IN EPISODE 2… | At the start of “Phantom Pain,” John and Kayce put their heads together about the sender of their attackers. Nonetheless, Rip tromped into the lake, opened the cooler and hurled a freaking rattlesnake at Roarke’s face! “Good riddance,” Rip muttered as the exec exhaled his last breath. To that end, he interrupted Roarke’s morning of fly-fishing to ask if a cooler was his. Rip, on the other hand, seemed to believe that someone else had been behind the attacks. “But when I do it, I’m not gonna farm it out like you, you f–king coward,” she hissed, “I’m gonna do it myself.” Of course she is. So she paid a visit to Jamie, accused him and promised to kill him. For her part, Beth thought that she already knew. (Keep in mind, this was the first we’d seen or heard of him since the show tricked us into thinking he’d been shot dead in the opening.) Though it was all well and good for Kayce to be out hunting whoever had attacked them, John noted that what they really needed was to know who’d sent their attackers. And who did he see coming across the lawn in camo gear that made him look like Sigmund the Sea Monster but Kayce. “A long list.” At the Yellowstone, John immediately ditched his IV and fired his nurse. “It’s on a list of things we need to discuss,” Beth replied. When at last John was released from the hospital, he glimpsed on his way out Jimmy undergoing PT. “We need to know who’s trying to take his land, because they’re coming for ours next.” “What they did to John Dutton hasn’t been done since they did it to us,” Rainwater said. (Jeez, could maternal Beth be the best Beth yet?) At Rainwater’s casino, a patron named Jesse mouthed off so loudly about being the “party planner” who’d arranged for John to be shot that the chief had Mo incentivize him to reveal the identity of the person for whom he’d planned said party. “F-k you,” Carter told his brain-dead dad, “for leaving me in this place with nothing and nobody.” If Beth hadn’t already loved the kid, she sure as s-t fell right then and there. Outside the hospital, Beth met and was almost immediately taken with Carter (new cast member Finn Little), a 14-year-old Mini-Rip whose junkie father conveniently croaked that very day. (This will be important later stick around.) From there, we flashed not only back to the present but to far enough into the future that John had grown a beard he was going to be OK, it seemed.
During our brief stay in that era, a Dutton ancestor gave a group of Native Americans the OK to bury a relative on the land that used to be theirs. No sooner had we started to catch our breath than we’d flashed all the way back to 1893 - a decade after the series’ prequel. But the music cue, we’d later learn, was a dang liar! And as we were reeling from Jimmy and Kayce’s “deaths,” Rip got back to the Yellowstone only to find his place burned to the ground. Finally, after a no-holds-barred, completely insane shootout with the bad guys on the highway, Kayce realized that oops, he’d been hit and collapsed. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, an assailant was beating the crap out of Monica when kaboom! Tate freaking shot him! (If this opening was any more intense, I would’ve wished I’d been wearing a diaper when I watched!) Out at the stables, as Laramie sobbed and another gunman was “dispensed with,” a horrified Mia discovered Jimmy looking - but only looking - dead as a doornail. Beth emerged from her office in one piece but worse enough for wear that Kelly Reilly was clearly going to be spending another season in injury makeup.
While Rip had John choppered to the nearest hospital, Kayce lobbed a grenade (?!?) at his attackers, then gave pursuit with his Livestock Commission deputies. IN EPISODE 1… | As we began the first of the two hours - which were, in a word, spectacular - all hell was breaking loose.