#4.10 analysis

Well, because Beth doesn't feel the same way about Dean that most of the fandom feels about Dean. She's certainly not in love with him, and on the whole, she's largely indifferent to him, but she's never relished hurting him, and in fact, doing so causes her to feel extreme guilt—and him catching her with Rio in that moment does hurt him.

This is a man that shot Dean in his own home and who his wife went on to have an affair with, one that wasn't just physical, but emotionally deep and significant to her in a way his own affairs weren't to him. One of the casualties of that affair was that the family-owned business that he inherited from his father was seized and lost to him, and after that, Beth lied to him and pretended that Rio wasn't involved in Boland Bubbles. And Dean only discovered that lie while in prison, after being arrested for their crimes.

Then Beth promises Dean that she's working on putting Rio away in order to free Dean—who is, remember, innocent!—and she tells him she does, only a few days later, Dean walks in, and finds his wife sitting down with this same man cooking up their next scheme. In that moment, too, she chooses Rio over Dean, asking Dean to leave.

Dean is a bad husband. He's a bad husband from the start of the show, and he never does grow to be a good one. Part of Dean's badness, though, is emphasized by the way that Beth has been a good and loyal wife to him up until the discovery of the affairs and the lost money. At that point, she becomes a scorned and angry wife, and she throws him out, and it feels like justice to her and the audience because at that point, he's reaping what he himself sowed.

But over time in the series, Beth becomes a pretty bad wife, too. She lies and keeps secrets from him. She uses him for sex that isn't about him, but about the same man with whom she cheated on him. She is dismissive of him, infantalizes him, and really only stays with him for the selfish reason of using him as a crutch for normalcy and a built-in babysitter. By the end of the series, at their best, all she does is placate him. The only moments of true joy they share together are when he's unknowingly done something to serve her business interests with Rio. Their relationship is hollow, their foundation is deeply cracked, and their marriage is only intact because Beth has a fantasy about a normal life which she keeps as a lifeboat to weather the tumultuous storm of her relationship with Rio.

And this moment in the series comes right after Stan tells Beth in 4.09 that she doesn't care about anyone but herself, that she "use[s] whoever [she] can to get whatever [she] want[s]," something we see her reckoning with after she steals the money back from Phoebe's evidence stash and she tells Rio she was, "Just being herself."

She's teary-eyed and upset at the start of 4.10 because she knows she's doing something wrong and treating someone badly—a man she built a family and a life with, a life which she thinks she wants to and goes through the motions to save as they keep talking about how they have a "chance" if they go to Nevada.

yeah, i think she was—at least, her version of the truth now, in retrospect.

i really think beth's feelings for rio—or at least her ability to acknowledge her feelings for rio—are very much dependent on whatever their present circumstances are. when things are good, she's more pliant, easygoing, and is more prone to leaning into her feelings for him—dressing up and flirting and falling into familiar patterns, even if she's got dubious intentions in the scene as well, like in the 3.08 bar scene or the 4.06 bookshelf scene.

but when things are bad, she shuts down, shuts out any memory that allows the nuances and good memories to crowd through and help her see the situation more clearly, or at least for what it is.

in this moment, she's come off of a major betrayal in getting him arrested and having him threaten her family (a threat which she took seriously). she's grappling with the person she's becoming, not only in response to fitzpatrick telling her that she can never be normal again, but in stan telling her she uses people, and in her admitting that she was "just being herself" when she duplicitously took advantage of phoebe to steal back the money for rio.

beth loves crime—that much is clear, and the episode doubled down on it—but she's always been far more comfortable when that crime is faceless, when she can't see the results of who she might be hurting. it's why she's comfortable robbing a grocery store, but not marion; why it's easier for her to deliver boomer to his death than to pull the trigger herself.

it's also why i believe she responds so acutely to seeing the negative consequences of it on her family—why her guilt manifests so severely when she gets dean shot and has to nurse him back to health, when kenny binge eats, when jane runs away, or even when stan actually faces consequences and goes to jail. beth's righteous in her fury at ruby for choosing stan when stan's arrest is theoretical, but when the other shoe drops and the stakes are real, she robs a quick cash even when her kids are on the line, and she ultimately turns herself in for a crime she didn't commit because as she tells ruby, it's him or her.

