In many ways, the Season 2 premiere of Marshals ought to have been the Season 1 finale . Events pick up immediately after Season 1 ended, and by the end of the episode we’ve resolved Season 1’s biggest conspiracy and conflict. The first season ended on a cliffhanger, which is obviously intended to keep interest up for Season 2, but “All Hat, No Cattle” fits more naturally at the end of the first season’s arc than at the beginning of Season 2. Spoilers ahead.

The premiere picks up almost immediately from the Season 1 cliffhanger and wastes very little time resolving it. Tate (Brecken Merrill) has gone off on what he thinks is a fishing trip with Tom Weaver (Chris Mulkey), unaware that Weaver is behind the attack on East Camp and Rainwater (Gil Birmingham) or that he’s being used as leverage to force Kayce Dutton (Luke Grimes) to give up the land.

Meanwhile, Cal (Logan Marshall-Green) and Belle (Arielle Kebbel) survived the assassination attempt at the end of last season, killing their attackers and recovering burner phones and evidence connecting the hit to Weaver’s foreman, Jeb. I’m still a little unclear why Jeb and Weaver set up the assassination attempt to begin with; getting into gun fights with U.S. Marshals seems like a sure way to draw unwanted attention.

Back at East Camp, Weaver sends his attorney Stan Cobb along with armed men to make Kayce another offer for the property. When Kayce rebuffs the offer, and pushes past Cobb into his cabin, armed men ambush him and Dolly.

Kayce convinces the men to lower their guns telling them Tate is all the leverage they need, and once they do he springs into action, killing the gunmen and stabbing Cobb, then turns his attention to Dolly Weaver (Ellyn Jameson), a potential love interest last season.

Dolly insists that she was in the dark about her father’s intentions, though the more we learn about Weaver’s shady business, the more we have to wonder how Dolly remained so blissfully ignorant. Then again, Weaver’s entire scheme is so over-the-top and preposterous it’s all a bit hard to believe. Kayce doesn’t exactly trust her, but she tells him Tate is being held at a location in Wyoming and helps arrange a meeting with Tom.

Rather than wait for the Marshals, or even inform Cal about what’s going on, Kayce decides to handle the exchange himself in true Kayce Dutton fashion. He’ll sign over East Camp if Weaver releases Tate, but he’s bringing plenty of firepower just in case. What could go wrong?

Andrea Cruz (Ash Santos), who is preparing to leave Montana for her new job in Washington D.C., stops by East Camp and immediately realizes something is wrong. She contacts the rest of the team. At the same time, Miles (Tatanka Means) uncovers more evidence linking Jeb directly to Weaver and discovers that the mine Rainwater had been fighting has effectively been relocated onto Weaver’s property, giving Weaver a motive to not only go after Kayce and his land, but to stop Rainwater from preventing the mine operations on tribal land.

When they dig even deeper, they discover that Weaver is likely running the largest cattle-based ponzi scheme of all time. He reports owning 80,000 cattle, but they can’t track down where any of these actually are. He’s raised 200 million dollars (somehow) but reports selling the exact same amounts each week to meat packing businesses, something that makes no sense in this industry. This is the source of the episode’s title, “All Hat, No Cattle” which is a phrase that means “all talk, no action” but in this instance literally means no cattle. “I knew you were no cowboy,” Kayce says to Tom at one point.

And now, it seems, Weaver has hired dozens of thugs to keep this ponzi scheme going. He’s just made one mistake; to slightly alter a quote from The Princess Bride : Never get involved in a land war in Montana. Especially not with the Duttons.

And never hire mercenaries who can’t hit the side of a barn. Seriously, one good sniper would have made a lot more sense than what Weaver had in store for Kayce.

After a Wyoming sheriff’s deputy on Tom’s payroll checks Kayce, Tom and Jeb for guns, he leaves them to their negotiations on a bridge. Once Kayce signs over the land, Weaver springs his trap. This is about as shocking as the sun rising in the east.

