“I told Garrett East Camp would save him – instead, it put him in the ground.” The death of Double-G in Marshals Episode 11 was tragic, but it seems to have opened something inside Kayce Dutton. He’s cleaning up what’s left of the barn after the fire, with help from Cal, Dolly, and Tom Weaver, but his attitude toward the place has changed. This land has seen so much it was not supposed to. Garrett’s heroics to save the horses ended up taking him. Monica, sick with cancer, died at East Camp. And where he once threw Weaver’s purchase offer back in his face, now he’s more receptive, if you can allow the significance of a cowboy’s slight raised eyebrow. Tate Dutton has reappeared, and it’s been so long since we’ve seen him on Marshals, it feels like actor Brecken Merrill grew five inches. But he also senses Kayce’s restlessness. “Home isn’t about land for me, Dad. It’s wherever you are.” 

This is Episode 12 of Marshals (“The Devil at Home”), and while it has been renewed, there is only one ep left in the first season. This does not mean there aren’t new problems. Sabrina (Chelsea Gray), Miles’s childhood pal from Broken Rock, has died of a fentanyl overdose. The reservation had enough trouble, with Thomas Rainwater fighting the federal government’s mining policies, cancer in the soil, and human trafficking rings. But now the Jalisco drug cartel is operating at Broken Rock. The initial Jock Up op, to apprehend a carjacker spotted in the area, blows wide open when he’s caught with a car full of drug money and enough fentanyl to kill everybody on the rez. 

At first, big boss Gifford sees this as an opportunity for the marshals. “Carve into it,” he orders Cal; “give me something juicy for DC.” But just as quickly he changes his tune, and takes the team off of it. Maybe Gifford should have thought about stepping on the DEA’s toes before he pictured promotions and funding windfalls. Anyway, Miles Kittle isn’t listening. The former reservation policeman who feels he should have done more for his friend goes rogue, rips the US Marshals patch off his tactical vest, and drives his personal vehicle into Broken Rock, where a group of cartel guys are doing a deal. Driven by range justice, he’s ignoring his own safety, and the team arrives just in time to rescue him from being shot and killed. With the tables turned, Miles now has the cartel operative responsible for poisoning Sabrina dead to rights. 

“He definitely earned that bullet you’re about to send him,” Kayce calls from nearby. But he recalls their first op together, when he told Miles killing someone can’t be undone. And while this works, with Miles and the team taking the surviving cartel members into custody, the rogue action gets Miles suspended from Team Jock Up. It’s the old “I want your badge and your gun” moment, and Pete Calvin says nothing as his angry deputy slams down his shield and stalks out of headquarters. Protocol or not, Gifford’s grandstanding – who cares. They should have done more for the people of Broken Rock.

Is Team Jock Up hauling headlong toward Team Break Up? Miles is only suspended, but he seems super disillusioned. And speaking of Gifford, he also pulls his “favorite marshal” aside and offers Andrea Cruz a position in the Washington, DC office. The New Yorker always framed her time in Montana as a temporary penance – “My cowboy ways are what got me sent here” – but we’ve all seen her bond with the team, and even without her brief romance with Garrett, Cruz seemed to come around to life in Montana. When Gifford says the spot in DC is hers if she wants it, she readily nods. 

Kayce is standing on the East Camp porch, in the same spot where he sold the Yellowstone, when Dolly and Tom Weaver arrive. Getting coffee with Dolly a few days before, he told her everything in his life was always done out of a sense of duty. His own desires, what he wants for himself, those were foreign concepts. And besides, everything he truly ever wanted died with Monica. When Weaver removes his cowboy hat, he looks exactly like the hedge fund/high finance guy from Back East that he actually still is, and the guy can’t contain his excitement over Kayce calling about the offer. He is respectful, though; he learned from the first time. And Weaver says any new sale of East Camp would not be at the same “19th century prices.” Kayce references John Dutton, everything his father sacrificed to steward the Yellowstone, and just seems to be kind of over doing the same for a ranch where tragedy has become its shadow. 

“What would a deal for East Camp look like? Walk me through it.”

Kayce Taykes for Episode 12 of Marshals (“The Devil at Home”): 

• This episode of Marshals makes a very weird detour. As Gifford brings Cruz with him to view a prototype electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicle (eVTOL), it even has the real-life CEO who built the thing, Adam Goldstein, appear in this scene. The whole bit feels dropped in from a corporate sponsorship deal somewhere. 

• Belle – or Isabel Turek, as she is known at the casino – is underwater with gambling debt. $20,000, which she doesn’t have, and now she’s up against it, because this will pop on the US Marshals security clearance she is required to renew.  

• And as if there wasn’t more adversity going into the Marshals Season 1 finale, Pete Calvin comes clean with Belle about his diagnosis. It is a Pancoast tumor, lodged at the top of a lung, that is causing his neck and shoulder pain. All he asks from Belle is to sit with him a minute. The tumor is a symptom of cancer, and Petel is terrified. 

Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social) is a Chicago-based writer. A veteran of the alternative weekly trenches, his work has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork, The All Music Guide, and The Village Voice.