With one spin-off underway and another in the queue,
"Yellowstone" is showing no signs of slowing down when it comes to keeping viewers coming
back — or tuning in for the first time — week after week. Without a doubt,
a major component of the series' appeal is its most rugged anti-hero, Rip Wheeler,
whose devotion to John Dutton and the Yellowstone Ranch appears to know no bounds.
And yet, there are bounds when it comes to what audiences are willing to accept with regard to
the often criminal, inevitably violent actions Rip feels he must take in order to defend the
Duttons and their ranch. Throughout Season 4, another beloved character, Lloyd Pierce,
has butted heads with one of the other ranch hands, Walker. Walker "stole" Lloyd's girlfriend,
and Lloyd has been unable to keep his jealousy and anger at bay ever since.
After Lloyd breaks the "no fighting in the bunkhouse" rule in Episode 4,
Rip and John ultimately decide the two should work their issues out
by pounding the crap out of one another, though John has one more wrinkle to add.
"I want you to make an example out of the last man standing."
Rip not only pummels Lloyd repeatedly in Episode 4 after the latter's initial fight with Walker,
but he also beats him down aggressively in Episode 6, then graphically smashes Lloyd's hand with his
boot. Lloyd's second beating, importantly, isn't Rip's way of reiterating this rule.
"There's no fighting on this ranch. if you want to fight someone,
you fight me. I'll fight you all f–king day."
When Rip destroys his best friend's hand, it's because Lloyd refuses to back down from a fight
that John Dutton ordered Rip to have Lloyd and Walker undertake until they could "work out" their
issues. By the time Rip "nobly" shoulders the burden of taking Lloyd down for good,
Lloyd's been continually fist fighting with Walker for well over an hour.
Prior to the premiere of Season 4, fans were already speculating about Rip and
Lloyd's fight from the trailers and had some pretty distinct opinions about what
they felt it would take to justify such a thing. As one fan wrote on the series'
subreddit, Lloyd would have to "commit a cardinal sin for Rip to beat him up."
Lloyd's "cardinal sin," on the surface, was stabbing Walker. Scratch below that surface,
however, and it becomes clear that his real sin was putting his own personal grudge against Walker
over the safety of the ranch — or so we're told. However, it's a bit more complicated than that.
As viewers will recall, Kayce was supposed to kill Walker in Season 2, after the singer saw
Rip help Jamie cover up a murder. Kayce, however, couldn't bring himself to kill Walker, a misstep
Rip and Lloyd discover in Season 3, Episode 9. But Walker doesn't actually return to The Yellowstone
Ranch on his own. Walker shows up in Dillon. Had Lloyd and Rip simply walked away from the bar and
pretended they never saw Walker, they wouldn't be obligated to keep him under the thumb of the
ranch at all, since he clearly wasn't interested in reporting anything he saw to the authorities.
Thus, the better part of the situation that leads to Rip
"being forced" to beat down on Lloyd is a situation largely of his own making,
and subsequently difficult to chalk up to just another instance of "cowboy justice." Add to
that the fact that Walker and Lloyd's entire conflict does little, if anything, to further
the plot of the series and you have the makings of a scene that simply crosses one bridge too many.
When it comes to anti-heroes like Rip, audiences can accept otherwise
unacceptable levels of violence since they're tethered to the narrative.
These acts would be appalling to our sense of right and wrong in the real world, but,
within the fictitious universe, they can be justifiable. It's only when that violence
spills outside the bounds of that justification — either because we've gained too much sympathy
for the individual on the receiving end, or, because it doesn't come off as a legitimately
necessary action — that our willful suspension of real-world morality begins to break down.
Viewers not only have enormous amounts of sympathy for Lloyd,
but it's also difficult to understand the thinking that went into throwing two ranch
hands and integral employees into a Gladiator-style fight to the finish,
only to then punish one of those individuals for doing exactly what he was told. It's so difficult
to understand, in fact, that several viewers on one Reddit thread theorized that the scene only
really existed because "the show is setting up a situation for Rip to take Lloyd for granted, and
then realize he was wrong." Whether that theory pans out or not, we'll just have to wait and see.
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