Where’s the body? In the South Texas darkness, Rob-Will keeps getting sidetracked with racist insults for his brother Joaquin. But he at least knows where he did a terrible job burying the 10-Petal ranch foreman he needlessly murdered, and when they arrive at the spot – on Dutton Ranch land – what’s left of Wes is long gone.

Dutton Ranch brought us quite a ways forward in Episode 1. Beth, Rip, and Carter were displaced by fire from their dream plot in Montana, and six months later purchased a five-thousand-acre, 80-year-old ranch in Rio Paloma, Texas, complete with 175 Black Angus steer. Beth also met Beulah Jackson, who runs the 10-Petal’s operations. And in like three seconds, the show established what will certainly be the crux of its fighting spirit. “That’s my friend from the slaughterhouse,” Beth says with sarcastic bite at a cattle auction here in Episode 2. She points out Beulah to Rip. “Fucking grizzly in Gucci.”

That sounds like a Taylor Sheridan line, doesn’t it. But while Dutton Ranch features a lot of Sheridan-O-Verse heavy hitters – director Christina Alexandra Voros, showrunner Chad Feehan, creator of Lawmen: Bass Reeves – it is not directly written by Sheridan. Right out of the cattle corral, the series has synthesized the tough talk and confrontational nature of Yellowstone and unleashed its core characters on a whole new challenge. Beth and Rip aren’t part of the biggest name around these parts. But that doesn’t mean the biggest name isn’t interested in them. 

This is part of the flashback that begins Episode 2, where we meet Jeanie Edwards (Harriet Sansom Harris), the kind, widowed seller of her ranch to the couple who survived the Dillon fire. Jeanie senses the stewardship gene within them, and Rip assures her the beef they raise from the Edwards’ genetic base will become bounty to feed people. Buelah Jackson and the 10-P spent 20 years trying to buy her ranch, Jeanie tells Beth. “But they would’ve turned it into something soulless.” More echoes of the Sheridan-O-Verse!

The 10-P’s got a bunkhouse full of cowboys, most of whom know better than to ask about Wes. And Chet (Hart Denton), who witnessed the murder, has been installed as the new foreman by Buelah under guarantee of his silence. But as Joaquin tells his mother, “Cleaning up Rob-Will’s mess is proving to be difficult.” Because Whitney Ayers (Olivia Rose Keegan) demands to know what happened to her husband, and she throws Joaquin’s attempts at a payoff right back in his face. Instead, Whitney files a missing person’s report with Sheriff Handy Wade (the chameleonic Josh Stewart, disappearing into another role). It is unclear whose side he is on.   

Rip is also hiring, but it’s gotta be the right cowboy, and luckily his foreman Azul Ramos knows a guy. Zachariah Moss (Marc Menchaca) is getting out of jail when Rip calls him over to the truck. It’s the funniest, harshest job interview ever, but total Rip Wheeler, as he feels out Zachariah. “God loves cowboys” does the trick, and hours later, the new hand joins his boss and Azul at work on Dutton Ranch. Rip doesn’t speak Spanish like them. But he asks how to say “Mount up,” and takes it to heart. “Fucking ¡Móntense!”

On some level, Carter knows enough about girls to not say shit when Oreana picks him up to skip school in her vintage green Bronco. They’re shooting at bottles when she realizes there’s more to this “kinda handsome, kinda not” Texas transplant, and drapes her cutoffs and cowboy boots over his legs. Only to tell him she’s got a boyfriend somewhere. In a not-shocking, but exciting-to-see-what-happens Dutton Ranch development, Oreana turns out to be Rob-Will’s daughter and the rebellious would-be heiress to the 10-Petal ranching empire. 

And she fucking hates her grandmother Buelah. At dinner in her sumptuous ranch mansion – it’s like a European castle with Longhorn taxidermy – Beulah scolds Oreana. “This family cannot survive another fucked-up child.” (A shot at Rob-Will, her other project.) Which her granddaughter rejects out of hand. “You can’t survive it.”

It’s only been two episodes, and everything’s coming around to Beth, Rip, and even Carter fighting for their autonomy from the powerful reach of Beulah and the 10-Petal. A reach that has already desecrated their land with the body of a murder victim. In the middle of the night, as Beth sleeps, Rip Wheeler dresses. He previously recovered Wes’s body from its shallow grave, and takes the man’s body out of a meat freezer in the barn. He loads it into his truck, reverses his 100-mile drive with Zachariah, and arrives at the access road for an old mine, closed due to collapse. Rip hups Wes’s corpse onto his shoulder, finds the exposed entrance, and tosses the body down the mine shaft. What’s more Sheridan-O-Verse than Rip establishing a new Train Station in South Texas?

The Beth parts for Episode 2 of Dutton Ranch (“Earn Another Day”):

• How exactly did Rip, Beth, and Carter end up in Rio Paloma, anyway? Episode 2 of Dutton Ranch also flashes back to the days after the Dillon fire. “I’ve called everybody I know,” Rip says. “Walker told me about an opportunity in Texas.” Walker, of course, was the singing cowboy member of the Bunkhouse Boys on Yellowstone, played by Ryan Bingham.

• Everett sings again! It’s Dwight Yoakham this time, “Guitars, Cadillacs,” and it’s on the radio in Beth’s truck as they drive to San Antonio to see a butcher more fair-minded than Beulah Jackson.

• Beth also tells Rip she found a bar in town, and introduces her husband to Everett at the Split Heart. Though we don’t catch the cagey old veterinarian’s number when he’s called up to sing, Beth and Rip do enjoy a dance to Cassidy Daniels and her song “Heart Shaped Necklace.”   

Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social) is a Chicago-based writer. A veteran of the alternative weekly trenches, his work has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork, The All Music Guide, and The Village Voice.