Yellowstone Finally Revealed Why Beth Hates Jamie

[Warning: The following contains spoilers from Season 3, Episode 5 of Yellowstone. Read at your own risk!]

Since Yellowstone began, fans have been wondering why Beth (Kelly Reilly) harbors such antipathy toward her brother Jamie (Wes Bentley). What happened between them to make Beth so angry and resentful? Sunday's episode, "Cowboys and Dreamers," finally answered that question. And it was a painful revelation, as a flashback showed that young Beth (Kylie Rogers) asked Jamie (Dalton Baker) for help getting an abortion after Rip (Kyle Red Silverstein) got her pregnant when they were teenagers, and rather than take her to Planned Parenthood where Beth would receive adequate treatment but people who knew the Duttons would find out, he took her to a clinic on a reservation that left her sterilized for life. Jamie sacrificed Beth's future to protect the family's reputation. 

Fans had suspected it was something to do with Jamie being responsible for Beth losing a baby ever since the scene in Season 2 where Beth had a strong emotional reaction to watching Rip (Cole Hauser) console her nephew Tate (Brecken Merrill), suggesting that she and Rip had once been expecting, but something went wrong. Then in last week's episode, Beth told Rip that she couldn't have children after he said he wanted to marry her. He told her it was all right, he didn't want kids anyway, but his face told a different story. 

"Cowboys and Dreamers" opened with young Beth crying while looking at the positive result of a pregnancy test, then telling Jamie, who was preparing to leave for college, that she needed his help, because she was in trouble. She put her trust in him. She refused to tell him who the father, was, though, which made him angry. 

He took her to the clinic on the nearby Native American reservation, and Beth waited in the truck while Jamie talked to the lady at the front desk. She told him to go to the Planned Parenthood in Billings, because they were white and didn't have to be at this clinic. But he showed her his ID and told her that they couldn't go there, because the word would get out. 

"You don't want to do this here," she said. "A requirement of patients receiving an abortion at this clinic is sterilization." Jamie told her he understood, and went and got Beth. He didn't tell her about the sterilization. 

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Yellowstone drew inspiration from a dark piece of history for this scene. A similar thing to what happened to Beth actually happened to thousands of Native American women. In the '60s and '70s, the Indian Health Service carried out a campaign of forced sterilization, often performed without the understanding and consent of the woman being operated on. In reality, studies have shown that doctors sterilized impoverished indigenous women in cases where they would not have done the same for wealthy white women like Beth, so Yellowstone is being ahistorical for the sake of drama. 

Upon returning to the ranch, Beth went and told Rip that the test was negative. He asked her why she looked so sad, and she told him they shouldn't see each other anymore. So that was why Beth and Rip broke up when they were teenagers before getting back together as adults. 

In the present, Beth woke up from a bad dream and went out onto Rip's porch. He followed her, and she told him she was thinking of a bad memory, one that she didn't want to talk about. 

 "I've made two decisions in my life based on fear," she said. (The other is freezing up and not helping when her mother was bucked off a horse and trampled. Beth still blames herself for her mother's death.) "And they cost me everything."  

"Not everything," Rip said, embracing her. Rip loves Beth dearly, and he won't be mad at her when he finds out the truth of what happened. But he will be mad at Jamie. And we know Rip has no qualms about absolutely wrecking people for much less serious offenses than what Jamie did. 

Yellowstone airs Sundays at 9/8c on Paramount Network.