With its fifth episode (“Lost Girls”), Marshals finally builds some momentum. For Kayce Dutton, plus his Team Jock Up marshals crew. And it’s a two-parter, so hopefully the series keeps this energy rolling. Unlike recent outings, this ep isn’t picking up Yellowstone’s hat, wearing it around for awhile, and learning it doesn’t fit. Instead, and more effectively, it channels Past TV ghosts through Monica, whose spirit seems to provide a little guidance for the Dutton boys.
We’ve already caught a few instances with Monica’s mustang. Beautiful and strong, the horse has been breaking through corral fences at East Camp since Marshals began. And while he has tried a calm hand, the animal’s unruly nature also speaks to Kayce – torments him – as a highlight of what they lost when Monica passed. The horse was hers, and would only let her ride. Now its wild streak is like the grief and loss Kayce can’t contain within himself. When Tate Dutton hurts his arm trying to connect with the mustang, his dad says the horse is moving on. “It’s time for his own new beginning.” But Tate says selling the animal is just Kayce trying for erasure, which is easier than dealing with the pain.
Here’s the thing, though. If they’d never driven the big Ram and horse trailer out to Wyoming looking for a buyer, they never would have run into Haley, a girl from Tate’s middle school on the Black Rock Reservation. She appears randomly from among the big rigs at a truck stop, and Tate notes she seems distracted and not herself. Kayce brings this up back at team HQ, and it turns out Haley went missing from the rez four months before. Hers is part of a pattern of disappearances that have plagued Broken Rock, which Miles investigated as a member of the tribal police force. But with limited resources, and indifference from state and federal law enforcement, the girls stayed missing.
We don’t know why Marshals still won’t let the team it built act as one. But Jock Up is split again as Kayce and Miles head to the rez and Calvin, Belle, and Cruz run protection duty for a mouthy federal witness. They’re loitering inside this guy’s staycation, as he eats steak dinners in a hotel room, waiting for an escort to the trial in Helena where he will testify. And Belle and Cruz agree with us. Why are these federal marshals acting as hand-holders when they could be throwing much needed light on the case of vulnerable girls being trafficked?
At Broken Rock, Kayce learns that Monica was an advocate for the missing, and he promises the mothers of the disappeared that he will find their daughters. His local knowledge also comes in handy, because from posts on the girls’ social media, he recognizes the fishing hole where they were lured by a lowlife. Kayce tosses his federal badge in the glove box. “I’m not a marshal – I’m a dad looking for his son’s friend.” And he’ll toss a tackle box at whoever gets in his way.
That guy gives up the name of his trafficker boss, and with the team full again, they search arrest records and license plate readers to locate the ringleader, who’s been moving the kidnapped Indian girls through truck stops using a broken-down old RV. Kayce also extends his little badge-less extrajudicial sojourn. Instead of arresting the tackle box goon, he delivers him to an ally. “You preyed on the rez,” Mo says as they stuff the guy in a trunk. “Now the rez is gonna prey on you.”
Once they had a target, Miles was gung-ho to get after the traffickers and locate the missing Broken Rock girls. But when Kayce actually saw Haley during an ensuing truck stop search, he had to let her go. She told him her captors would kill the other girls if she fled. Which makes sense in that moment, but Miles is still hugely pissed at Kayce. They had a chance to deliver on the hope they brought to the parents on the rez. But the girls remain just as missing as they ever were.
Maybe not for long. Another traffic camera search, and this time, the RV is located, hauling ass down a highway not far from marshals HQ. The team gears up, heads out, and soon has a visual. And though Calvin orders him to stay back, Miles, keyed-up, accelerates the marshals’ SUV til they’re alongside the traffickers. Firing AR-15s from truck windows at 55 miles-per-hour, while the innocents you’re trying to rescue could be inside, seems ill-advised.
Nevertheless, the momentum of this episode of Marshals has finally brought Team Jock Up together. After they deploy spike strips to stop the RV its doors fly open and the kidnappers come out firing. And while Calvin smokes the driver, Kayce, Miles, and Cruz advance on the passenger side door. With all the bad guys down, they enter the vehicle. “Kayce! Sit-rep!” But the camper is otherwise empty. The lost girls will stay lost for now. “We missed ‘em,” a frustrated Kayce says into his radio, and the look his teammate gives him is the coldest one on the planet. Miles might be more mad at Kayce than Monica’s mustang will ever be.
To Be Continued.
Kayce Taykes for Marshals Episode 5 (“Lost Girls”):
- Sheridan-O-Verse easter egg! “I’m gonna call Travis, see if he can find a home for this bronc.” The “Travis” Kayce is talking about is of course Travis Wheatley, horseman extraordinaire and a character played in Yellowstone by Sheridan himself. Remember Bella Hadid rocking a cowboy hat as Travis’s girlfriend?
- Cruz mentions that she rents her place in Bozeman “for a quarter of what I paid in Washington, DC.” Notably, in real life, the Montana mountain town saw rental rates skyrocket during and after the pandemic, as digital nomads and people moving from the coasts – like Deputy US Marshal Andrea Cruz – took all the available real estate.
- Ash Santos also keeps injecting life into her character with cool Cruz line reads. So the trafficker they’re after is a “fully formed POS,” and the nickname she first put on Kayce has immediately stuck. Cruz, deadpan, ‘cause it isn’t: “Treading lightly is Cowboy’s specialty.”
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.