#ruby hill analysis

hello yes thank you i love this question and had way too much fun with it.

how beth shows love: i absolutely agree that beth shows love through acts of service, from helping annie raise ben to the intricate lunches she packs her children to the quilt she makes sara when she's in the hospital. she's quite guarded with rio, but i think we see it in the way she quickly insists that they have to tell rio that eddie got picked up (1.08) to the way she tries to take care of marcus in the aftermath of his "death" (3.01). we also saw it in season 4 when she was so excited to offer up a boss instead of rio (4.05) and to turn in gene in place of him, too (4.08). of course, i think that culminates in her remaining silent when she thinks he might be behind mick shooting her (4.16). i also think this is demonstrated in the way that one of the must gutting things dean ever does is guilt her for not being able to show up for danny in the hospital when he breaks his arm, implying that she has failed in showing her love for her son.

how beth receives love: which i think beth appreciates acts of service, she really preens with words of affirmation. of course we see the way that she's affected by rio's compliments, from telling her she doesn't need botox (1.08) to telling her she could be something (2.04)—and she's particularly rattled when he genuinely tells her he loves her execution of boland bubbles when they're at their worst (3.11)—but it goes beyond that. i think one of the major reasons she softens towards dean in season 1 before she discovers the cancer lie is that he acknowledges her when she finally admits she's working for a gang. again, in the opposite vein, she's harshly cut down and reacts drastically when words of affirmation are withheld from her: not only when dean diminishes her after her accomplishments at boland motors (2.04) but when rio ignores her and trivializes her boland bubbles idea and she throws a tantrum (3.10).

how rio shows love: rio is very physically affectionate and his developing feelings for beth are signified by his increasingly intimate touch. he starts by brushing her, touching her arm, getting into her physical space, but he escalates to gently pushing her hair off her face and softly kissing her. he also demonstrates his love for marcus this way—throwing him over his shoulder, putting his hand on his shoulder, and hugging him in nearly every scene they share. when he introduces beth to rosa, too, he immediately slings his arm over her shoulder. on the flip side, one of his lowest points is when someone he cares about that should care about him instead restrains and physically harms him. i think it's significant that we see rio exchange a familiar and warm dap with mick, but we never really see any physical affection between him and nick. for someone that is also prone to words of affirmation, it's also interesting that rio reiterates the distance between them by repeatedly insisting that they're cousins, not brothers.

how rio receives love: while i think rio would love to receive physical affection, it seems that he can manage without beth offering it freely. i think that way that he seeks it out is actually through quality time, which is why he often spends time in beth's orbit, even when things are rocky between them. he always shows up when she calls—even in the middle of the night (3.03) or at the drop of a hat (2.07)—and i think it was made clear that one of the biggest ways he suffered in solitary confinement post-shooting was that he was unable to spend time with marcus, instead fixating on building marcus several model airplanes (something it seems they used to do together). the activities he does with marcus are based on quality time, too, from playing soccer to helping him on the monkey bars to taking him to t-ball and family barbeques. like beth reacted drastically to the lack of words of affirmation, rio reacted dramatically to the belief that beth was spending quality time with nick planting trees "or whatever the hell [they were] doing" (4.13) so he kidnaps annie to make a point.

It hits that sweet spot where I’m invested and want to know what happens next, but I feel confident that things would work out for the girls. There’s just not a version of reality for me where Ruby and Stan don’t realign OR where she drops everything to be there for Beth and Annie when she learns about Annie’s arrest. And there’s not a version where Beth doesn’t pull every string imaginable to bail Annie out.

And for a character who struggled to grow up for the entire series, who was taken care of by everyone else around her, there’s devastating poetry to Annie stepping up and holding her head high while she’s cuffed because she knows she did it to protect someone she loved, someone that sacrificed so much for her. The fact that she did it quietly, too, and didn’t tell the girls once she knew exactly what was going to happen? Such a painful parallel to Beth keeping her in the dark in 2.13 when she turned herself in.

And Ruby! Ruby has always been the one that was the most firm in her convictions, and that wasn’t always for the better. She sometimes steamrolled Stan and she’s lost her way. I love the idea of her ending with having to really think about her choices and what she wants, because I know she wants it all and I’d have loved to see her figure out a way to make it happen—because she would. Ruby’s capable of that and her and Stan are a team and they meet every challenge they come up against.

