"Beware the Second Beating" aired on December 15, 2024, and at 43 minutes it is one of the shortest episodes of the season. Michael Friedman directed it, his first of two Season 1 credits, from a script by Taylor Sheridan. It picks up in the middle of Tommy's drive to Fort Worth. Monty hears about the pipe-yard accident and about the cartel. The families of the dead are asked to sign, Victor's lawyers strip Angela of nearly everything, and Manuel and Antonio put Cooper in the hospital. The last third is Tommy's answer.
Monty's house
Angela borrows Tommy's truck to go see Victor, and Tommy goes into Monty's house alone. They start with the morning's accident. Monty asks the question a boss would: "Am I exposed?" "That's a lawyer question." "At this point, you're as much a lawyer as anybody else." Tommy tells him what happened in the pipe yard. "The pipes came in in a mixed bundle, which is not what we ordered. He knew better than to be standing up there. Negligence is his. But it don't make the pill his wife's got to swallow any easier." Monty's answer is "We'll take care of the family."
Then they go through what M-Tex has in progress. Monty asks whether the TTP lease dispute is settled, and Tommy says the lawyer is winning it: "This little lawyer's a pit bull, I tell you." Tommy says the bereavement offer will have to go "north of 250 per, I think, to make it stick." Then he gets to the reason for the trip. The Hermosa Field lease sits on "a distribution route for drugs headed north," and the cartel wants payment for its lost product. "Get in line," Monty says. Tommy tells him the crew is spooked and won't work the field. "Well, that's not an option." Tommy asks if Monty has any senators in his rolodex, and whether the Army might want to come down and play war games for a few weeks, which is what he threatened the cartel with in episode 5. Monty asks who else is drilling in the field. "Everybody. BP and Marathon and Chevron." He says he'll make calls, and Tommy asks him to make them fast, since they are supposed to start clearing pads next week.
Later Monty asks how long it has been since Tommy stopped drinking. "Almost nine." "And not one drink." Tommy says he doesn't miss it. "I'm too scared of it to miss it." The talk turns to green initiatives, and one of them lays out a theory that the two biggest backers of those initiatives are Saudi Arabia and Russia, since less American supply makes the world more dependent on theirs. That is a character's theory, and the episode doesn't confirm it. It is cut short by a call from Nathan, who says Cooper was attacked last night and is in surgery.
The offer at the widows' table
Rebecca and Nathan carry out the plan from episode 5 at the widows' house. Before going in, Nathan asks Rebecca whether she has done this before. "More than I can count." He doesn't believe her. "You've faced widows and orphans and tried to assign a monetary value to their loved ones' lives more times than you can count?" She admits that under these circumstances she hasn't. Then one of them says, "Let's leave all the lawyer out here on the porch, know what I mean?"
Inside, the lawyers go through the terms in English and Spanish. Each man had a term policy through the company with "death benefits of $25,000," and one of the women asks what they are supposed to do with that. The answer is "a nominal amount to cover funeral expenses." Their medical coverage will continue under COBRA for 18 months. The offer is called "a bereavement offer," and the women ask what the catch is. "No catch." "What do you want from us?" "Nothing. Just your signature at the bottom that you received them." One of them asks what "indemnify" means, and Nathan explains that it concerns liability and giving up claims of blame. When she asks what those words mean, he says, "It just means you can't decide in ten years that the accident was our fault."
"What if it was your fault?" "It wasn't our fault. It wasn't your husband's fault. It wasn't anyone's fault." "But what if it was?" This is where Rebecca answers, and the answer is blunt. "Then you'd have to prove it. You'd have to hand that check back, go hire a lawyer one better than our lawyers and prove it was our fault. While we try to prove it was yours." Nathan softens it: "none of us wants to fight." A woman at the table sees through it. "But if you're not to blame, why would you offer us anything?" "Because it's cheaper than proving it."
Ariana's call
In the middle of the meeting Ariana steps out to call Cooper, and Walt answers on the sheriff's department line. "Are you calling for Cooper Norris?" "Are you a friend?" "I think so." When he tells her Cooper has been beaten in his trailer at a man camp, she names the man. "Manuel Lopez. He threatened Cooper at my house." "With a gun." When Walt says he needs a statement from her, she tells him he can come to the hospital and get it, and learns that Cooper is at Midland General.
Angela and the prenup
Angela is at the house she used to share with Victor. A lawyer named Nelson Means, from Brown, Mayer, and Hammond, is waiting with the marriage settlement. "Victor would prefer the prenup to be fully executed prior to any contact." He points her to the infidelity clause, paragraph nine, "which states should you engage in adultery, the settlement portion of the agreement will be nullified." Her objection is that Tommy is her ex-husband. "That is the very definition of adultery," he says, and adds, "Based on your efforts to travel to him, the affair was premeditated." All community property reverts to Victor: the residence, the house in Aspen, the ranch outside of Morgan, the residence in Cabo, the cash, the joint credit cards and the cars.
She asks about the Bentley. "The Bentley was a gift. All gifts are your separate property." What she keeps is her jewelry, clothing and accessories, a personal bank account with "just over $300,000," and child support for Ainsley through her 18th birthday. Victor has also written a letter for her to deliver to Ainsley. Her belongings have been sent to Tommy's house in Midland, and the rest is in the car. "Keys are in the vehicle." A young woman named Madison shows her to the garage, and the exchange turns ugly, with Madison telling her she is "a little long in the tooth to come crawling back and try to kick me out of his bed." Angela's report to Tommy by phone is that she feels like a whore and had to "meet my whore replacement on the way out." He can't talk. Nathan has called.
