Why Marshals Visited Yellowstone's Infamous "Train Station"

Marshals just took a trip to the Train Station, and Kayce Dutton (Luke Grimes) had better watch his back. 

After spending its first episode getting the grieving cowboy to join his old war buddy in the U.S. Marshals, the latest entry in the Yellowstone franchise got dangerously close to the Duttons' darkest family secrets. Kayce and his new team went off in search of some criminals who were operating in a place called The Zone of Death, a really convenient area around the Montana/Wyoming border where the land is government owned and there is no population, no candidates for a jury, and thus no way to prosecute any crimes that occur there. 

His teammates had never heard of such a place and were kind of amazed it existed, but alarm bells immediately went off in Kayce's head because that's exactly where his family has been dumping bodies for more than a century (they called it "the Train Station"). It's also where his adopted brother Jamie Dutton (Wes Bentley), who is still considered a missing person, was unceremoniously laid to rest at the end of Yellowstone. Gifford (Brett Cullen), the team's boss, is already suspicious of Kayce and hasn't forgotten about Jamie, meaning Kayce and his family are never far from some serious trouble. 

Showrunner Spencer Hudnut tells TV Guide that even though Kayce is now leading his own, totally different show, it felt important to not erase his darkest deeds. Read on to hear how Marshals is balancing Dutton history and the reality of U.S. Marshals in Montana. 

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Why did you feel you needed to take us to the Train Station so quickly? How much of Kayce's family past is going to be following him to this new show? 

Hudnut: The Duttons have been in Montana for 140 plus years now, and they have a very dark past. There's a lot of skeletons, and I think to ignore that would be foolish on our part. As Mo says in the pilot, violence finds the Duttons. I do think Kayce's struggle this season is to find a new path for himself and Tate, but also, how can you do that when you are from this family that has had such a big and not always positive impact on Montana? So we will revisit it again. This show needs to stand on its own, but I think to turn our backs on such rich backstory would be doing a disservice to the show. 

So how much can you dig into it? Do you have to figure out a way to publicly "solve" Jamie's disappearance within this show? 

Hudnut: Yeah, it's a very good question because there are things we can build off of, like Kayce's relationship with Rainwater and his relationship with his father. Taylor put some of these stories to bed in a way that I don't want to dig them up, [but] the fact that no one ever found Jamie is kind of interesting, and the fact that Kayce now wants to be a Marshal. If I was Kayce's boss, I would be asking questions too — the two biggest cold cases in the state are related to his family. And one of the most interesting and surprising things Kayce did in Yellowstone was come face to face with the man responsible for his dad's death and let him go. He did that to protect his family, but if his family is not what it used to be, does he want to revisit that? Does that haunt him in some way? I think things like that are worth exploring. 

Do you have a specific season or arc you could point to on Yellowstone that you reference a lot, or that really hit on who Kayce is? 

Hudnut: I think a lot of stuff that happened with Tate, and a lot of the guilt Kayce felt. Now Kayce is a single father. Solo parenting is a real challenge for him, so I think a lot of his missteps from the past are probably on the top of his mind as he's now trying to wrangle a 17 year old. Honestly, that's such rich ground for us. We're tapping into all of it. 

Now that we've seen a couple of cases that this team is tasked with, can you explain what exactly the Marshals do? Are there types of cases they would never handle? 

Hudnut: U.S. Marshals primarily run down fugitives, so they do a lot of manhunting, which is great, but 13, 18, 22 times a season might get to be a lot. I think a U.S. Marshal show in New York City might be much more limited than a U.S. Marshal show in Montana, and I think what we've tapped into, which is really happening, is there's a lack of infrastructure. There's been a lot of federal cuts, there's been a lot of state cuts. So there's not a ton of law enforcement in the region where we find our marshals, which allows them — and the Marshal badge, actually — to be deputized. They can go work with other agencies. They can go work with state and local and federal agencies, so that gives us a lot of ground to cover and a lot of flexibility in what our people are doing. And what's great about running down a fugitive is you don't always catch them, but you could catch them in the middle of something super exciting that another agency might run point on. Because we're in the middle of Montana with not a lot of people around, all of a sudden, our marshals are taking a drug case that the DEA would normally handle. We want to ground it as authentically as possible, [with] the cost and the consequences of the job and what it does to our first responders. We will take a little creative license every now and then with what exactly a U.S. Marshal is doing. 

How did you put the team together and create characters who would be willing to take a job like this? 

Hudnut: From my time working on SEAL Team and getting to know the types of people who are special operators, also having worked on some cop shows in the past and becoming friends with some law enforcement types, it's interesting because as much as I've written about it, I don't think I have it in me to take on a job like that. It's really scary and it's really dangerous, and it takes a lot out of your personal life. I think what's fun for us in the first season is that we really explore and unpack the journeys that these characters have gone on and what got them to this point, what makes them want to wear the badge. For some people, it's to avenge the death of a parent, like Andrea. For people like Cal, he's just trying to find purpose, and he's trying to atone for some sins from his past. And Belle, we will reveal that there's a reason why she's trying to make Montana a better place, which ties directly to her backstory. The goal was to not just make cookie cutter people who are just there because "to serve and protect is the highest honor," which is great, but to really give them more drive than that, and tie it to who they are.

New episodes of Marshals air Sundays at 8/7c on CBS.