Kayce Dutton (Luke Grimes) is BACK.
Marshals, the latest Yellowstone spinoff series officially premiered tonight on CBS, and while I won’t get into too many spoilers regarding the plot, I will confirm what most of us who have been paying attention to the promo materials already knew… Monica Dutton, who was played by Kelsea Asbille in Yellowstone, is dead.
Of course, none of this is a shock as she was nowhere to be found in the cast list, nowhere to be found in any media leading up, and she was nowhere to found in the trailer… except for a dark silhouette of Kayce by a headstone and near what appeared to be a body under a sheet.
The opening scene of Marshals, we see Kayce awake from a frightening dream where he is screaming for Monica, our first clue that she’s gone. His son Tate, played by Brecken Merrill, makes an early appearance, but it’s clear that Monica, for whatever reason, is no longer part of the picture.
Finally, it’s revealed that she passed away when Kayce goes to visit her headstone.
He tells Tate she “suffered” and that “the only thing more cruel than losing a parent, is losing the wrong one,” so we’re led to believe that she succumbed to some kind of debilitating disease like cancer, or possibly something like Alzheimer’s, MS, or Parkinson’s. She did suffer a traumatic brain injury in Yellowstone and was hospitalized for a while, but there was no indication in the new Marshals debut that it could be related. Later on at the Reservation, where Gil Birmingham and Mo Brings Plenty reprise their roles, we hear that Kayce hasn’t been back to the reservation since Monica’s funeral.
Of course, for this storyline to continue in the way it is… Kayce leaving his quiet family life to return to a life of danger and stress in the US Marshals, something crazy must have happened. He spent all of Yellowstone running from that violence, and finally settled down in the series finale. I’m curious if the plan was to try and get Kelsea back, and when they couldn’t, Taylor Sheridan and Spencer Hudnut decided to kill her off. Or was it “Sorry Kelsey, we gotta kill you to run with this new spinoff idea.” I would love to know…
But during a recent interview with ExtraTV, Grimes pretty much confirmed that the show will start with the loss of Monica, as many suspected based on the first trailer, explaining that we find him “at a really low point” that is “worst case scenario”:
“We find him at a really low point. Kind of worst case scenario, actually. Kind of the worst thing that could happen to him has happened, and it’s sort like picking up the pieces and where does he go from there.
I think faced with something like that, you’ve only got a couple of choices, you know. One, you can completely fall apart, and live in despair, or you make a huge change and you keep fighting and you try something new, and he decides to do the ladder.”
Grimes also talked about being hesitant to sign onto Marshals at first because he loved how Kayce’s story ended in the original Yellowstone series, because he got everything he wanted while also managing to get out from under weight of the Dutton name when they finally sell the ranch:
“I was kind of hesitant, you know, because I just loved the way Kayce’s story ended in the original show. I thought it was the perfect ending, and he got everything he had been fighting for, which is a much simpler life out from under the weight of all these things that have been in his family for years, and he got his life with his family. And clearly, that’s no longer an option when we see him here.”
To be fair, it was a great ending for Kayce, but if we’re gonna get full throttle, high octane, a** kicking Kayce Dutton action for a whole series, I’m glad he’s back. All of my favorite scenes of Yellowstone were the ones where Kayce was busting out the Navy SEAL training, and it sounds like Marshals is poised to be a whole bunch of exactly that. Even the first episode, for having to lay some groundwork, was pretty action-packed.
If you missed the premiere tonight, you can stream it on demand on DIRECTV, or you can stream in starting tomorrow on Paramount+. Check out the new trailer below:
