Two besties out riding horses in Montana’s great wide open. Is there anything better? “Damn, Kyo – a few more doses of this, and maybe I wouldn’t have to get pumped full of poison.” Pete Calvin shared his cancer diagnosis with Team Jock Up. Now he must face it within himself. Problem is, he’s conflating “within himself” with “by himself.”
In Episode 3 of Marshals Season 2 on CBS and Paramount+, Cal still thinks he can One Man Army his way out of this. Even with his best friend in life and battle beside him, a friend intimate with cancer’s destruction. “Yeah,” Kayce says from his saddle, “that first chemo blast is a bitch. Let me wingman you.” In the part of Kayce’s life we didn’t see, between Yellowstone ending and Marshals beginning, he wingmanned his late wife Monica through her diagnosis and treatment. The cowboy tells Cal he’s spent enough time in those spaces to understand how they can crush souls.
But Cal doesn’t budge. Stubbornness is a support beam in the SEAL Warrior Code. “I survived Hell Week,” he says with a dismissive wave. “I can stand sitting in a chair solo.” Alright, buddy, but we can all see the hesitance and fear in your eyes.
And Kayce’s got a more immediate stubbornness problem. While riding East Camp, he also discovers Tate shooting targets on a makeshift pistol range. The damage to their land, their shot-up cabin – these things are fixable. Trying to reach a teen with battle scars? Kayce can’t find the access point, and other than Tate’s One Man Army statements of his own – “What happened stays where it is,” which might as well be a bullet point in the Dutton Handbook for Life – the kid clams up.
It’s a fact of the Sheridan-O-Verse. If you see a lone wild animal, you are that animal. Usually it’s a wolf, but in this episode, Kayce sees a buffalo while searching the space beneath his hat for a way to reach Tate. Mo Brings Plenty helps him interpret. A buffalo symbolizes self-sacrifice, Mo says, but Kayce already lost everything, except Tate. “So the buffalo could be here to make you confront your shame, spur you to take action.” And we all know how much symbolism and the wisdom of the Broken Rock People – Monica’s people – speaks to Kayce.
Mo is in the mix because of more trouble on the Broken Rock reservation, where Thomas Rainwater’s haters just won’t quit. The chairman was already trying to tamp down the mining rights issues; he’s got a new faction pushing for cannabis farming; and now his policy to allow the US Air Force to conduct drone tests on rez land is under fire. Literally: young men are shooting at the buzzing things as they fly, a sequence Marshals renders with the same Drone POV as the opening of Lioness Season 3.
At HQ, a stuffy Air Force colonel pushes this problem onto the Marshals. The tests are part of a federal contract with Gavin Escher (Callan McAuliffe), a sniveling tech bro who immediately insults Cal and Kayce’s military service as well as the entire team, which means Jock Up will have to serve warrants on the reservation to “domestic terrorists.” It’s a bullshit op that reeks of government overreach and bureaucracy, makes Miles Kittle mad again about his straddling the line between the Marshals Service and his heritage, and puts Cal in the position of having to rally his people to placate his bosses.
The operation comes down to corralling two young men who shot at the drones in a disused community center. But when the team arrives, they’re fired on by professionals, who even toss flash-bang grenades. Miles gets past his anger by becoming the hero of the day, drawing fire while Kayce, Cal, Belle, and Cruz close on the assailants. And whaddya know, it’s not the locals smeared as terrorists stirring up trouble. Gavin Escher hired mercenaries to agitate this static, pin it on Broken Rock community unrest, and keep that sweet R&D money flowing to Horus Avionics, his defense-tech company.
Marshals loves mercenaries. We don’t see Escher again this episode, but we wonder if his introduction means more regional villainy, now that Tom Weaver and his private army have been vanquished.
“I’m not your son, and I don’t need helicopter friending.” Damn, Pete Calvin! Your denials to Belle sound a lot like the lashing out of an angry romantic partner. These two have chemistry even when they argue about the romance they are not engaging with.
Pete’s long solo walk through the oncology center is as powerful as the understated way Logan Marshall-Green has played Cal’s raging emotions against his outward Warrior Man displays. A nurse guides him to the medical recliner and chemotherapy machines, and all Pete looks to his left and right, where his teammates might have been. Unlike the patients around him, he has no one, because he told everybody who cares about him he didn’t need their help. Cal is looking at his lone wingman, the comically oversized water flask, realizing he was a fool, when somebody slams a deck of cards onto the table. “You are not facing this alone, Peter Calvin.” Belle!
No one man is an army, and nobody should face their trauma alone, even when they can’t put it into words. Kayce Dutton took what Mo said to heart, and that lone buffalo’s stance in the valley out at East Camp. At the cabin, as Tate rejects his tentative forays into college visits (Tate scores a cutting teenage line when Kayce says it’s what Monica would have wanted: “You really gonna guilt me with that?”), this Dutton Dad makes his boldest play yet in the raising of the stalwart fam’s next generation.
“Get some sleep,” Kayce tells his son. “Because tomorrow, you’re going to therapy. It’s the last place my father would’ve taken me, and the last place I would’ve gone myself.” But after all the violence that has occurred, after Monica’s heartbreaking passing, after Kayce’s communion with the lone buffalo, he has realized that a real warrior can ask for help. We hope Tate can, too.
Kayce Taykes for Marshals Season 2 Episode 3 (“Falling Sky”):
- Another battle is brewing within Andrea Cruz. She has pledged to stay with Jock Up, and is even looking for a more permanent place to live in Montana. But she is dogged by harsh flashbacks to the experience of being held captive by Randall Clegg and his gang of white supremacist killers. The PTSD has Cruz sleeping on a couch in the office, while telling everybody she’s just fine.
- Pete tells Kayce his doctors believe the cancer is a result of exposure to burn pits while deployed in Afghanistan. “We thought those demons in our heads were the only party favor…”
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.