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‘Yellowstone’ Season 3 Episode 9: Why did Garrett Randall kill his wife, is Jamie more like his real father?

Jamie Dutton drives down to the house and knocks on the door with a tinge of reluctance. He is anxious to see his real father, Garrett Randall

Every father should remember one day his son will follow his example, not his advice. ‘Yellowstone’ echoes that sentiment as Jamie Dutton (Wes Bentley) goes through a moral dilemma. A couple of episodes earlier, Jamie stumbled upon his birth certificate and realized he was adopted.

The revelation came as a bolt out of the blue and left him completely shaken and stirred. Who was his real father? He couldn't help but mutter to himself: "Who the f**k are you?" After a heated conversation, John Dutton (Kevin Costner) tells him: "You actually have the opportunity to choose. You are a resourceful man so I am sure you can find him and you can look at his black f**king heart, his rotten soul. You can look into his eyes, Jamie and you get to choose. You can choose who you call father."

Midway through the new episode, ‘Meaner Than Evil’, Jamie is perplexed and looks at the identification documents of his real father, Garrett Randall, and stumbles upon his picture. It reads: 

Inmate No. 13136411
Facility Arrival Date: 8/15/1980
Sentenced to Thirty (30) years to life
Social SSN: 4142-77-8933
Gender: Male
Race: Caucasian
Birth Date: 10/12/1948
Eye Color: Brown
Height: 6'1"
Weight: 220 lb

He also finds his address: 1401 Buckhorn Meadow, Red Lodge, Montana. Without wasting a heartbeat, he scribbles it on a piece of paper and storms out of his office. Jamie drives down to the house and knocks on the door with a tinge of reluctance. He is anxious to see his real father, Garrett Randall (Will Patton). When there is no answer, he heads towards the backyard. He hears the whirring sound of a welding machine and yells at the top of his voice: "Excuse me."

The man working in the factory turns around. "You're Garrett Randall?" Jamie asks. Confused, Garrett replies, "Who wants to know?" Jamie then says: "The Attorney General of Montana..." Still confused, Garrett asks, "What do you want with me?" Jamie then replies, "I just wanna look at you, see if I recognize anything in myself."

Within a second, Garrett recognizes him and utters: "Michael." When Jamie says that it's not his name anymore, he replies, "It might not be what you call yourself... But, that's your name." With a deep longing, Garrett reaches out to Jamie and says, "Let me look at you. You got your mother's eyes." Jamie immediately fires back at him as to how he can mention the woman he killed. Brimming with melancholia, his voice traces back old times and Garrett says, "The one time we had hope we dreamed about a future. But it was goddamn drugs that took it all away."

Eager to know the answer, Jamie directly confronts him, "Why did you do it?" When Garrett says he doesn't need to know, Jamie says he needs to "for my soul and to understand who the hell I am." Garrett then says, "You won't know who the hell you are. Your mother sold her body for drugs and I killed her for it. That's who you are. That's where you come from." He adds, "I'm sorry but if things didn't happen the way they did, you'd be dead, you'd be in prison. You got put on a road, you stay on it son."

When Garrett says John Dutton should never have told him, Jamie clarifies that he didn't. Instead, he found it himself. Garrett then goes on to say: "Ah, well that's a shame then. You don't wanna know me. I killed everything that I loved and everything that loved me and you don't wanna know me, son." Confused and shaken, Jamie walks off the place with a thousand questions in his mind. He punches his car bonnet and looks away and then comes back. "I need to. I've never known who I was. I've never felt like I was whole. I need to know you. Or I will never know myself," he tells him. Garrett agrees and asks him: "You want some coffee? Come on."

With the major revelation, the question remains: Is Jamie more like his real father Garrett Randall? After all, Jamie has committed a crime too. Remember when he got himself in trouble by telling reporter Sarah Nguyen things he shouldn't have and when she threatened to publish them, he attacked her in a fit of rage and eventually killed her. With Rip Wheeler's (Cole Hauser) help, he then covered up his crime by making it look like she died in a kayaking accident. Is that who he really is?

Many fans feel his adoption could turn out to be a saving grace for the Dutton Ranch. One wrote: "Okay can we talk about #Yellowstone? Because I feel like Jamie’s adoption situation is possibly gonna be the saving grace on the ruling of the Dutton land sitch."

Well, as we wait for the last episode this season, it may give us some answers. Catch the season finale on Sunday, August 23, 2020, as it airs on Paramount Network.