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Snakes in Movies   Yellowstone - Season 4, Episode 1 "Half the Money" (2021)   Spoiler Alert ! Some of these pictures and descriptions may give away plot details that you might not want to know before watching the film.   This is that hit contemporary western television show about the Yellowstone cattle ranch in Montana that your red state friends love so much. The ranch is continually under attack from people who want to develop the land, but the owner refuses to sell any of it. The ranch employs several cowboys and cowgirls, and when they're not herding cows, they sometimes kill people who are a threat to the ranch. Most of the time these killer cowboys use guns, then dump the bodies off a remote cliff in an uninhabited jurisdictional dead zone called the train station, but in season 4, episode 1 "Half the Money" we see a more entertaining murder using a rattlesnake to dispense the ranch's brand of frontier justice. Roarke (Josh Holloway), is a rich evil New York finance yuppie who is working with a giant corporation that is trying to steal a large slice Yellowstone ranch land to build an airport on it. He hires thugs to beat up a couple of Yellowstone cowboys, so, after the thugs are taken to the train station, it's his turn to ride the rails. Rip (Cole Hauser), the meanest killer cowboy on the ranch, decides to get creative and do the job himself. Rip finds Roarke standing in the middle of a remote stream fly fishing, and walks up to him holding a cooler as if he is a DoorDash delivery man asking: "Is this your order of avocado toast and Kombucha?" He asks Roarke if the cooler is his, saying he found it on the bank. Roarke says it's not his but Rip keeps walking towards him until Roarke gets upset. He should be. Rip shakes the cooler then holds it up to Roarke's face and opens the lid showing us a rattlesnake then says: "A little present from the Yellowstone" as he tosses the rattlesnake into Roarke's face. The snake immediately bites Roarke. We see the snake falling into the stream and swimming away. Roarke runs a short distance into the woods where he foams at the mouth and drops dead almost immediately. We see two bloody fang marks below his eye. Rip follows him, holds him down with his boot, and watches him die, then says "Good riddance." Rip leaves Roarke, picks up the cooler and walks across the stream right at the camera as if he's threatening anyone watching, like a true bad ass. You can watch much of the scene on YouTube in a lot less time that it takes to read all this. The scene was well-executed, but as I've said here before, no matter how cool it looks on a screen, using a venomous snake is not an efficient way to murder someone. I'm not saying it's ever a good idea to murder someone, but there are just too many variables with using a snake: You can't throw a snake at a target like a dart at a dart board - it has a mind of its own. Even if it does hit the target, it won't always open its mouth and bite, and when it does bite it won't always inject venom, and when it does inject venom, that doesn't always lead to death, and even when the venom does kill, it can take hours for the victim to die, not a couple of minutes. If the venom doesn't kill, then the intended victim becomes a living witness to attempted murder, and as any wannabe John Wick knows, that's not very smart. Along with all that uncertainty are the dangers of injuring yourself by catching a deadly rattlesnake and carrying it around in an easily-opened cooler, and it's a really terrible idea. Using a rattlesnake to kill Roarke probably seemed like a good way to make his death look accidental, but snakes don't usually bite people in the face, certainly not when the person is standing in a stream, so no good detective would ever believe his death was an accident. But Rip knows that Roarke's body will probably get eaten by wolves long before any detective can ever examine it. And as it turns out, Roarke's disappearance is never mentioned again on the show, so maybe his body was never found. Roarke died very quickly from the venom in the scene. That's typical screen fiction shorthand, so I'm not complaining, but unfortunately it makes people wrongly believe that snakebites always kill and when they do the victim dies immediately, because they've seen it so many times in movies and TV. Any snakebite survivor will tell you that's not what happens. The snake we see in the cooler is a Western Diamond-backed Rattlesnake, a species that doesn't live in Montana where the scene is set. It was most likely filmed on a stage somewhere, then edited into the scene. It's probably not easy to obtain a live native snake for a shoot, and there might even be even laws that prohibit native snakes, so captive diamondbacks are often used, regardless of where the scene is set, rented from companies that provide them for filmmakers. Since they're what we're used to seeing, they're how people expect a rattlesnake to look, and some native species might not be convincing enough. The snake that flies into Roarke's face is a fake snake or a dead snake or possibly CGI. It's too fast and distorted to tell what it is. If they used a prop snake, the striking shot was most likely filmed in reverse. We also see a snake falling in the stream and swimming away that is probably CGI. I like that they showed us that the snake was OK after biting the greedy bastard, as if its life was worth more than his.