Cooper and the second beating
Walt gives Tommy the outline. "Found him unconscious in his trailer. Took a real good beating." His suspect is Manuel Lopez, who works on Cooper's crew and "threatened him with a pistol earlier in the day." At the hospital a doctor tells the family that Cooper's right lung collapsed, that a chest tube has to stay in for several days, and that there is "some brain swelling." In the car, Tommy phones Boss, whose full name the call gives as Theodore Ramone, and interrupts a game with his son Darius. "Manuel and Antonio, for starters." He asks what Boss's men are doing "putting my son in the goddamn hospital" and whether Boss runs a tighter crew than that. Boss says he'll have it handled before dawn. Tommy tells him he has had his chance. "You find me five thumpers that don't play in their side of the sand box, and keep your goddamn phone on."
In the hospital room, Angela panics when she sees Cooper. Tommy sends her to the hallway to take a Xanax and wait for it to work. Then he is alone with his son. Cooper says nothing is going on between him and Ariana. Her husband just died, she asked for help, and he gave it. Tommy doesn't accept it as the point. "She's not my concern. You are." When Cooper says his father shouldn't step in, Tommy says, "This is not your dad talking. This is the general manager of an oil company talking. And when my employees break into another employee's company-provided housing and beat the dog shit out of him to the point where a surgeon has to re-inflate his lung, I step in." He gives Cooper advice about the girl: "You're gonna have to move slow with this girl. She's hurting in a way that you can't understand, and she's trying to find somewhere to put it." Cooper says it isn't like that, and Tommy says what gives the episode its title. "This ain't the first time you took a beating over this girl. This is the kind of beating you get when the first one didn't take."
The ending is Tommy's answer. He tells someone at the man camp to turn off the cameras and leave them off until he says otherwise, and goes to the trailer with Boss and his men. Manuel and Antonio are inside. Tommy tells them, "Needless to say, you're fired," and that by noon tomorrow they will be on a "no hire" list for every oil company in the Permian Basin. The sheriff, he says, is five minutes away and will search the trailer, and he lists what that will turn up: possession of a firearm by a felon and possession of a controlled substance, either of which "violates your parole." Add aggravated assault and kidnapping, "'cause when you shut the door on him, that's kidnapping." "I ain't a goddamn mathematician, but that's, like, 30 years." Then he explains why: "That's what I do to people who hurt my family." He is going to take 30 years of Manuel's life, and if he ever comes back, "I'm gonna take the rest of it." Walt arrives, and asks Tommy whether Manuel had anything to say. "He gave up the names. Even wrote 'em down for you."
After the sheriff takes them away, Dale says he hasn't done anything like that since 2016, and that the place is getting wild again. Tommy is worried about his son. "He ain't mean enough for this place, Dale. He just ain't mean enough."
What the widows were actually signing
The scene at the table is written as a document walkthrough, and every item in it is a real thing with a real rule behind it. Two of them are worth checking.
The life insurance is plausible. Each man had a term policy through the company "with death benefits of $25,000," and when one of the women asks what they are supposed to do with that, the answer is honest: "a nominal amount to cover funeral expenses." Basic group life at a flat $25,000 is an ordinary employer benefit, and it is not meant to replace an income.
The health coverage is where the show slips. Nathan tells them, "Your policy will COBRA, which means that you will remain on the policy for 18 months. Then, you can extend the policy at your own expense." Under the federal rule, 18 months is the continuation period when the qualifying event is the employee losing the job or having their hours cut. When the qualifying event is the death of the covered employee, the surviving spouse and dependent children are entitled to 36 months. These men died on shift, so the families in that room should have been told 36. Whether the writers simply used the number everyone half-remembers, or whether the scene means for the lawyers to be shading it, the episode never says. Either reading fits what happens next.
The word that does the real work is the one a woman at the table stops on. She asks what "indemnify" means, and Nathan gives a fair answer: "It just means you can't decide in ten years that the accident was our fault." That is a release. What M-Tex is buying with it is not really the day's discount. It is a door that stays shut. Rebecca spells out the alternative without dressing it up. "Then you'd have to prove it. You'd have to hand that check back, go hire a lawyer one better than our lawyers and prove it was our fault. While we try to prove it was yours."
The exchange that ends the scene is the honest one, and it is the best single line in the episode about how liability works. "But if you're not to blame, why would you offer us anything?" "Because it's cheaper than proving it." Our guide to oilfield insurance and liability goes through why that calculation nearly always favours settling.
Smaller beats
- Victor's lawyer is Nelson Means, played by Jonathan Runyon, and the clause that costs Angela everything is paragraph nine. The list he reads out, the residence, Aspen, the ranch outside Morgan and the place in Cabo, is the whole marriage in one paragraph.
- Tommy tells Cami, when she says Angela is welcome in the house, that she has to go break up with her husband first. "Yeah, our first divorce was so fun, we thought we'd try it again."
- Monty mentions that convincing his daughter to go to TCU is "one of my greatest accomplishments." It ties to episode 2, when a runner named Gracie Miller wins for TCU.
- Ainsley, visiting Cooper, tells him she missed her first patch party for him. "To think, I missed my first patch party for you."
- Angela, in the hospital parking lot, tells Tommy why she isn't inside. "I need to be strong for him, Tommy."
- The captions name two songs: "If Today Doesn't Do Me In" by Ian Noe and "Sunshine" by The Red Clay Strays.
What it leaves open
Tommy has fired two men and given their names to the sheriff. Cooper is in the hospital with a chest tube, and Angela has lost her marriage settlement and is on her way to Midland in a Bentley. Episode 7 follows.