Bethany Dutton, better known as Beth on Yellowstone (played by Kelly Reilly), has been consistent in a few things throughout all five seasons of the hit Paramount show, including her ability to fight anyone and everyone if they dare push back against her, and her hatred of any woman her father chooses to sleep with. These traits both make sense and don’t at the same time but when it comes to Beth, it is easier to just let her get whatever it is she’s dealing with out of her system and then move on.
From the start of Season 1, Beth hasn’t been someone to reason with. This is not to say that she’s entirely unreasonable but rather that she gets something in her head and makes it so that it becomes everyone else’s problem at the same time. For a while, it was just her and her father John Dutton (Kevin Costner) dealing with it, but we saw time and time again that she’d even make his life harder because of her perceived ideas of what he should do.
This is why it was no surprise that Beth wasn’t a fan of her father’s latest flame, self-professed vegan and environmentalist Summer Higgins (Piper Perabo), from the jump. In fact, she brandished a knife at her in one of their first interactions fans got to see on-screen. Thus began the hate-filled relationship between Beth and Summer. Every time they were in the same room, they’d take swipes at each other. It all reached the point of no return in this week’s Season 5, Episode 5, titled “Watch ‘Em Ride Away,” when Beth and Summer both attended a family dinner at the Dutton ranch — which ended about as well as you’d think a dinner with these two opposing forces would go.
Beth’s Issues With Her Father’s Relationships Go Back to One Fateful Event
After the death of John’s wife Evelyn Dutton (Gretchen Mol) when she was out riding with Beth and Kayce (Luke Grimes) as kids, their lives were changed by only having John to turn to moving forward. As a result — and partly due to repressing her own guilt for her perceived role in her mother’s death — Beth felt like she had the right to say who her father could be with.
At the beginning of the series, former Montana governor Lynelle Perry (Wendy Moniz) is revealed to be sleeping with John, and Beth clearly had a problem with it, so it’s no surprise that she’d have the same issue with Summer taking on that same role. Some of it also stems from Beth’s own inability to unpack how her mother treated her in the past, not to mention what is going on in her adult life, and therefore she projects her own problems onto her father. Despite pretending as if she doesn’t care, Beth still feels a sense of responsibility to her parents, plus she wants validation from her father.
Beth and Summer Finally Come to Blows… Literally
We haven’t seen the long-running issue between Beth and Summer come to such a head as we do in Season 5, Episode 5, when Beth seemingly has enough of Summer and the judgments she’s placing on the Dutton family. After Summer gets out of jail — courtesy of being pardoned by a newly-instituted Governor John Dutton — she’s forced to stay on the ranch for a while under house arrest, and being there means that she’s going to have to deal with the Dutton family apart from just John. And that definitely includes Beth.
Summer complains about the dinner prepared for them because it’s all game that’s been killed and prepared to serve at the table by Dutton family chef Gator (Gabriel “Gator” Guilbeau) and she’s a vegan. Instead of respecting the Dutton family and what they choose to eat, she pushes her own feelings about it into the conversation as they’re being served until finally Beth reaches her breaking point and tells Summer that they’re going outside. The two then proceed to do one of the most shocking things that has happened on Yellowstone yet, which is saying something, and just start beating each other up on the front lawn until Beth’s husband Rip (Cole Hauser) joins them outside and tells them that they’re going to go blow for blow, exchanging punches, until one of them can’t take it anymore.
And it, surprisingly, actually works. When they’re done truly just beating the crap out of each other, Beth gives Summer a helping hand up and the two go into the house, and from then on Beth actually makes an effort to be nice to Summer. She’s not willingly throwing jabs at her, even stopping herself when she starts to do it and apologizing since that’s not their relationship anymore. It’s a surprising turning point, given how Beth normally is with Summer and anyone that her father sleeps with, that you can’t help hoping that their long-running feud is at an end — even if it was resolved in the most dramatic way possible. Then again, Beth is known for changing her mind and lashing out against other people, especially in defense of her own father, but this feels like a distinct shift in her relationship with Summer that might work out (for everyone) for the better.