in that sense, she's also been confronted with seeing the way that her association with rio—professionally, personally—has hurt her family. she's still entertaining the idea that the only way they can fix things is to run away from the problems rather than to confront them. she and dean still don't talk; the solution is nevada, not therapy, not honesty, not reality. dean gets arrested and is facing 20-30 years in prison, and it's because of beth secretly jumping into bed professionally with rio. you could trace it back to dean, of course, and the original betrayal of the affairs and losing the money, but as much as beth has held onto that (and she has—4.01 established it when beth threw it back in dean's face after all this time), she's also very focused on the present. and in the present, she's going through the motions of saving her marriage, even if she's unwilling to do th actual work to save it.

and in that state of mind, it's true. rio never should've been in her thoughts in the way that he was, because she was married and on a date with her husband when she first crossed that line. and it was her marriage bed that she invited rio into, and it was her husband who took the fall for her and was stuck at home with an ankle monitor on when she was hooking up with rio at his grandmother's house.

those things didn't matter at the time because her marriage didn't much matter at the time, but in the moment of dean confronting her about it, it's the easier answer and it's the true answer.

i think it's very realistic that what beth thinks is an easy choice turns out to be much more difficult when she's actually the one making the decision. she asks ruby to pick her over stan because as she says, "i would always choose you every time." but when reality sets in, when she's thinking about how it would affect her children, when she's responding to the fact that dean took the fall for her in the same way stan took the fall for ruby, suddenly the choice isn't so simple.

this season is playing around with beth facing consequences in so many ways I'm really loving, not only with the confrontations with fitzpatrick and stan and phoebe and dean, but with beth's own words coming back to haunt her in both this instance and her flippant wish in 3.09 that "just once" rio would show up at annie or ruby's house so they would understand what it's like to be her. she'll absolutely be eating those words in 4.12 when annie goes missing because, at the end of the day, beth will always choose to go down for annie and ruby. as much as she resents being the one that faces the most difficult choices, the truth is she'd rather it was her than them.

in that vein then, although the choices seem similar on a surface level, they really aren't. in 2.08, ruby makes an active choice to betray beth in order to save stan, but ultimately fails to commit. in 4.10, beth's initial choice to run has nothing to do with ruby, but ruby becomes an unintended casualty of beth's decision. that decision then becomes intentional when beth agrees to stan's terms.

beth and stan also put ruby into very different positions, and while both hurt ruby, they do so in distinct ways.

beth asks ruby to make an impossible decision without real understanding or empathy about the weight of that decision. it's selfish and self-centered, but the onus of responsibility lies with ruby—and regardless of beth's feelings, it always did. ruby had to make a choice and she had to live with it, regardless of who she ultimately chose. ruby's choosing stan makes sense, but so does beth's pain in reaction to it.

in contrast, stan doesn't ask ruby to make a choice—he asks beth. ruby has no agency in this dilemma. her choice is made for her, behind her back.

that means beth and ruby's roles aren't just neatly flipped in this scenario, despite the fact that they're both placed in the dilemma of choosing between their best friend and their husband. in 2.08, beth had no agency at the hands of ruby—whether or not she goes to jail depends on ruby's decision—but in 4.10, ruby has no agency at the hands of stan, who forces that choice when again, ruby wasn't originally actively part of that choice.

this is why it's important that stan balks when beth easily agrees, and beth admits that the circumstance has only arisen because she's already planning to run. in this scenario—the only scenario in which beth would agree—beth theoretically saves everyone. dean doesn't go to prison, her kids get to keep their father, and stan and ruby (and their marriage) is safe because, presumably, they also get to exit crime without beth being the supposed driving force between ruby's involvement with it.

at the end of the day, ruby does choose beth. she doesn't turn in the calendar and she calls beth and confesses. and beth chooses ruby back when she turns herself in for a murder she doesn't commit.