And Beth! She let go of her marriage and it was satisfying to me. She’d had Dean’s back when he didn’t deserve it and she pointed that out to him because he couldn’t recognize it—all while he worked only for himself. And she seriously imagined a future with him where on paper everything was perfect and she realized she’d never be happy and in the dream sequence it wasn’t the other women, and it wasn’t the money, and it wasn’t about anything except the fact that she’d outgrown him and she wasn’t the woman he married because she didn’t want to be anymore. And she let that relationship go without guilt and without fanfare, and we got to see her with her kids—being a mother AND being a boss bitch.

And Rio! He started out as this selfish character who was always looking out only for himself and willing to sacrifice whomever he needed to get ahead, and he grew into someone different. Someone who could freely offer help and who wasn’t so lonely anymore. And I think it’s significant, too, that Mick did something that is against Rio’s interests and Rio moved him from Nick’s payroll to his own, prioritizing that relationship despite what might be perceived as a lack of loyalty. It’s so markedly different from how he handled Eddie.

god i was just rambling to @bethsuglywigs about how it's basically a near-perfect episode. each piece of it pushes the other storylines further and it's just SO good.

like, okay, take ruby's conflict with turner. at the beginning of the episode, she's purposefully giving him nothing and acting like she tried her best, really in a sort of stasis where she is working with him and betraying beth, but not in a meaningful way. she's thrust forward to action in three ways: 1) turner switches gears from the previous episode, outlining that if she doesn't cooperate, he will put her (and stan!) away even if his initial goal is to keep them safe because they're "good people," 2) beth's actions force ruby to reckon with how reckless and dangerous she's being when she pulls them into the drug den, and 3) turner makes good on his promise and an internal investigation is opened against stan. suddenly, the threats are very real and she can't wring her hands anymore. however, she isn't given opportunity until she's left in beth's empty house, which only happens because jane goes missing and annie rushes off because she can't get a hold of ben and thinks the same thing has happened to him.

but ben's not missing—he's just at the movies with nancy and being secretive about it, which is just the culmination of the conflict between him and annie all episode. ben is reeling from annie admitting that she slept with greg and spending all of his time with nancy, but when annie puts her foot down and forces ben to come back, she wins, but their trust isn't restored. ben is secretive with annie because annie is secretive with ben, refusing to tell him where she got her money. even at the end of the episode, ben still cant tell annie "when he'll be her kid again," which puts annie in a fragile state and makes her more susceptible to noah's tactic of getting closer to her.

meanwhile, of course, we have the overarching plot where beth reaps the benefits (money) and the consequences (decreased time with her family) from her 50/50 deal with rio. she's been spending less and less time at home since 2.05 when she took boland motors and we saw in 2.06 how she comes home late at night, after the kids are asleep, and dean is wearing thin under his new responsibilities (of providing his children with basic care) and then the realization that beth has been intimate with rio. this escalates in 2.07 when we see beth's calendar, emphasizing how busy she is, and when beth misses jane's recital at the top of the episode because rio demands her immediate attention and insists upon her delivery of the car that night. dean, however, refuses to stay with the kids in a petulant fit of rage, and beth is forced to take the kids with her (the weakest part of the episode and only significant ding, as there were certainly other options) where jane leaves behind her dubby. of course jane is going to react strongly to the lost dubby because she's lost both of her security blankets now: her blanket, but more importantly, her mother. she runs away, which causes all of the other tension to break.

dean blames it on rio, but we see beth fights for him, insisting he wouldn't and basically trying to, in her own way, protect him from dean's accusation. this even pushes her to go straight to rio, who shows up immediately when she asks for it, not dissimilarly to beth showing up when he called her out of the dance recital. despite their opposition, they really are partners.

and rio! in the alley! furious and agitated and refusing to be helpful—only to go and retrieve the dubby? fighting for and protecting beth in his own way, but only doing so after he's triggered to feel genuine worry for her and the possibility of her messing up so severely that she either goes to jail or dies? UNF!

and then it caps off with ruby finding jane and being forced to confront that she'll feel like jane when she loses beth, too. so she steals the calendar—at the start of the episode, a symbol of beth's increased demands, now shifted into evidence ruby can present to turner—because she's in a bind, but immediately at the start of the next episode she both can't turn it in and can't keep it a secret from beth anymore.

