As Luke Grimes‘ Kayce Dutton attempts to get himself out of the frying pan on this week’s Marshals, he has somehow found himself tossed straight into the fire. “Playing with Fire” concludes with Kayce caught up between his past and his present, hoping to bury one while preserving the other. But that may not prove possible depending on how the CBS drama plays out. In a week full of intersecting plotlines and overdue reveals, Marshals has put Kayce in a corner, and what the Yellowstone star does next will decide his fate as a lawman going forward.
‘Marshals’ May Finally Be Following Up With Kayce’s Complicated ‘Yellowstone’ Past
“Playing with Fire” ends on an unexpected cliffhanger this week as Kayce hears on the news about an escaped convict named Neil Lamb (Sterling Jones). Instantly recognizing the man, he goes completely off-grid on an unsanctioned mission of his own, traveling into the forest in pursuit of this prisoner that Belle Skinner (Arielle Kebbel) and Andrea Cruz (Ash Santos) had let slip through their fingers in the prison bus crash. But things go quickly from bad to worse when, as it turns out, we discover that Lamb bears the same “Y” brand that Kayce does — meaning that he too was once privy to the happenings at the now-defunct Yellowstone Dutton Ranch. While Lamb is a new character created just for Marshals (he never once appeared on Yellowstone), he represents the same troublesome upbringing and Dutton-style of cowboying that Kayce is haunted by whenever he looks at his bare chest in the mirror. But while this reunion already presents us with a saddle full of questions, things go further south of the border when Lamb reveals that he plans to expose the Dutton family’s secrets in exchange for a lighter prison sentence. Not a good day to be Kayce.
Collider Exclusive · Taylor Sheridan Universe Quiz Which Taylor Sheridan Show Do You Belong In? Yellowstone · Landman · Tulsa King · Mayor of Kingstown
Four worlds. All of them brutal, complicated, and built on power, loyalty, and the price of survival. Taylor Sheridan doesn’t write heroes — he writes people who do what they have to do and live with the cost. Ten questions will reveal which one of his worlds you were made for.
🤠Yellowstone
🛢️Landman
👑Tulsa King
⚖️Mayor of Kingstown
01
Where does your power come from? In Sheridan’s world, everyone has leverage. The question is what kind.
02
Who do you put first, no matter what? Loyalty in Sheridan’s universe is always absolute — and always costly.
03
Someone crosses a line. How do you respond? Every Sheridan protagonist has a line. What matters is what happens after it’s crossed.
04
Where do you feel most in your element? Sheridan’s worlds are as much about place as they are about people.
05
How do you feel about operating in the grey? Nobody in a Sheridan show has clean hands. The question is how they carry the dirt.
06
What are you actually fighting to hold onto? Every Sheridan character is fighting a war. The real question is what they’re defending.
07
How do you lead? Authority in Sheridan’s world is never given — it’s established, maintained, and constantly tested.
08
Someone new arrives and tries to change how things work. Your reaction? Every Sheridan show has an outsider disrupting an established order. Sometimes that outsider is you.
09
What has your position cost you? Nobody gets to where these characters are without paying for it. The bill is always personal.
10
When it’s over, what do you want people to say? Sheridan’s characters all know the ending is coming. The question is what they leave behind.
Sheridan Has Spoken You Belong In…
The show that claimed the most of your answers is the world you were built for. If two tied, both are shown — you’re complicated enough to straddle two Sheridan universes.
🤠 Yellowstone
🛢️ Landman
👑 Tulsa King
⚖️ Mayor of Kingstown
You are a Dutton — or you might as well be. You understand that some things are worth protecting at any cost, and that the modern world’s indifference to history, to land, to legacy, is not something you’re willing to accept quietly. You lead from the front, you carry your family’s weight without complaint, and when someone threatens what’s yours, you don’t escalate — you finish it. You’re not cruel. But you are absolute. In Yellowstone’s world, that combination of ferocity and loyalty doesn’t make you a villain. It makes you the only thing standing between everything that matters and everyone who wants to take it.
You thrive in the chaos of high-stakes negotiation, where the money is enormous, the margins are thin, and the wrong word in the wrong room can cost everyone everything. You’re a fixer — the person called when a situation is already on fire and needs someone with the nerve to walk into it. West Texas oil country rewards exactly what you are: sharp, adaptable, unsentimental, and absolutely clear-eyed about what people want and what they’ll do to get it. You’re not naive enough to think this world is fair. You’re smart enough to be the one deciding who it’s fair to.
