Matt McCausland

It’s basically a reparations propaganda piece dressed up as a drama, while disguising itself as a neo western action story. Taylor Sheridan exemplifies the “two wolves” parable from the rez, and the two wolves are his fetish for cowboys and his fetish for the american indians. He just can’t decide which one he wants to feed more! The father, John Dutton, who is at the core a fantastic father who is ambitious, ruthless and driven towards preserving his family and their legacy, but these traits are treated as harmful to his children, and they flesh his character out more with negative traits that are designed to vilify the core traits because Hollywood wants White people atomized and not caring so much for things like preserving your family and your land - go live in the city and eat the bugs! Beth Dutton, the she-boss daughter who is somehow just magical at literally everything she does who has a tragic backstory is just so cliche and bad lol. Casey, the disappointment son who hates his family and his culture so much that he goes off to live on the Rez and become an American Indian by taking a girl from the rez as his wife and having a kid with her (and eventually gifts the ranch to the Amerindians) but somehow he’s framed as trustworthy and responsible? He banded with some guys from the rez to steal from his own famuly, and this resulted in his brother being killed. He didn’t invite his family to the funeral for his unborn child because it was “private” but there were a bunch of Indians at his funeral burning incense and yelling “hiyayaya hiyayaya” while his dad and sister quietly observed from a ways away off in the distance lol. But sure, he’s a proper son. Rip, the head cowboy, or foreman of the ranch is depicted as a no-nonsense tough alpha, but when it comes to his love interest Beth, he’s a complete cuck who says “I don’t care who you f—k, I just care about you” There’s so much wrong with this show. The scenery is nice but that’s God’s doing, not Taylor Sheridan. The F word is used so gratuitously, and that’s coming from a guy that says it a lot himself. Beth Dutton has two really nice… smarts! But other than that she’s insufferable. And with Casey being the only one who can produce an heir to the Dutton family after Lee dies and it’s revealed that Jamie is adopted and Beth is sterile, the conflicts of the show are basically moot because Casey’s son is half Dutton half broken rock native, who are the natives the Dutton family took the land from and are still in conflict over the land, the land will go back to the broken rock natives anyways… But then Casey just made it official and sold the land to them for really cheap at the end. And that’s not even a spoiler because you see it coming from a mile away 3 or 4 episodes before the show ends… and you can really see it in Casey’s character all throughout the series that if he was in charge, the land would go back to the injuns. Taylor Sheridan, with his subversions of White Americans, is by all means a purple haired college kid in the Native American studies department, but he decided to wear Carhartts and cowboy hats instead for some reason.

1 star for this instalment and 1 star for the sequel trilogy overall. This film seems so detached from the world created in episodes 1 through 6 - and the only real semblance of “Star Wars” in this series is the appearance of various characters from the original movies... but it feels more like a couple of old timers in it for their last hurrah. Ben Solo (Kylo Ren) seems nothing like a skywalker - and with his helmet on, he seems like an edgelord Vader wannabe. And they dealt his character a really weak hand and probably could have cast him a lot better. Then they killed him off in such an unceremonious way too. The supporting cast like Finn and Poe feel really weak too. Rey was actually a well done character and her arc was written decently. I find the whole palpatine resurgence to be lame. And with Rey being a palpatine and with them killing off Ben, “the rise of skywalker” is a really, really stupid title. I don’t care that Rey names herself Skywalker at the end... she’s still a palpatine and the title is stupid. If they were to call it “the rise of palpatine”, then that would be an equally impactful title and it would even have a bit of a twist involved in it too! But noooo... they had to use a deceptive title that doesn’t even match up to the film. The yellow lightsaber was cool to see though. This trilogy sucked and I hope they scrap it from canon so that someone can fix it somewhere along the way.

Netflix is always trying to stomp on white people. No wonder the crew on this show is pretty Jewish. N’s don’t go to Valhalla. Never did. Never will.