“I don’t think any of us really see this coming,” says Logan Marshall-Green of the explosive shock to the US Marshals unit in the Yellowstone spinoff’s first season finale. His Marshals character, the hard-to-know team leader Pete “Cal” Calvin, ends up in grave danger as the bullets fly.
“There’s always a challenge with these firefights and these big set pieces, gunfights,” Marshall-Green says of the action. “But that started to become second nature to Cal, to me, as we move through the season. The thing he has the hardest time doing, is asking for help. He’s taken on this role of team leader in a world that’s not necessarily his [military] world, [but] the Marshal world.”
Everyone will need to step up for each other when the stampede of trouble starts with an assassination attempt on Broken Rock chairman Rainwater (Gil Birmingham), who was first targeted in the series premiere. While Cal and the Marshals race to discover who’s behind it, Kayce (Luke Grimes) goes on protection duty, sticking close to the man he sees as a brother — and discovers the conspiracy is larger than anyone imagined.
Marshall-Green says that the sometimes at-odds Cal and Kayce are better comrades for what they endured in the past few episodes. They nearly froze to death in the backcountry; reckoned with a tragedy that occurred during their Afghanistan deployment; and lost SEAL comrade Double G (country music star Riley Green in his acting debut).
“They are more intertwined, and it allows them to move forward as a real team. Kayce’s going to need it. His whole world’s going to collapse,” the actor reveals. Kayce’s world is son Tate (Brecken Merrill) and the ranch. That ranch is the target of a potential buyer, cattleman Tom Weaver (Chris Mulkey), whose daughter Dolly (Ellyn Jameson) is flirtatious with Kayce.
Marshall-Green doesn’t know what to think of the Weaver woman. “She could be a pawn. We don’t understand her intentions,” he says. But if anyone lays a hand on Tate, they better watch out. The actor promises, “When it comes to kids, FAFO.”
There’s an undercurrent of tension for the pair, who kissed in a previous episode. “When it comes to a romantic relationship, is that more codependency due to the cancer that he’s fighting? Or is it that he’s trying to reattach to his daughter [Maddie, played by Morgan Lindholm] and Belle’s given him a lot of advice about that? She’s helped him so much. They have their own kind of intense intimacy. It’s also somewhat of a shared trauma. It’s going to be fun delineating kind of what his agenda is,” Marshall-Green muses. “Was it just a drunken kiss, or was it something more?”
No matter how you label the bond between Cal and Belle, they better not let that closeness make them drop their guard. As the season-ender’s action intensifies, Marshall-Green says, “They’re on a bit of a high and then immediately the rug is pulled out from under these two.” Watch your six.
Marshals, Season 1 Finale, Sunday, May 24, 8/7c, CBS
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