this is why i think the emphasis in 4.11 was on ruby's pain at stan's betrayal, not beth's. beth was willing to go down for ruby in lieu of stan in 2.13, and ruby let her go—she was the only one that knew in advance what beth was going to do. similarly, i think ruby could be willing to let beth go in these circumstances, even if it was painful.

but the betrayal is in stan asking beth to leave ruby behind, and in stan not communicating any of it to ruby. and like beth feeling the consequences when the shoe is on the other foot, now ruby is experiencing it. in season 1, she lied to stan and kept him in the dark to protect her family. now he thinks he's doing the same thing.

that could be a part of it! but i always read it more as beth showing growth and learning that she can't take rio at face value. he keeps insisting that the job is easy—just the creation of the money and the drop—but beth doesn't trust it. she presses, rio insists, and then she questions him about her payment. rio lies by omission so she's really trying to suss out all possible angles to find the trick—he always has one, after all, always likes to leave her in the lurch, and beth is trying to mitigate that.

of course, beth ends up being right because rio caveats at the end of the episode that the drop is actually in canada and the catch is that she has to figure out to get the money over the border all by herself.

to me, it's really a scene about beth showing that she knows him and that she's trying very hard to get on equal footing on him, but that rio still wants to wield power over her even when there's no real benefit for him. the whole job ends up showing the lack of trust on both of their sides. beth doesn't trust him to be straightforward with her which means she's left scrambling, and he doesn't trust her with the task so he sends his guys to trail her which means she ends up ditching all the money to protect herself.

in a weird way, though, it shows some development in their relationship. they don’t particularly enjoy working together in this moment, but they both want to keep the other one around, and they are sitting and collaborating and talking just—you know—badly.

by showing beth's skepticism of rio in this scene, it contextualizes later episodes in the season, particularly when she doesn't know how to process rio returning her furniture or the money (she's waiting for the catch there, too, only it never comes) and when she decides to go out on a limb and trust him when he offers to help her take down nick, and again when he fails to show up for that very thing.

Hmm, maybe? But I don't personally think so. I think the contexts are very diffierent and I also think that their dynamic is different.

When he raised his voice at her in 2.07, I believe it was because he was worried about her and he was frustrated with her for putting herself in danger for something he believed was trivial. He also wasn't directly responsible for making her cry here; she enters the scene teary and gets more hysterical as it goes on, but her feelings are more centered on Jane's missing status and less on what Rio is saying to her (but I do think the fact that he comes off callous in the scene is hurtful to her, but it's not because he is callous, it's because he knows exactly what's at stake and she seems to forget that, naively believing that other people operate the same way that Rio does).

I think it's important, too, that this is smack dab in the middle of the time period where Beth and Rio are at their best personally. They've slept together, he retrieves the dubby for her after this, and as you point out, offers to return her money that was stolen by the baby hitmen, and all of this leads to the 2.09 kiss being as meaningful as it was. His feelings are intensifying her her and becoming something real, and my personal read of 2.08 is that he's not looking for redemption, necessarily (if he was, I think he earned it through returning the dubby alone), but that if nothing had messed up their trajectory, he'd slip into a more protective, helpful, and mentoring version of himself more often. I read 2.08 as what Beth and Rio could've been at their best.

I actually do think he's lashed out at her in various ways since then, though they didn't always look like 2.07. I think he loses his temper in 3.03 at the bar when he grabs her and hisses, "Don't. Do. That." I also think the best example would be in 3.06, when he breaks and snaps, "That ship sailed when you put three slugs in me!" (which is also another scene where Beth is crying).

I think in that moment she was trying to diffuse the situation and feeling very avoidant and guilty about being caught in such a big lie. I think she knew the significance of Dean finding her with Rio after she supposedly put him away and she desperately wanted him to leave so they could fight about it later privately rather than in front of Rio. I think she was really mortified and guilty, and I think she chose trying to get Dean to leave instead of Rio because she felt like she would have more success and ultimately be less embarrassed.