‘Yellowstone’ Spinoff ‘Marshals’ Reveals Monica Dutton’s Fate In Premiere

SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers for the premiere episode of CBS’ Marshals.

Luke Grimes is back as Kayce Dutton, the character he played for five seasons on Taylor Sheridan’s Yellowstone, but this time in more of a procedural format.

Marshals, formerly known as Y: Marshals, debuted on CBS tonight and the spinoff of the Paramount Network drama finally revealed the fate of Grimes’ former on-screen wife, Monica Dutton, played by Kelsey Asbille.

In the opening scene, Kayce Dutton wakes up in an empty room after a dream where, as a U.S. Navy Seal, he is screaming “Monica, where are you?”.

He then spends much of the first act caring for his teenage son Tate, played by Brecken Merrill. “I know your mom was better at all this,” he said.

There’s early references to how tough things have been in Montana since Yellowstone ended with Dutton telling a cow, “You got to keep moving and forget how cruel this life is.”

Later, viewers finally get confirmation that Monica is dead as Kayce goes to her headstone.

Monica, who got a traumatic brain injury in the first season of Yellowstone, died as a result of cancer due to the toxicity on the reservation. Kayce tells Tate that his mom “suffered”. “The only thing more cruel than losing a parent, is losing the wrong one,” he adds.

For Asbille, she has booked a number of jobs since the end of Yellowstone including feature films Adulting and The Technique, alongside Emma Roberts and Noomi Rapace.

“I don’t think we’ve seen you on Broken Rock since Monica’s burial,” Kayce is told as the procedural action starts kicking in.

Remember, at the end of Yellowstone’s fifth season, Kayce kept the East Camp of the ranch for his family but sold much of it to Thomas Rainwater, played by Gil Birmingham, for the same price as it sold when the white man took it from the tribes.

Birmingham reunites with Dutton in Marshals and is injured in the first episode when a bomb explodes during a protest at the Broken Rock reservation.

Mo Brings Plenty, who plays Mo, also joins his boss Birmingham in the series.

The first episode of Marshals, Piya Wiconi, however, doesn’t linger too long on Sheridan’s previous world, rather it shifts the story to an elite unit of U.S. Marshals. Kayce is convinced by his friend Pete Calvin, played Logan Marshall-Green, to help find some bad guys hiding in the depths of the land, alongside his team that features Belle Skinner (Arielle Kebbel), Andrea Cruz (Ash Santos) and Miles Kittle (Tatanka Means).

The group hunt down the bomber and Kayce gets a taste of his old SEAL world and clearly likes it (obviously he kills someone in the first episode).

The series, which comes from Paramount Television Studios, 101 Studios and Bosque Ranch Productions, was created by Spencer Hudnut, who served as showrunner of CBS’ SEAL Team, perfect training for Marshals.

Marshals is one of two new Yellowstone spinoffs that have been greenlight (The Madison, starring Michelle Pfeiffer and Kurt Russell was originally a spinoff but has morphed into its own story). The other is The Dutton Ranch, which follows Kayce Dutton’s sister Beth, played by Kelly Reilly, and her husband Rip, played by Cole Hauser.

That series, which is for Paramount+, sees Beth and Rip move to Dillon, Montana with stars including Annette Bening and Ed Harris joining.

Hudnut has teased that Marshals and The Dutton Ranch, which is showrun by Chad Feehan, exist in the same timeline and universe, so there is the possibility of a crossover.

“I fought so hard to get out from under the weight of the Yellowstone and here I am forcing you to live like my family’s lived for a 100 years,” Kayce tells his son Tate in the Marshals premiere. It seems the weight of Yellowstone lives on.