#who didn't want people to look to closely at a swiss cheese plot

[disappearinginq]

I’m rewtaching a favorite show of mine - well, up until season 4 favorite - Yellowstone, and I realize that they capitalized on an emotional topic to get out of shoddy writing and what I hate even more is that it worked. 

Jamie and Beth have hated one another from the get go, but between season 1 and season 2, it goes from ‘every sibling in this family somewhat hates the other one but they’re still kind of okay to one another’ to there’s a very intense hatred that wasn’t there before between these two specifically. 

There’s a few scenes where you can make a guess - Beth as a child is blamed for their mother’s death (by her mom herself) when Beth’s horse spooks into their mom’s and the horse crushes her. Okay, maybe that’s why Jamie doesn’t like Beth, and Beth just hates everyone because that’s pretty traumatic. Nope - you get another flashback where their mom is still alive on a Christmas when they’re all pretty young and you find out Beth has always been dramatic, and Jamie is complaining that they should just start opening presents without her because it will be New Year’s before she comes down. Okay, so they’ve always had issues. Some siblings are like that, I get it, fine. One girl, middle child, in a family of all cowboys and she also hates horses? Makes sense - drama is the only way for her to get attention. 

And then comes The Real Issue - some time after their mom dies,I assume Beth is 16 or 15 and Jamie is two years older and about to leave for college, his birthday is in December - so 17 ish. She’s been knocking boots with the other teenage ranch hand (who becomes the love of her life later on) and she winds up pregnant. Rather than go to her father, her older brother, or even the guy she’s been having sex with, she goes to the brother that she doesn’t particularly like, and asks him to take her to a clinic for an abortion. Their family is 6 generation famous - everyone knows this family, their business, etc. John Dutton runs this valley through fear and violence. They founded the town. So they can’t go to a Planned Parenthood, even several towns over, because people will still know and report back to John. So they go to the next door Reservation where Jamie shows his ID while his sister waits in the truck, and the nurse at the desk informs them that a stipulation in getting an abortion there is you’re sterilized. Jamie seems to think about it for a minute, goes back out to the truck with his sister, and tells her it’s okay to come in. 

From then on, Beth absolutely despises Jamie for the rest of their lives because ‘he prevented her from ever having kids without telling her about it.’

And this is where I lose it. 

I get why they picked it, bodily autonomy is a hot topic and so is the fact that indigenous women were sterilized by white doctors against their knowledge for years in a planned genocide. It made the audience so mad that they just stopped paying attention to the amount of holes in this plot. It might’ve even made this make sense if Beth wasn’t the white daughter of a homicidal white land baron who ran everyone and everything in the state of Montana. Why is the blame put squarely on the 17 year old (or the 15 year old) when clearly multiple adults somehow just....screwed the pooch? If you knew who’s kids those were, if you stopped and sort of paled at their last name, why would you not tell the one getting an abortion ‘hey - you sure about this?’ because that’s just too much WTF to expect a white doctor to recognize the rich white kid and say absolutely nothing - no consent form, no talking to her about it - why would you not question Jamie at that point? Why wouldn’t you question Beth? Is this rape? Is this abuse? YOU DON’T KNOW, THEY JUST DECIDED THE EMOTIONAL REACTION WOULD PREVENT PEOPLE FROM LOOKING TOO CLOSELY. Why would you sterilize the fifteen year old in secret when women who are in their 30′s have to get multiple doctors and a psych eval to get a hysterectomy, or tubes tied when their rationalization is ‘you might want kids some day?’ or ‘what does your husband have to say about it?’

Again, it’d would’ve made perfectly logical sense if it’d been an indigenous woman and a white boyfriend (or no boyfriend, or even her own husband, or literally just by being  indigenous). Why does no one question why Jamie was either 1) so angry at his sister that this is some pubescent revenge scheme (except it’s clearly shown that he regrets it - thank you Wes Bentley for caring about your character development when the writers didn’t) or 2) so scared of his dad finding out that his little sister is pregnant that he decides right then and there that getting sterilized is the best course of action? I mean, this is the dad who puts a branding iron to his youngest son (when he’s still a teenager) when he gets a woman from the Rez pregnant and refuses to take her to a clinic for an abortion like his dad tells him to. That’s the son he likes. So the threat is real that something bad would’ve happened if they told their father - bad enough that Jamie and Beth keep it a secret into their 40′s - but AGAIN - why is this on Jamie? And only on Jamie? Is it really that hard to make the leap that Jamie knew what his dad was going to do - drag his sister to a clinic anyways, and then quite probably kill the kid who knocked her up - the kid who winds up being her husband and her father’s favorite son? Why are we not putting the (or any) blame on John Dutton who was apparently so fucking awful at this point that they were scared to go to him and this was the better option? 

There’s too many parts in this story line that make absolutely no sense, or require a lot more guilty adults than just Jamie and Beth (should also note, that for the first season, Jamie and Beth, for having this horrible relationship and skeleton in the closet, still call one another when they’re in trouble - need a ride, need to confess something, try to save the ranch, etc - and then it just vanishes in season 2). 

Maybe I give Jamie too much leeway. Maybe it’s because I love Wes Bentley as an actor and keep watching the Behind the Story shorts on the DVDs where he explains Jamie’s motivation. Or maybe because I really fucking don’t like that they’re obviously trying to make Jamie the Bad Guy because he’s the adopted son and clearly, Adopted Kids are always the Bad Guy in media (I have never met a single adopted or foster kid who was like ‘yeah, my loyalty is to my Bio parent despite the fact that they were so fucking awful that I got taken away by the state and put in a much nicer home with people who actually want and love me, let me torpedo my adopted family’s lives straight into the shitter now that I have my bio family again’. But the fact that the entire fandom in a goddamn western has become like Team Iron Man vs Team Captain America because EmOtIoN irritates the fuck out of me because it’s excusing the writers for having absolutely no fucking idea what they’re writing about and just want drama for the sake of drama and never really thought out how this would actually go down. 

And this isn’t even touching on the fact that any child that Beth had would be emotionally or physically abused because that’s exactly what Beth does to the teenager she ‘adopts’ in season 4, because having a kid doesn’t automatically make you a better person - which they would know, if they looked at the amount of kids in foster care.