UGH IT'S SO GOOD.

but i don't know how to chose a favorite scene with how well everything flows together, but i'd probably choose the triad of beth screaming at dean that rio didn't take jane, then running to rio for help, then opening the dubby. the alleyway fight is a genuine fave, but it's heightened only by being bookended between each of them revealing their true feelings for the other in scenes where they're apart. beth trusts rio implicitly, and rio cares about beth more than he realizes.

ANNIE

i think it really freaks annie out, tbh. i think her furious reaction in 2.05 and insistence that he isn't "just some guy" showed that she felt really off-kilter about it, and while part of that i think is having a sort of arrested development juvenile reaction to the idea of her mother-figure doing something so out-of-character (an affair period, let alone an affair with someone that's threatened to murder them) but part of it is just that she's the most scared of what rio is capable of (she was the one most affected by lucy's murder, after all). i think she doesn't know what to do with these feelings, so she masks them with humor, and i think she was freaked out in a whole new way last episode in 4.12 when she realized how rio felt about beth. i think annie is the most sensitive of the girls and i think she was really feeling the weight of recognizing that rio's love for beth is really dark and twisted.

RUBY

i think ruby's actually the one more conflicted. i don't think she could ever support beth being with rio because what he does is too far outside of the boundaries of her morality, but i think there was a part of her that could be happy for beth in a way annie wasn't, because i think ruby has an understanding of the pain of beth's marriage in a way that annie doesn't, even though beth's actually confided more in annie. i think she also worries about beth and was pretty shocked to learn it wasn't just a one and done, and i think it scares her in a different way? like, with annie, i think she's scared of who rio is and what he could do. and with ruby, i think she's scared of what it means about beth and who she is and what she can live with—and what that means about the person she knows as her best friend.

Well, I think that definitely depends on if they know their last season is their last before they write the season finale! I think it’s hard to say when the show moves so quickly and things that were once a staple of the show (say, Boland Motors and Fine and Frugal) are suddenly absent in it as the characters move on to new phases of their lives, I don’t think I can come up with any specifics (for instance, I’d have never imagined the show exploring Annie trying to become a paramedic! But I would’ve hoped that she’d escape Fine and Frugal by the end if I were making this prediction in season 2).

On that note, here’s what I think the idealized end is for all the characters—whether or not I actually think that’s where they’re going, haha:

Beth and Dean are divorced and making it work as well as they can co-parenting. She no longer lives in the house she was trying so desperately to save at the beginning of the series, but in a new space she bought on her own for her and hers. Stylistically, it is mostly Beth’s normal style—florals and soft things and clutter—but there is something more vibrant and bold about it. Beth is still in crime with a small but efficient operation of her own. She’s also still heavily involved in the suburban elements of her life (like PTA and cooking and baking). She’s taken the lessons Rio has taught her and it helps her keep a better balance between her feeling the thrill of crime and the stability of making smart moves that keep her safe.

Annie is mostly out of crime, but she’s never above helping Beth out when she needs it—but she’s found work that is meaningful to her and which allows her to be stable. After learning to be comfortable being alone, she finally meets the right person who treats her well and who she is an equal to. She celebrates Ben’s success as he has done everything right and they’re still close, and while she doesn’t need it anymore, she still lets him take care of her in small ways. She’s stable enough that Ben feels like he can go off to a big fancy college and she’ll still be okay.

Ruby’s completely out of crime, and her and Stan have started their own business of some kind where they help people in some capacity. They’re not loaded, but they’re stable, and they are thankful to be out from under the debt but living a more modest life that makes them happy—guilt-free. Diane works for them and Stan is like her psuedo-protective big brother. Sara and Harry know the truth and they don’t approve of it (which is what Stan and Ruby want them to feel) but they understand why they did it. Ruby has to convince Sara to go to the big fancy school that she got into because Sara doesn’t want to move away from her mom and dad.

Rio returns to running his crime empire without the chaos of having the girls working for his crew, and he respects Beth’s operation as her own, even if he does from time to time pop up to give her hell and play the game with her. They sometimes ally and work together, all the while they fall in and out of bed together. He’s happy for Rhea when she gets remarried, and he’s still close with Marcus.

Yeah, I mean, I’ve been thinking about it, and Beth really is stretched the most with how many relationships she’s balancing?

