The chemistry between Cruz and Cowboy is so powerful, it has taken solid form. In the locker room at marshals HQ, once Pete Calvin leaves, the heat-generating third presence still in there with Andrea and Kayce might as well be wearing a tactical vest. She looks across at him. “You are a chaos magnet, Cowboy.” They’re both smarting from the blast that ended Part 1 of Marshals Season 2 Episode 5 on Paramount+. “I warned you,” Kayce says, with what counts as a grin tossed her way. “Keep your distance.” 

It’s worth it to compare the interminable slog of Dolly Weaver’s one-sided flirtation with Kayce Dutton as proof of the power surge in this one single exchange. We’re just saying Cruz ignites something in Kayce like no one has since Marshals began.

Small-time terrorist Rudy Carpenter’s “fuck it I’m out” bomb was a bell-ringer. But it was only the team’s first problem. That anfo explosive material they were chasing? Before he blew himself to bits, Rudy loaded it onto a truck driven by an accomplice, Derek McCoy, whose family clams up when Jock Up goes hard on their ranch house with a raid through the front door.

As the team splits up, collaring different McCoys in different rooms, Cruz finds herself in pursuit, running down dark steps and into the unsure gloom of a basement, where her trauma from the Clegg events returns. It hits her like vertigo, and at her shoulder, Belle notices. Once all the suspects are secure, Cruz blames the blast for slowing her reaction time. But Belle knows there is something up.

All suspects secure except for one, who ran to an un-structurally sound outbuilding on the property. Man, in Marshals, you should just never run into a barn. Double-G, Kayce and Cruz earlier, and Kayce — again! — who gets his guy as the hay loft collapses onto the main floor, which then consumes them in collapse. 

The tumble caused a gas line to rupture, and a severed power line is sparking. There are timbers and debris laying across the McCoy suspect’s busted leg. Kayce is mildly worried. His comms are down and somehow this barn is a million miles from what the team is doing inside. 

Now, if backup was ever more than something vaguely referenced in a radio call on Marshals, this scenario wouldn’t even be happening. But instead of all that, let’s let Kayce Dutton the damn thing. He sounds like both his father and Rip Wheeler doing a version of his father when he says “Look man, I’m not dying down here with you. You’re gonna get up, or I’m gonna break the other leg.”

It’s the McCoys who break under interrogation from the team, and they learn that Derek McCoy has taken his box truck full of anfo explosive to Helena, where he plans to bomb the bank manager that foreclosed on his family farm. He’s stuck in traffic when the team triangulates on his position.

Too bad there aren’t any horses parked in downtown Helena. Kayce, Cruz, and Miles instead ride the roofs of the cars behind McCoy’s truck as they advance in his blind spot. He’s surrounded, and he’s warned. But they always reach for the trigger in shows like this, and Jock Up puts the bomber down. 

“Easy Day,” Pete Calvin calls it back at base. Even if Kayce and Andrea cheated death together, he was holding his neck in pain during the whole operation, and his replacement is battling ghosts of the job in her head. That’s right, Gifford relented in his arrogance campaign enough to understand it’s Pete Calvin’s team, and gave him the go-ahead to pick. “When I go on leave for this surgery,” Cal tells the team, “Dre, you’re gonna take the conn.” 

Miles says she’ll have to work on her “‘Y’all’”s and Belle says she’ll follow Cruz into hell…where they’ll face the dark basements together. But later that night, there is a knock at Kayce’s East Camp door. Where Andrea is in tears. “I have been chasing down fugitives with you because it’s better than not sleeping. Because sleep, it’s much worse.” 

Kayce realizes he’s been so worried about Cal’s cancer battle, he missed Andrea fighting her own, even with all the time they’ve been bonding as a two-person Team Jock Up. If we said we didn’t think the subtext of this emotional scene is the mutual attraction they have also artfully not been seeing, we’d be lying. Kayce says as long as Andrea isn’t sleeping — right? And? — he can make her some tea. But when he returns to the living room, she is sound asleep under his western blanket on the couch. “You came to the right place for chaos,” he told her. But as he sits vigil while Andrea rests, he knows that here with him is the first time she’s felt secure in weeks. 

Kayce Taykes for Marshals Season 2 Episode 5 (“Secret Weapon”): 

• Gambling problem? Just call 1-800-illegally-use-your-federal-powers-to-search-a-database-for-dirt-about-the-thug-who-is-threatening-your-family-over-the-debt-you-owe! Belle figured out the guy hounding her for the money has a daughter, and warned him she could put her in jail. So the ethics here are all over the place. But at least Belle looks cool when she snuffs out his cigar in warning.

• Pete Calvin got close, about two or three sentences away from telling Maddie about his cancer…and didn’t. Come on, son!

• And Miles Teller — uniter or divider? He meets with Shane Whitebear (Duke Davis Roberts), the Broken Rock councilmember who convinced Thomas Rainwater to explore the cannabis farm idea. Shane, who wants to push the chairman out, butters up Miles. An endorsement from a hero marshal, he says, would go a long way for his campaign.

Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social) is a Chicago-based writer. A veteran of the alternative weekly trenches, his work has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork, The All Music Guide, and The Village Voice.