Yellowstone’s Sins Return to Haunt Kayce on the Latest Episode of ‘Marshals’

Lauren HubbardMon, March 9, 2026 at 1:01 AM UTC

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“The Yellowstone might be gone, but there’s still some landmines left behind,” Kayce Dutton (Luke Grimes) says toward the end of Marshals’s second episode, in what feels certain to be a prophecy for the spinoff’s future. If last week’s series premiere was starting a new chapter, this week’s episode is all about the things we can’t leave behind. From characters haunted by regret, to those yearning to return to the past, to a quandary about where the bodies are buried (literally), the chickens are really coming home to roost in the second outing of Marshals.

Here’s the full breakdown:

A New Start

Having joined the U.S. Marshals team in the series premiere, this week kicks off with a new status quo. Kayce’s ready for a fresh outlook as he begins his first official day on the job. We get a brief name-check of Rip Wheeler, the enigmatic ranch hand from Yellowstone who ultimately married Kayce’s sister, Beth (don’t worry, their spinoff is still slated for some time later this year) who has found some guys to deal with the day to day ranching tasks that Kayce will now be too busy to do. It’s only the first echo of Yellowstone that we’ll get in this episode full of harkening back, but it’s one that’s sure to give fans of the original series a thrill.

Kayce gets the tour Marshals HQ—a suspiciously stylish converted mill that has only a single restroom, despite the fact that at least a dozen people work there (don’t worry, most of those characters have desk jobs and no names, so they probably don’t use the bathroom either). Perhaps unsurprisingly, Kayce’s being treated as the new guy, given the “training wheels” jobs—perhaps even less surprisingly, Kayce is not pleased by this turn of events.

Harry, who might be better served by wearing a pin that says “I’m the boss” instead of having to constantly remind people, still doesn’t approve of Kayce joining the team. Despite a general loyalty we’re meant to feel for the Duttons, it’s hard not to see his point.

“You don’t find it odd that he’s jumping back into law enforcement when the two biggest cold cases in the state are his father’s death and his brother’s disappearance?” Harry asks team leader Pete Calvin. Calvin, who also happens to be Kayce’s former SEAL team leader, insists that’s merely a coincidence. “There’s no such things as a coincidence with the Duttons,” Harry says. Oh buddy, you don’t know the half of it.

Sonja Flemming

This week’s case starts off straightforwardly enough, as the team kicks in a few doors and arrests two men—one a cartel member, the other, part of the Aryan Brotherhood. The odd couple pairing gets the team’s attention and eventually, they (Andrea) manage to determine that there’s a big drug deal going down between the the opposing gangs that very day. The short timeframe means that the team will have to handle the takedown by themselves in a place that will be very familiar to fans of the Duttonverse: The Zone of Death.

Known in Yellowstone as “the train station,” and first introduced under its ominous official name in the prequel 1923, the Zone of Death is a secret spot (based on a real location!) at the Wyoming/Montana border where the lack of legal jurisdiction allowed the Duttons to quietly dispose of the bodies of their enemies… including, by the end of the flagship series, that of Kayce’s aforementioned “missing” brother, Jamie. Cue the dramatic music!

Hard to Turn the Page

The team heads off to take down the cartel deal, but before they leave, Belle’s husband and young son pay a surprise visit to HQ. Belle apologizes to Calvin, saying it won’t happen again, but he argues that she should let them come, saying if he had been there for his family more, he’d still have them. Belle admits that she’s still adjusting to normal life after working undercover for the DEA, and that she hadn’t told her husband that she had been shot (in her bulletproof vest) on their previous mission. Calvin warns her about building walls between herself and the people she loves, but she argues, “They’re not walls, they’re shields.”

Elsewhere, Andrea has clocked that Kayce’s feeling weird about the Zone of Death and not so subtly implies that he knows where Jamie is. As fans of Yellowstone will remember, Jamie is very dead, but as far as most of the characters of Marshals know, he’s just on the run after being linked to the murder of his adopted father, John Dutton—which poses a potential problem for Kayce should anyone on the team somehow stumble across his body, or the many others the family has dumped in the Zone of Death over the years.

It’s a possibility that seems increasingly likely as Andrea refuses to drop the idea that the Zone of Death might live up to its name, but fortunately for Kayce, a bunch of guys in SUVs show up for the drug deal and derails her curiosity.

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Sonja Flemming

Nothing goes as planned, of course, as it turns out the cartel is trading a bomb for the drugs instead of money, Belle winds up forced to hide under a cartel truck amidst the deal and Miles, who is supposed to be covering her, gets sidetracked by a rattlesnake. (This plays somewhat confusingly in the episode, though Miles later explains it is considered a bad omen among his people to kill a rattler—unclear if it’s also a bad omen to respond on your radio in front of one, but whatever.)