By this chart, Beth has 16 relationships (Rio appears twice because I think her romantic relationship is quite separate from the business relationship that encompasses Annie and Ruby too) while Ruby and Annie both have 13. Not only does Beth has more singular relationships that are just hers (12 compared to Ruby’s 8 and Annie’s 9), I’d also say they generally hold more narrative weight (while Rhea or Lucy or Max don’t have much screentime, they’ve made a much larger impact than, say, Laura or Tony, who some people might not even recognize on this chart as being Cohen’s girlfriend or Ruby’s diner boss). I could’ve put more things in Beth’s slot, too, such as Gayle or “the dealership” since I put “church” and “doctors” under Ruby’s. On top of that, I’d argue that Turner, Mary Pat, and the business-side of Rio have more development/conflict with Beth than their respective relationships with Annie and Ruby too.

Ben gets a lot of screentime (or got, since that was minimized in season 3) because a lot of Annie’s conflict revolves around the fact that she’s still trying to grow up and stabilize. Their dynamic—where Ben has the be the responsible one while Annie’s a bit of a mess—is central to her character development. That’s why we saw her having to put her foot down and demand Ben get in the car in season 2 and why we saw her enter therapy in season 3 (and while she didn’t make much progress, she did make some—she acknowledged that Beth took care of her, something she denied in season 2, and she figured out a path, whereas she was reticent to even consider another job in season 1—although there were severe stumbling blocks along the way).

Ruby’s family gets a lot of screentime because it’s really her central conflict. Stan is her confidant and her marriage is priority #1 for her. They are partners, a team, and their relationship and family is something that they often talk about and discuss—from Sara’s meds to Sara’s rebellion. Harry, on the other hand, is often used as an anecdote for comic relief. We know very little to nothing about his personality and I don’t think we’ve seen a singular solo Ruby/Harry scene—whereas we’ve seen Beth alone at Kenny’s swim practice, Beth alone helping Danny with homework, Beth alone trying to help Jane find the dubby, Beth alone at Jane’s school, Beth alone comforting OG!Emma after nightmares... these scenes are brief and don’t hold as much weight as Ruby and Sara’s scenes, but the show does try to show us Beth bonding with her children—it’s just usually all together (like the jenga scene or handing off lunches scene in the pilot) and it’s usually less significant because... 

Beth’s conflict is different. 

Her arc is specifically about becoming more than a wife and a mother. About discovering her agency and carving out something for herself. She’s never had that before. She’s been cleaning up Annie’s messes and parenting her since she was a teenager. She went straight from her childhood home to Dean. She’s never had a paying job because her job has always been looking after and taking care of other people. We’ve seen that she’s disastrous when left to her own devices at taking care of herself. 

Her conflict hasn’t been about whether her children will discover the truth (like Ruby’s has been with Sara or Annie’s has been with Ben). It’s about how she’s being pulled in two different directions. Dean and her kids are reluctant to see her transition to a new role, and by pursuing something for herself, Beth is caught with the guilt of being labeled and looked at as a bad mother. She blames herself for Kenny’s binge eating and Jane running away, and yet Dean’s gone the first eleven years of his children’s lives unfamiliar with their schedules or even knowing which child is supposed to be in a booster seat. She doesn’t have a Stan—she parents alone. Dean says it bluntly: “I would never tell you how to raise the kids.”

The show has very explicitly told us that Beth cares about and values being a mother. It was an important way that they developed the Beth/Rio relationship—by making him a father and making her admire the kind of father that he was. Protecting her kids—physically (emphasizing to Mick that she has children when he’s watching over her), financially (going into crime to save their house), and emotionally (putting herself in danger to retrieve the dubby)—has been something the show has returned to time and time again: “I’m a mother!” 

