‘Marshals’ Reveals How Long Monica Has Been Dead & Surprise ‘Yellowstone’ Cameo

The Marshals series premiere revealed Monica Dutton’s (Kelsey Asbille) fate and why she was missing from the trailers. Now, Episode 6 has revealed how long she’s been gone, and the episode’s ending came with a surprise cameo from a Yellowstone actor. Warning: Spoilers for Marshals Season 1 Episode 6 ahead.

Marshals stars Luke Grimes as Kayce Dutton, his character from Yellowstone. The cowboy and former Navy SEAL joined the U.S. Marshals in Montana when seeking a new start for himself and his teenage son, Tate (Brecken Merrill). Asbille played Monica, Kayce’s wife and Tate’s mother, in every season of Yellowstone, but the character was killed off before the events of Marshals Episode 1 in a disappointing start for the CBS spinoff.

Viewers knew that she died of cancer, and that it had been some time since her passing. But Episode 6, which aired on Sunday, April 5, revealed how much time passed between her death and the events of the series premiere.

CBS

Marshals Season 1 Episode 6 opened with a flashback to the day Monica died. The scene took place in a bedroom of Kayce and Monica’s home on East Camp and showed a nurse covering Monica’s body with a sheet. Text onscreen said, “One Year Ago.” This moment was teased in the Marshals trailer, but without the timestamp. Later in the episode, Kayce and Tate grieved Monica together at her grave in East Camp. Tate was upset that Kayce was still planning to miss Monica’s ceremony on the Broken Rock Reservation commemorating the anniversary of her death.

“I came out here hoping that Mom would cheer me up,” Tate said. “She usually does.”

“Hard to believe it’s been a year,” a sorrowful Kayce said. “I know how you’re feeling. Losing your mom’s put a hole in my heart that will never heal.”

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“I don’t need cheering up about the anniversary. I’m not the one avoiding it. I just can’t stop thinking that Hayley would be safe if we had just done something when we saw her,” Tate said, adding, “Mom led us to that truck stop, and we didn’t deliver. I disappointed her.

“That’s the last thing you ever did,” Kayce replied. “You were her whole world.” Tate walked off just as disappointed in his dad as before.

Monica was top of mind in this episode for Kayce and Tate because the search for the missing Indigenous girls was still ongoing. Monica fought for more resources to be dedicated to finding missing Indigenous girls in Yellowstone and, as revealed in Marshals Episode 5, planned to continue those efforts with the mother of a missing teen before her cancer diagnosis and death. Tate said that solving this case would honor his mother’s legacy.

In Episode 5, Tate encountered an old classmate, Hayley, at a gas station in Wyoming. Hayley had been missing for a long time, Kayce and his Marshals team learned, and this led to a discovery that she had been kidnapped by a sex trafficking ring, the same one that took her friend, Ava.

Hayley revealed in Episode 5 that Ava was murdered by the man running the operation, Bledsoe, whom the Marshals crew killed at the end of the episode in a high-speed chase and gunfight.

CBS

Episode 6 continued the search for the missing girls, starting with informing Ava’s mother of her daughter’s tragic fate. The team discovered that Bledsoe had passed the 10 surviving girls off to a violent motorcycle gang called the Iron Sentinels. Belle (Arielle Kebbel) and Kayce went undercover as one of them for the rescue mission. In Yellowstone Season 3, Monica put herself up as bait to catch a man who had kidnapped an Indigenous woman and her child. The Marshals undercover mission was a success, and the girls were saved and reunited with their families

“You found your own way to honor Mom,” Tate said to his dad when he learned the news. Kayce attended Monica’s ceremony on the reservation, where they reunited with Monica’s grandfather, Felix Long (Rudy Ramos, above, with Merrill and Grimes), who was last seen in the Yellowstone series finale. Felix, Tate, and Kayce stood for Monica’s ceremony, where Kayce finally revealed he had been holding on to Monica’s favorite necklace all year.

“Maybe it’s time I start letting go,” he said as the episode ended.

Marshals, Sundays, 8/7c, CBS