‘Marshals’ Episode 2 Recap – Kayce Isn’t Strictly A Good Guy (And That’s Good)

There’s no point in a Yellowstone spin-off that doesn’t feel pretty intimately connected to Yellowstone, and if the premiere of Marshals had a downside, it was that aside from Kayce being the main character, it felt like it was sweeping a lot of existing drama under the rug. This problem is largely addressed in Episode 2, “Zone of Death”, which rattles the skeletons in Kayce’s closet enough that the bones are liable to spill out into the effective procedural format. This, it strikes me, is more or less how the show should work if it’s going to make a case for itself.

There are still some concessions to be made, obviously. The opening of this episode is a sweet summary of Kayce’s bonding sessions with Tate now that the responsibility of maintaining East Camp is out of their hands – Rip has organised some solid hands to keep the place ticking over – but they have the feeling of a farewell to them. I don’t think anything’s going to happen to Tate, obviously, but at the same time, I don’t think he’s going to have much to do with the series either. Kayce will be busy, Tate will be doing his own thing, and East Camp will be fine. It feels like tabling while Kayce beds in with his new unit.

FNG

Speaking of which, it’s technically Kayce’s first day on the job, but the dynamic doesn’t feel like that in fairly smart ways. Kayce’s already seen more action than the entire team combined, with the possible exception of Cal, who keeps vouching for his old SEAL buddy even when Cruz suggests their existing relationship might upset the balance of the team. And Kayce isn’t new to Gifford, either; he has longstanding problems with the Duttons, and hasn’t failed to notice that the two coldest cases in the state of Montana are the deaths of John and Jamie Dutton. Cal’s instinct is to defend Kayce, but a lot of this episode is about highlighting that Kayce isn’t – can never be, really – as much of a U.S. Marshal as Cal would evidently like. The thing with Duttons is that they’re always Duttons ahead of everything else.

You wouldn’t think this would have anything to do with Raul Garza, a fugitive from a gang called the 406 Royals, who is hiding out in a trailer park. And it doesn’t, initially. But Garza leads to a connection between the Royals and the Aryan Brethren, a white supremacist gang out of Idaho, and the two factions are planning to stage a fentanyl deal at a spot just over the Wyoming border called “The Zone of Death”.

The Train Station

This location will be recognisable to long-time franchise fans, in the way that it’s also recognisable to Kayce – it’s the “Train Station”, where multiple generations of the Dutton clan have dumped the bodies of people who disagreed with them. Jamie’s bones are down there somewhere. If only Gifford knew.

This is where the Yellowstone connections in Marshals Episode 2 really work. I could probably do without a sequence where Cal accompanies Kayce back to East Camp to wrangle a stallion that has broken through the fence, because it feels a bit too mythic cowboy to me, and that kind of po-faced sincerity about Montana’s natural wilderness and the preservation of the ranching lifestyle worked in the main show in a way that feels a bit ill-fitting here. What does work here, though, is the orchestration of the action scenes. The long build-up to ambushing the exchange site is very good, as is the subsequent gunfight, which takes several exciting turns while it’s ongoing.

Last Action Antihero

With Belle trapped under one of the trucks while trying to plant a tracker, Kayce has to spring into action to help Miles cover her, despite being visibly preoccupied with the possibility of the Dutton graveyard being stumbled upon. Miles is waylaid by a rattlesnake that Kayce hilariously just picks up and throws away like a piece of garbage, and it also becomes clear that this isn’t a fentanyl deal, as initially suspected, but the exchange of a bomb. Kayce chases it down, which also gives him the opportunity to coldly execute the surviving assailant and dump his body in the Zone of Death. But the point here is that he’s kind of proving Gifford, who thinks he’s waylaying the authorities to keep them from sniffing around Jamie’s death, right.

This is a pretty compelling path for Marshals to take, since it kind of makes Kayce an antihero, someone that even his allies can’t quite trust. And since his survival in the Marshals is going to be contingent on the team trusting him, and they all have their own fair share of personal problems and hang-ups, that’s likely to become a major issue. It might even end up being a fatal one. Given Miles’s relative inexperience, Belle’s past undercover work and the fact she keeps so much of her job and its dangers secret from her family, Cal’s shared past with Kayce – which gets an oblique mention here in the form of a name, Roner, that Kayce dropped during the mission – and Cruz’s pretty obvious suspicions, there’s a lot of room for the interpersonal drama to have major consequences going forward. This seems like the show’s strongest aspect to me, and I hope it’s the thing that gets leaned into the most instead of us having to constantly watch Kayce nip back to East Camp to do some cowboy stuff.