As we wend our way closer to the mid-point ofMarshals's 13-episodefirst seasonthe stakes are only getting higher for Montana's favorite U.S. Marshal team. Iflast week's outingwas all about character building, this week, the work is front and center as Kayce and the squad take on a topical case that has emotions running high.
Here's what happened on this week's episode ofMarshals:
Hope is a knife that cuts two ways
Last week's episode saw the Marshals team divided, and while there are nominally two cases this week, after their shared camaraderie last time, the squad is (mostly) back on the same page and covering one another's backs.
As the title "Lost Girls" suggests, the primary case this week centers on teen girls who have gone missing from the Broken Rock reservation—a nod to the real life tragedy of the disproportionate number of Indigenous women who go missing each year.
Kayce stumbles his way into the case when—following an incident with Tate getting injured—Kayce attempts to sell the temperamental mustang that once belonged to his late wife, Monica. Tate (he's back!) disapproves of the sale, feeling connected to his mother through the horse, but it winds up not mattering, because the surly equine bites his would-be buyer, who cancels the purchase. On the drive back from the failed transaction, Tate sees a girl he knows from the reservation school, Hailey, at a gas station, and her cagey behavior immediately catches his attention. At Marshals HQ, Kayce quickly discovers that Hailey was reported missing weeks ago and may have been trafficked; the team is immediately in favor of looking into it.
Unfortunately, Cal informs them they've been assigned to protect a witness in a federal fraud case (more on that in a moment) but Kayce and Miles convince him to let them have an unofficial chat with Hailey's mom anyway. There they learn that Hailey's not the only girl from the reservation that's gone missing in recent months—in fact, Miles worked on the case of another girl, Ava, when he was a res cop.
The mothers beg Kayce and Miles not to give up on this case, but Broken Rock chairman Thomas Rainwater has a different take. Showing up with his righthand man, Mo, Rainwater points out to Kayce that, since the marshals haven't officially been invited onto the case by the reservation police, he and Miles are here unofficially, and that the government has a long history of writing girls like Hailey and Ava off as runaways. He warns that Kayce and Miles's bosses will never let them get involved, and that by coming here they've only given the mothers false hope.
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Warm weather scams
While Miles and Kayce deal with things on the reservation, Cal, Andrea, and Belle are on witness duty, and no one is happy about it. The witness in question is a cocky lowlife named Lachance, who's taking advantage of a "pocket change" federal case to order room service steak at a hotel and get sent to Hawaii in the witness protection program. While dealing with his annoying antics, the women keep quietly working on the case of the missing girls behind Cal's back (making me question Cal's detective skills.) They're able to track down some information on the man they think catfished Hailey and Ava and send Kayce and Miles to a place they think he can be found.
After giving federal agents a false tip that Lachance plans to commit more crimes in Hawaii, thus getting him banished to witness protection in a colder, more miserable locale, the marshal trio returns to HQ where Rainwater is waiting. The tribal leader swallows his pride and asks Cal to get the marshals involved officially, and the women reveal that (surprise!) they've been on it the whole time, and, using some information that Kayce and Miles beat out of the catfisher (on-theme, fishhooks are involved) have found the name of the man they think is behind the trafficking scheme: Bledsoe.
Hope is contagious
After turning over the catfisher to Mo for what I'm sure will bea very stern talking to(see: Odds & Ends) Kayce and Miles head back to the gas station to look for Bledsoe, whose alias just bought gas there. Kayce immediately finds Hailey (did anyone consider going back there before??) However, Hailey refuses to go with him, saying that Bledsoe is trafficking 9 other girls as well and if she escapes, he'll kill them—a fact she knows because he previously killed Ava.
Kayce agrees to let her go, earning the wrath of Miles, who blames himself for not being able to save Ava. Hailey did give them a lead though, telling them about a place with trees where Bledsoe also takes the girls. The team determine the trees are a logo and with CCTV are able to pinpoint a camper van that Bledsoe must be using to drive the girls around.
The team takes off after the camper, trailing it to a deserted stretch of road. While Cal insists that they should tail them at a distance to discover where they're going, an enraged Miles refuses to slow down, alerting the men in the camper, who fire at the marshals. With some coordinated driving, they manage to bring the camper to a halt and dispatch the traffickers, only to discover that the girls aren't in the camper at all.
And with that, we come to perhaps the most brutal ending to an episode ofMarshalsso far—a title card saying "TO BE CONTINUED."
Odds & Ends
"The only way left in this world to hurt me is through you, son," Kayce tells Tate at the beginning of this episode. I'm certain that won't prove portentous in any way as the season goes on.
If I have nightmares about getting a fishhook stuck in my face, I'm taking it up with this show.
In keeping with Yellowstone's history, Marshals stands on complicated moral footing. In the five episodes of this season so far, we've seen Kayce shoot multiple people in the line of duty, straight-forwardly murder a (albeit dying) man and dump his body, and turn a man over to Mo for some amorphous-but-deadly-seeming vengeance. I'm not sure what point, if any, the show is trying to make about that yet, but it's definitely… complicated.
The idea of a remembrance service for Monica on the reservation has been floated for several episodes now. This episode seems to imply that it might be happening simultaneously with the case, but it's a little vague—maybe we'll see it (and Tate's heretofore unseen grandfather) next week.
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