So Garrett didn’t make it. Marshals opens episode 12, “The Devil at Home,” with the gut punch the back half of season 1 has been building toward: Riley Green’s Double G is dead, oxygen-starved lungs courtesy of last week’s barn fire, and the rest of the hour is everyone else trying not to let his exit be the only body count.
(The following is a recap of episode 12, “The Devil at Home,” and there are spoilers.)
We open at East Camp, where Kayce Dutton (Luke Grimes) and Pete Calvin (Logan Marshall-Green) are sifting through the wreckage of the barn and the wreckage of their friend. Cal floats a Roll Tide flag and a sixer of PBR as a more honest memorial than whatever Tate’s bulldozer-happy grandpa is planning. It lands as one of the few laughs the episode will allow.
Cue Weaver, the Wall Street transplant turned cattle baron, who picked the literal day after Double G’s death to swing by Kayce’s ranch and reopen his offer to buy East Camp. To his credit, he frames it as concern. To Kayce’s credit, he doesn’t immediately knock him into the lumber pile. Weaver’s pitch this time, that maybe a fresh start is what Kayce needs after the fire that just killed his friend, hits with about the subtlety of a real estate ad in a funeral program.
Cut to Belle (Arielle Kebbel) at a coffee shop with her son Braxton, getting cornered by a guy who knows her maiden name, her married name, and the $20,000 she owes a casino. She tells him she’s good for it. He tells her her next visit won’t be this gracious. Insomnia plus crippling credit card debt was already her thing. Now there’s a leg-breaker shadowing her at the kids’ coffee shop.
Out at East Camp, Tate (Brecken Merrill) reminds his dad that even if this place isn’t destiny, it’s still home. Kayce reminds Tate that it’s also where his mom got sick and died. (Monica’s offscreen cancer death has been the running ache under this whole season.) Tate’s response should haunt the rest of the hour: home isn’t about land for me, Dad. It’s wherever you are.
At the bar, Andrea (Ash Santos) is pouring one out for Garrett, the man who was supposed to be her soft place to land before Montana, in her words, screwed that up. (See: her recent kidnapping at the hands of Randall Clegg.) Calvin, in a rare moment of unmurky decency, tells her she’s good with Miles and to enjoy it. She’s not in the mood.
Miles (Tatanka Means) steps outside to take a call we already know is bad news. His childhood friend Sabrina has overdosed. Three days for the news to reach him, and the marshal who saves strangers for a living couldn’t save the woman he grew up next door to.
The case of the week: Cody Raynor, a carjacker wanted for killing a college student in Arkansas, has been spotted at a Livingston apartment complex. The collar goes clean, but the truck doesn’t. Inside a hidey-hole popped open by the crash is roughly a million dollars in cash, and the Glock on Raynor matches a weapon used in a Jalisco vs. Sinaloa shootout in Eagle Pass six months back. This is not a carjacker. This is a courier.
While the others are working the bust, U.S. Marshal Gifford (Brett Cullen) yanks Andrea off the op to parade her in front of visiting DOJ brass who want to meet “the marshal who exhibited such courage under fire.” Translation: gawk at the kidnapping survivor. She has to stand next to a sleek new electric plane-helicopter hybrid called the Midnight while Gifford schmoozes a federal budget out of it. The episode wants you to find this gross, and it is.
Miles tells the team about Sabrina. Cal tells him to take whatever time he needs. Miles does not take whatever time he needs.
Over on Broken Rock, Chairman Thomas Rainwater (Gil Birmingham) is getting publicly knifed by Council Member Irons, who points out three fentanyl deaths on the rez this month, Sabrina included, and asks what exactly the chairman is doing about it. Rainwater’s answer is essentially: Senate testimony next week, eyes on the prize, don’t put on the blinders of vengeance. Irons does not buy it. Frankly, neither does the rest of the episode.
Phone records put Raynor on Broken Rock for weeks. The marshals roll out to a property owned by a 70-something woman with dementia whose niece recently married a Jalisco national named Hector Diaz. The house is empty. The dust says nobody’s lived there in months. The outbuilding tells a different story: enough fentanyl to, as Belle puts it, poison the whole reservation. Raynor wasn’t running from the cartel. He was running for them. The Jaliscos have set up a plaza in Montana.
While they prep the seized cash for a DEA pickup, Cal pulls Belle aside about a red flag from Professional Responsibility. She’s overdue on her security clearance renewal. Belle, who is currently being extorted by a casino enforcer, plays it cool. She is not cool.
Then Raynor turns up stabbed 27 times in a jail cell. DEA Agent Phil Dendry shows up to scoop the file off Harry’s desk, tells the marshals to stay in their lane, and walks off with the cash. Harry, with deep reluctance, stands the team down.
This would be the smart moment to stand down. Miles does not.
A side conversation between Kayce and Dolly, Weaver’s daughter, plants the seed: figure out what you want now, then make a deal that gets you that. Kayce, who has done everything in his life out of duty, admits he doesn’t really know what “want” means.
Then the lab results land. The fentanyl from the rez stash matches the batch that killed Sabrina. Miles puts a heavy bag through its paces and goes silent. By morning, Maddie is at the office asking where the hell her boyfriend is. He stood her up. He’s not answering. Belle tracks his vehicle GPS to a spot deep on Broken Rock, nowhere near Diaz’s house. He’s gone hunting.
The team rolls in to find a full firefight already underway at a cartel compound. Miles has shot-caller Dolfo Guzman flat on the ground and Hector Diaz on his knees with a pistol pointed at his forehead. This is the episode’s center of gravity, and it’s Kayce who walks into it. (Of course it is. He’s been in this exact frame more times than he’s said the word Yellowstone.)
“If you put him down hard,” he tells Miles, “every time you think of Sabrina, his face will be the only thing you can see. Don’t let him rob her memory from you.”
Miles lowers the gun.
Harry, however, is not in a forgiving mood. He pulls Miles into the office, calls the stunt reckless, reminds him that going outside the lines is a road map he himself has warned Miles not to use. Then he takes the man’s badge and his weapon. (For once, Harry makes the unambiguously correct call.)
Gifford finds Andrea on her way out. The DOJ lunch has paid out, he tells her: a spot has opened in the D.C. office. The job is hers if she wants it. Andrea, who spent the morning being trotted out like a war trophy, does not give him an answer.
Cal, meanwhile, finally tells Belle why he’s been ducking the security clearance. The shoulder pain she’s been clocking for episodes isn’t a strain. It’s a Pancoast tumor. Lung cancer.
He confesses that it wasn’t really scary until he said it out loud just now. Belle, who has $20,000 of casino debt and an enforcer breathing down her neck and a credit card that just declined her, immediately starts offering him her husband Jared’s best oncologist. He stops her.
“Right now, I just want to feel like I’m not staring this down alone.”
She tells him he’s not.
The final scene is Kayce on his porch with Weaver and Dolly. He admits the only thing he ever wanted was taken from him. Weaver, who knows a thing or two about losing a wife, tells him a man never gets free until he sheds whatever’s weighing him down. Kayce looks out at the land.
“Walk me through it,” he says.