Kayce insists on jumping into the fray, convincing Calvin by saying that if he doesn’t act “it will be Roner all over.” The dig seems to be pointed at something in their SEAL history, presumably a team member who died, but we’ll have to wait until later in the season for more details.

Kayce goes full Kayce, rushing in, tossing the rattlesnake into a bush with his bare hand, and kicking off a gun fight, only to ride off on horseback as the men with the bomb escape. Considering he’s chasing two speeding SUVs on a horse, he does an impressive job of it, not only catching up to them, but managing to shoot the bomb inside of the vehicle, blowing it sky high. (Is this the way bombs work?)

One of the men from the vehicle crawls free, scorched and pierced by shrapnel. “I’m dying,” he gasps from where he lays in the dirt. “No, you’re already dead,” Kayce says, telling him it will be a long and slow death. The man says it doesn’t have to be, tacitly asking Kayce to end his suffering, which he does with two bullets to the head.

Now, if you’re thinking that Kayce’s going to be forced into faking the scene to make it look as if the criminal threatened him in order to justify this shooting (on his first day on the job, no less!) you’re not thinking like a Dutton. As the saying goes, ‘to the man with a hammer every problem is a nail’, and to a Dutton, every dead body is to be dumped at the Train Station. What’s a convenient corpse-disposal locale for, after all?

New Guy No More

Having successfully(?) completed their mission, the team reconvenes at HQ for some camaraderie. Calvin wonders where the missing Arayn Brotherhood member from the SUV could have gotten to, to which Kayce shrugs, “Zone of Death, I guess.”

Miles then presents him with a non-alcoholic beer (I can’t recall either show ever dealing with Kayce having a drinking problem, but the pointed way they mention it seems to imply that he’s sober—good for him) with a Marshals star in it that he’s meant to chug as part of his official induction into the team. Miles may regret that later, when he privately admits to Kayce that he’s still thinking about the man he killed last episode, and Kayce’s pep talk is to say that this job may not be for him, but that’s okay. Calvin also catches up to Kayce to call the “Roner” call-out a low blow.

Sonja Flemming

Harry waylays Calvin and Andrea to congratulate them. Calvin gives Kayce all the credit, but Andrea points out that he was insubordinate and overruled Calvin at the scene. Harry shares his suspicion that Kayce may have joined the team in order to help Jamie evade capture, so expect that hanging plotline from the Yellowstone finale to continue to be a thread this season.

Elsewhere, Calvin and Andrea have a discussion about how she feels that she deserved the credit that he gave Kayce, because it was her contacts who discovered the plans for the drug deal in the first place. Calvin accuses her of only caring about the credit in order to leave them and rejoin her old team, but then Andrea goes off to kiss a cowboy on the other side of the bar. Good talk.

Calvin briefly flirts with Maddie, the bartender who seems certain to be a returning presence, then Belle arrives saying she needs a buffer zone before she goes home to her husband and son, and settles in for a drink with him.

Finally home (this was a very eventful first day of work!) Kayce checks in with Tate, who says he didn’t get the new start he was hoping for. Kayce comforts him that it will come when the time is right, after which Tate reveals that he went and saw his maternal grandfather. He wants them to honor Tate’s mom, Monica—who died offscreen of cancer between Yellowstone and Marshals—at an upcoming remembrance ceremony, and wants them to bring her favorite necklace. Kayce says he’ll look around for it, but when he steps out onto the porch, he reveals he’s been carrying it around in his breast pocket the entire time.

Odds & Ends -

The brief scenes revolving around Tate have him looking forward to a new start, just like Kayce, but it’s never clear from the episode what exactly this would entail. A new school? Some other big change? I’ve got nothing for you.

There’s a weird interlude in this episode where Kayce and Calvin go to chase down a renegade stallion at Kayce’s ranch. (Aren’t the guys Rip recruited for him supposed to handle these things?) It seems tailor made as a metaphor for Kayce being unable to be penned in etc., but all that really comes of it is a few seconds of Kayce lassoing the horse with background music suggesting this is a much more dramatic action sequence than it really looks like. In an episode with multiple shootouts, I’m not really sure what to make of that… I guess maybe they just wanted to show off Luke Grimes’s cowboy skills?

In case you were worried that product placement was exclusive to Yellowstone, a neon sign for 6666 Grit & Glory (the beer and canned cocktail brand from Yellowstone creator Taylor Sheridan’s 6666 ranch) appears prominently in the bar toward the end of the episode.

I’m calling it now: Belle and Calvin are going to have a romance before the end of the season.

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Source: “AOL Entertainment”