She may not have the same type of relationship with her kids, but I don’t think that means much beyond the fact that all three of the girls have different relationships to their respective children. Ruby and Sara’s relationship really looks nothing like Annie and Ben’s, either. 

i’ve been sitting on this ask for a while. it rubbed me the wrong way when i first got it, and i thought about deleting it, but i’m going to try and tackle it. 

i might mess up, so please call me out if that’s the case.

so.

i think there is some uninvestigated internal bias towards and prejudice against black people in this ask. this sentiment comes across racist to me, and while i don’t think it was intentional, that doesn’t negate the fact that this is an uncomfortable mentality that i think should be sat with, examined, and explored.

the reality is that racism is a central facet of our society—and i mean that globally. all of us have unchecked biases because white characters, experiences, love, growth, and stories are centralized and prioritized in media. while we can’t be faulted for growing up in a society like this and having unintended beliefs as a result, it’s our job to do better and do the hard work of investigating our biases and growing from this uncomfortable realization.

you do provide some reasons for not liking the hills, and yeah, maybe those are just traits that would get under your skin if it was a family of white actors, too— but in a family of four distinct black characters, the only one you seem to like is the one that doesn’t speak and rarely gets any screentime. harry IS absolutely adorable and precious and i agree that i would like to see more of him, but while ruby, stan, and sara have commonalities, they’re also distinctly different from each other. the fact that they—the primary black characters on the show with agency and storylines—are all swept aside as being the characters that you “can’t get into” is, to me, troubling (particularly because it seems to go beyond personal preference, since you start by saying you don’t get how other people could be into the hills, either).

are the hills judgmental? sure, but mostly of themselves moreso than outsiders. there’s actually a lot of talk in the fandom generally about ruby letting beth’s bad behavior slide, and the moments where she is openly judgmental about beth? beth certainly deserves it (i mean, ruby’s right—you can’t just serve a bitch a mini muffin and invite her to join you in a life of crime...)

most often, ruby is hardest on herself and preoccupied with her own identity as a good or bad person—and i wouldn’t call ruby holier-than-thou, particularly because ruby genuinely seems to believe that she sold her soul and that she’s no longer “good.” 

stan (and sara) can be harsh with judgment towards ruby, but while there was a tease of getting to know what stan really thought of beth this year, we got one heated look and that’s it. and i feel like there’s a bubble in this fandom generally that takes stan’s judgment of ruby really hard, but i think it’s fair to say that if you have been in love with and married to a person for 20+ years and built a life around an ideology that centers on a specific type of morality, it would be deeply troubling to see that person change before your eyes—but he is always there for her despite it. 

(i’d also classify annie as particularly judgmental of beth’s choices, and beth as pulling a holier-than-thou attitude towards annie a lot of the time, too.) 

there are a lot of reasons that the hills are a beloved part of the show—their fierce protectiveness over each other, their complexity despite the fact that they are so grounded and solid, the fact that ruby and sara are the only deep exploration of a mother/daughter relationship we get on a show that otherwise centers female relationships—but i think it’s also just important and unfortunately a bit rare to see black love and a black family on television.

here are some suggested articles to delive into the issue of the underrpresentation of black couples in media:

Why is TV so afraid to show Black people loving Black people? (Race Baitr)

Black Love On The Big Screen, From the First On-Film Kiss to Today | Unpack That (The Root)

Where Have All the Black TV Couples Gone? (Ebony)

here are some excerpts i like:

The predominance of interracial relationships in modern media misrepresents the reality that the majority of Black people exist in relationships with other Black people. A census study found that in 2017, from the overall married Black population, 7% of Black women and 15% of Black men had married non-Black partners. 

—Why is TV so afraid to show Black people loving Black people?

From the very first known black kiss on film, to the late 1990s, and the early aughts—an era that some would call a heyday of black films, black love has persisted. Still, in 2019, we understand black love to be revolutionary. Professor Racquel Gates focuses on African American media, specifically, race in popular film and television. She says that the concept of loving while black is a striking concept.

“I think absolutely black love is revolutionary. I think that if you’re talking outside of the realm of film and television the idea of black people being loved and loving each other and being treated as whole and valuable human beings who are deserving of love and care and affection is sadly still a fairly novel idea to many people,” said Dr. Gates. 

—Black Love on the Big Screen, from the First On-Film Kiss to Today

The three most popular shows on prime-time network television are returning from mid-winter break this month: ABC’s Scandal, How to Get Away With Murder and Fox’s Empire. They all feature Black females as the respective leads: Kerry Washington (Scandal), Viola Davis (HTGAWM) and Taraji P. Henson (Empire). But there’s another, albeit subtle, but definitive, commonality: none of the characters have a romantic relationship with a Black man.

It may (not) be hard to believe—especially given that all three shows were created by either Shonda Rhimes or Lee Daniels—but it seems like network TV doesn’t want to see Black men and women together, or at least not in a healthy relationship.