, complete with wolves devouring a dead bear’s carcass for metaphorical good measure. For a show determined to examine the darker side of human tendencies, showing bad behavior wasn’t enough. All of these individual moments require a certain amount of horrible luck - points to “Yellowstone” for turning “getting bit by a horsefly at the wrong time” into a major late-season plot point. One by one, each major player in this saga of Dutton hubris is visited by some parade of horrors, perfectly timed to add another wave of trauma to an already-fraught series (that began, by the way, with the brutal death of a family member).
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