Dutton Ranch Season Finale Leaves Us Hanging

Dutton Ranch wrapped up its first season with an action-heavy finale that was full of strange revelations — and we’re not sure it all adds up. But the episode left just enough gaps in the plot that Season 2 could fill in some details and correct the show’s course. Which it’ll need to, because Dutton Ranch is sitting in kind of a problematic spot right now.

Warning: This article is extremely full of spoilers for the Season 1 finale of Dutton Ranch on Paramount+.

Throughout this first season, Dutton Ranch had clearly been holding back some major plot details. We saw glimpses of these missing pieces throughout the season — like Beulah’s (Annette Bening) weird phone call with someone called Mariano in Episode 3, and the flashback to when Beulah killed a man (who had raped her) while Mariano was present in Episode 7.

What this all was leading to, apparently, was the revelation that Beulah Jackson’s 10 Petal Ranch essentially operates as a drug-smuggling arm of a Mexican drug cartel, run by her old pal Mariano. When Beulah named Rob-Will (Jai Courtney) as her successor as boss of the 10 Petal Ranch in Episode 7 — a spur-of-the-moment decision that Rob-Will strong-armed her into making — her adopted son Joaquin (Juan Pablo Raba), who had previously been in line to take over, rebelled. He called his real father, who turned out to be Mariano, and Mariano responded by bringing his cartel to Texas to restore order.

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This is a plot turn that technically “fits” what came before, since the series had been layering in those major hints for a while. Even so, it doesn’t really line up too well with everything else that had been going on in this series. Episode 8, just a week ago, included a scene near the end where Austin (Sterlin English), the disgruntled 10 Petal Ranch ranch hand who’d been investigating his friend’s disappearance all season, told Rip (Cole Hauser), Beth (Kelly Reilly), and the rest of the gang what the Jacksons have been up to.

“10 Petal’s got an operation down in Mexico that steals and smuggles cattle illegally. Forges all the paperwork for Border Patrol and cattle brokers. Place is so mismanaged, it’s the only way they’ve kept the lights on, kept living in luxury. Hell, it’s the only way they’ve been able to afford a goddamn thing. Whole Jackson family’s crooked, top to bottom. They ain’t ranchers. Those motherf***ers are thieves, putting every ranch in South Texas at risk.”

In the very next scene with these folks, at the start of the season finale episode, they’re at 10 Petal Ranch waiting for the new shipment of cattle, and they’re convinced the cows are being used as drug mules — Beth cites “instinct” as the reason they know, rather than offering any actual reason. Fortunately for them, their alleged “instinct” was correct, as Everett finds two bags of fentanyl in one of the cows, but it feels like we skipped a step in getting here. Before the finale episode, there hadn’t been any references to drugs or potential cartel involvement on Dutton Ranch at all, so this revelation comes out of left field.

It reminds me a little bit of Season 1 of Daredevil: Born Again, which was partially filmed before the rebooted series made major story changes — and the version that was eventually released contained pieces of both versions of the story. Dutton Ranch feels like it went through a similar ringer, with this entire cartel storyline having the air of a late-stage pivot during production. Considering the way Dutton Ranch‘s showrunner, Chad Feehan, was reportedly fired from the series before it premiered, this sort of discombobulation wouldn’t be that surprising.

For now, though, Dutton Ranch has ended up in a weird spot at the end of its first season, with the story seemingly shifting from being a complex slow-burn thriller into a simpler “us vs. them” narrative in which the aggrieved white Americans have to team up to defend their land from foreign brown invaders.

The finale promotes that perspective by attempting to rehabilitate all the remaining white characters who might have been major villains. Rob-Will, who had been portrayed as the show’s cruelest and most unhinged character, including during the opening scene of this episode, gets to have a completely unearned tender father moment immediately before he’s killed by an unknown person (implied, but not confirmed, to have been Joaquin). It was a bizarre attempt to try to gin up sympathy for the most unlikable character on the series, who would have made for a much better main villain than yet another TV cartel boss.

Likewise, Beulah hiring Rip and Beth to help run 10 Petal Ranch doesn’t make much sense in the context of her deal with the cartel. She tells Everett in the finale that she did it as some sort of act of resistance against the cartel’s control, but she didn’t offer any details that would explain how that would work. It’s only now, after the cartel has made its move against them and turned all the locals or Rio Paloma into natural allies, that Rip and Beth would even consider continuing to work with her after the big reveal. Beulah’s actions have been so all over the place that it’s impossible to understand what she really wants — she was a lot more interesting when she appeared like a distorted new version of John Dutton.

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Strangely enough, however, this story is salvageable because it’s full of plot holes. Usually that’s something we’d complain about, but in this case it feels intentional, as if the powers-that-be were trying to leave gaps that can be filled later with plot points that aren’t nonsense. Rob-Will’s death is the perfect illustration, because we don’t know what happened or what he really knew about what was going on with Mariano at that time, and the writers can fill in those details however they want — the same goes for Beulah’s motivation in hiring Beth and Rip.

And there’s plenty of reason to hope that Dutton Ranch can get it together in Season 2 with new showrunner Benjamin Cavell (SEAL Team, The Institute), since a lot of successful shows don’t find their way until the middle of or after their first season. Yellowstone, which started off as a goofy modern Western version of Romeo & Juliet, was itself one of those shows, after all.

Dutton Ranch, which has been renewed for a second season, is now streaming on Paramount+.