You are a Dwight Manfredi — someone who has served their time, paid their dues, and arrived somewhere unexpected with nothing but their reputation and their wits. You adapt without losing yourself. You build loyalty through respect rather than fear, though you’re not above reminding people that the two aren’t mutually exclusive. Tulsa King is for people who are still standing when everyone assumed they’d be finished — who find, in an unfamiliar place, that they’re more capable than the world gave them credit for. You don’t need a throne. You build one, wherever you happen to land.
You carry the weight of a system that is broken by design, and you do it anyway — because someone has to, and because you’re the only one positioned to do it without the whole thing collapsing. Mike McLusky’s world is for people who are comfortable operating where there are no good options, only less catastrophic ones. You speak every language: law enforcement, criminal, political, human. That fluency makes you invaluable and it makes you a target. You’ve made your peace with both. Mayor of Kingstown belongs to people who understand that keeping the peace is not the same as being at peace — and who do the job regardless.
With his father, John Dutton (Kevin Costner), and brother, Jamie (Wes Bentley), dead as a result of Yellowstone‘s final season, and his sister Beth (Kelly Reilly) doing her own thing down in Texas on the soon-to-premiere Dutton Ranch, Kayce is the only Montana branch of that tree left to take the blame. Not only would Lamb’s admission of the Dutton family’s crimes ruin the life that Kayce and Tate (Brecken Merrill) have built for themselves at East Camp, but it would likely bar him from ever working in law enforcement again. And just when Kayce finally found a purpose… Of course, things get even more complicated for Kayce when Pete “Cal” Calvin (Logan Marshall-Green) arrives just in time to see Kayce leading Lamb away at gunpoint, with the episode ending before we discover what happens next. There’s no way that Kayce will be able to kill Lamb and hide his body now, at least not without Cal being on the hook as a potential accomplice.
Luke Grimes leads the charge in this Dutton-verse sequel that is full of network potential.
Although fans knew better than to expect Marshals to be the next Yellowstone, many hoped that fallout from the original Paramount series would spill over into the new CBS drama. Given that Kayce got away from the ranch scot-free in the Yellowstone series finale, the whole thing seemed too good to be true. Now, Kayce is between a rock and a hard place, and we’re glad that the neo-Western procedural finally got there. Though the Dutton heir narrowly avoided contact with the “Train Station” back in “Zone of Death,” and he has seemingly taken out the Dutton’s old rivals, the Cleggs, his family’s sins (which are also his own) have finally come back to haunt him. If anything, Marshals seems to be leaning more and more into its Yellowstone connections, hoping to genuinely continue the narrative that the original series left behind rather than spin off from it. Right now, it’s a bit of a toss-up if it will land, but the fact that it isn’t ignoring the potential legal consequences that Kayce might face for being complicit in his father’s schemes is certainly a welcome change.
Will ‘Marshals’ Be Able To Live Up to What ‘Yellowstone’ Left Behind?
This, then, begs the question of whether Marshals can really live up to Yellowstone. Although I noted in my review for the series premiere that Marshals certainly has the potential to be something great, the frustrating writing and overall procedural tone have been a hard turnoff for many. While the weekly format fits Kayce well, the CBS continuation has struggled to live up to the high standard of the original Taylor Sheridan series, especially in light of what we’ve seen thus far from Paramount+’s Dutton Ranch, which appears to recapture the same muscular, tough-as-nails tone. This isn’t to say that Marshals can’t get there, but perhaps paring down the main cast and focusing more on Kayce’s attempts to redeem his past could be the way to solve the problems many audiences have with the series. Indeed, it’s entirely possible that “Playing with Fire” is doing just that, hoping to rework Marshals to be more about Kayce and less about the rest of the ensemble.
Wherever this plotline takes Kayce and the rest of his team, digging more into his past and dealing with the loose threads that Yellowstone left behind is probably the best route forward. If Marshals wasn’t going to be a clean break from the Dutton drama of the past, then it needs to address everything that Kayce and his family did — possibly at the risk of his happy ending. Certainly, the show ought to do this by continuing to explore his past as a Navy SEAL, but most importantly by revisiting the horrors on display on Yellowstone.
Marshals airs Sundays on CBS and is available for streaming the next day on Paramount+.
