‘Yellowstone’ Season 5 Episode 5 Recap: “Watch ‘Em Ride Away” (2024)

It’s always rewarding to spend some quality time on the ranch. As we learned last week during the initial round of branding, with Spring in Montana comes the gathering, when all of the cattle that have been out grazing are brought together through the diligent work of cowboys operating as a team. “Watch ‘Em Ride Away,” episode 5 of Yellowstone’s fifth season, begins in the past as Young John Dutton and his cowboys gather out front of the barn in the predawn gray. And as he gives his commands, Young Beth ignores Rowdy to instead wish care and safety on Young Rip. In these parts, and on the Dutton ranch, the Gathering is a rite of spring. But it’s also rough business, and not without danger.
In the present, Rip tells Beth that today and tomorrow are all that concern him. He doesn’t have the time or capacity to dwell on yesterday. It’s a dry year in Montana, and there are already fires on the mountain. Everyone in the valley is shorthanded for branding season, and the foreman’s plan for the gathering involves two cowboy crews, one pushing beef and one wielding the hot pokers. (Lloyd lets out a whoop at word of the plan. “Yee-haw, cowboy sh*t!”) There will be day laborers involved in the gathering, too, but John doesn’t want any of them near the most important work. Trusted cowboys only. But while being governor complicates ranch life, it will also provide Dutton with an opportunity. “Nobody knows what the hell we do anymore,” he tells Rip about their work. “It’s time we remind ‘em.” And John tasks Clara with inviting news crews and politicos to the Dutton Ranch, so they might better understand this life. For as much as John dislikes the mechanics of his new job, his intrepid assistant consistently shows how adept she is at hers.
Summer is here too, of course – the jailbird environmentalist remains on house, er, ranch arrest. And for as much as she’s learning about the larger forces at work in ranching, as well as the unique challenges inherent to cowboying, Summer still represents everything Beth hates about those who would take the Duttons’ land for themselves and rob the family of their way of life. Wolves, bison, and the plight of the greater sage-grouse – for John, it all manifests as a political problem. For Beth, it’s as simple as the closing of a fist.
In anticipation of the gathering, Kayce, Monica, and Tate have come to the ranch with their horses in tow. Baby John’s passing is still raw. But Monica encourages Kayce to stay on at work, to understand that his purpose in this world can be both professional and personal. Your job didn’t take him from us, she tells Kayce. “He died because God needs him.”
There’s one Dutton affiliate who’s conspicuously absent from the ranch. (Kayce is “my only son, John had grumbled to Clara.) In the office of the attorney general, Jamie is visited by Sarah Atwood, and the litigator and corporate shark engage in a philosophical battle over the lingering stink of Market Equities and the airport land lawsuit. Jamie is of two minds about their recent physical encounter – his uptight nature won’t allow him to view it as anything other than unprofessional. But he allows a visible half smile, too. Sarah catches it. “If you thought that last night was unprofessional…” and she begins to unbutton her dress right there in the AG’s office. These two are playing a game with outcomes and consequences as yet unresolved.

The mutual resentment between Beth and Summer is lingering, too, and it’s about to pop off. In the grand tradition of Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon dinner table danger, she ignores John’s orders to play nice in the Dutton family dining room and instead tosses challenge after challenge across the expanse of mahogany. John glowers, Rip glances warily, and Kayce and Monica laugh openly at all of the grandstanding as Beth and Summer trade barbs about animals with four-chambered stomachs the nature of vegetarianism. And poor Gator (Gabriel Guilbeau) is on the spot, trying to serve his traditional assortment of roast game to a table where a vegan and a predator are hunting each other. Let’s take it outside.
Is there an Emmy awarded for best cowboy fight? Because Kelly Reilly and Piper Perabo should share the award. After Beth lures her nemesis onto the front lawn, she opens the festivities with a fist to the face, followed by a rollicking head butt. Then Summer deploys a series of jiu jitsu takedowns, which Beth seems to dismiss as the province of warrior hippies, and soon Rip is forced to go full ranch foreman on the activist and his wife. What is this, a scrap in the bunkhouse after one too many Coors Banquets? “Just stand here and trade ‘em until one of you has had enough,” he tells the combatants, and they punch back and forth until sufficient blood has been spilled. Ultimately, though, it’s beneficial. (And the subtle humor in this scene is appreciated, especially after all of Beth’s fiery antics this season.) With an ounce of respect earned on either side, the women return to the dinner table, spitting teeth onto fine china and mixing blood into their mashed potatoes.
It’s the morning of the gathering, and the cowboys are preparing. Showers, hats, cereal, chaps, coffee, rifles, and the remnants of last night’s whiskey and Louisiana hot sauce. Ryan, Teeter, Colby and the rest solemnly wait for Lloyd to lead them out, just as the folks in the main house follow John Dutton’s lead. In the yard, horses are being saddled in the predawn hush. Clara proves to be no stranger to cowboy sh*t – “I was born in Miles City,” she tells John – but she’ll dutifully carry the governor’s satellite phone in her saddlebag. Even Beth saddles up, her FOMO not letting her stay behind in a drafty, nearly empty mansion while her husband, dad, brother, and the assorted cowboys light out for this hard journey into the backcountry. Old Emmett Walsh (Buck Taylor) has joined the group – “I’ll race your ass up to the top, governor!” – and all told, it’s about 15 riders who settle their mounts into a line, ready to gather.
“We’ll ride up along Mount Chisolm,” John tells his assembled team. “Push ‘em down to Lewis Creek. Hold ‘em in the meadow overnight. And if we’re lucky, we’ll get ‘em all in one drive.” It’s more or less the same speech he gave as a younger man at the episode’s outset – John wouldn’t miss the annual gathering, no matter the distractions of his new job in the capital. And Monica cries as she watches ‘em ride away. This is cowboy sh*t on a primal level. The job is a hard one, fraught with danger, and if the medevac chopper glimpsed in the previews for next week is any indication, one that everyone gathered might not survive. Clara better make sure that sat phone is charged up.

Hooked Rocking Y’s:

• It’s a proud tradition of the western, two cowboys steadying each other as they trade blows, and like Beth and Summer, it’s often with a blend of anger, rite of passage, and quaking issues of respect. All of that is at work in this memorable scrap between gunslinger Chuka (Rod Taylor) and US Army sergeant Hansbach (Ernest Borgnine) in the 1967 western Chuka:
  

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NI3ZOcCOhPE

• And on the Yellowstone music watch front, there are two excellent cues in “Watch ‘Em Ride Away.” Early on, as Summer is trying to figure out why the cowboys are so nonchalant about a forest fire on the ridge, the series engages with its penchant for sweeping vistas, with the camera climbing up and over a vast forested mountainside as the serene, dusky “Intertwine” plays by Senora May featuring Chloe Edmonstone and Seth Avett. And later, as the assorted Duttons and cowboys ride out for the gathering, they’re accompanied by “Far From Home” from singer and songwriter Aubrie Sellers.

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter:@glennganges