Weaver’s plan is to kill Tate by drowning him and make it look like an accident, then kill Kayce and manufacture a self-defense story. Why bother with all of this now that he has the document signed? Arrogance, I suppose. Maliciousness.

Dolly finally turns against her father and pulls a gun Kayce secretly gave her, training it on him until finally she wavers and her father grabs the gun. “You can’t unmake family,” she tells Kayce, but it’s a mistake that will cost her dearly. Weaver pulls the trigger and nothing happens. Kayce deliberately gave her an unloaded weapon, clearly not sure whether she would actually help him or not. Good thinking, Kayce.

Unfortunately, a bunch of armed men appear at this point and start shooting wildly at the bridge, no matter that Weaver and Dolly are still right there. Thankfully for Kayce (and the Weavers), Tom’s men proved in the Season 1 finale that they’re about as accurate as Star Wars Stormtroopers. It’s honestly a little embarrassing to watch. A dozen men with automatic rifles firing away, missing every single shot as Kayce sprints to his truck, reloads his pistol and escapes down the river, taking a couple of them out along the way.

The rest of the team arrives via helicopter and make short work of the mercenaries while Kayce chases down Jeb and Tate on horseback. He reaches them as Jeb is furiously attempting to drown the boy. Kayce shoots the foreman, leaping into the creek to pull his son to safety. A brief fight ensues, but Kayce bashes Jeb’s head in with a river rock, letting the body drift away downstream as he rushes to Tate’s side. “What did I do wrong?” Tate asks. This poor kid. I kind of wish that the show had just written Monica and Tate both out – maybe divorce or separation, with the pair moving away – so that Kayce could just do his Marshals thing without family ties. It’s also just a tiny bit ironic that in the Season 1 finale Tate was waxing poetic about how Kayce joining the Marshals brought “life” back to East Camp, and then he’s kidnapped and almost drowned.

Dolly Pays For The Sins of Her Father

Tom makes a run for it with his daughter and the Marshals and Kayce quickly chase them down (I’m uncertain how Kayce managed to get ahead of the vehicle on horseback, but we’ll just leave that aside. This show is filled with implausible and impossible and unbelievable things; best to just suspend your disbelief).

“It’s over,” Dolly tells her father, but he just grimaces and says “Everything is a negotiation” before not negotiating at all and driving full speed down the rocky hillside. He hits a boulder and loses control and the SUV goes spinning and toppling down until it crashes.

Kayce finds Weaver alive beside his dead daughter, her skull caved in during the crash. Weaver, distraught, asks Kayce to kill him but Kayce refuses, telling him that living with his daughter’s death is the punishment he deserves. It’s moments like this that I wish they would let Kayce be more of the strong, silent type.

Dear Marshals writers: You don’t need to have characters say everything. The things left unspoken can speak louder than words. Kayce not shooting Weaver, while Weaver sobs and begs to die, would convey Kayce’s intent while making him look stone cold. The line itself felt flat and awkward, whereas a stoic Kayce looking at him with disgust and then walking away would have been juicy with subtext. Less is more!

Back at HQ, Tom tells Cruz that Dolly really wasn’t part of his criminal operation, which she conveys to Kayce to ease his mind. She also discovers that Tom’s men burned down Kayce’s barn, killing his friend Garrett last season. Two points for Kayce, though nothing much cheers up our dour hero.

Andrea ultimately decides not to take the Washington job, which none of us thought she was going to take to begin with, and stick with Montana. This opens the door for a potential Kayce/Andrea romance, or at least a continuation of the will they/won’t they stuff. The episode also continues the Cal/Belle relationship. Belle is now particularly jaded with her marriage after her wealthy husband refused to bail her out of her gambling debts (and can you blame him?)

She insists on accompanying Cal to his oncology appointment in Salt Lake City, while Cal tends to the injuries she suffered during the assassination attempt.

Kayce and Tate return safely to East Camp, battered but alive. Kayce cleans up and comes across a damaged family photograph of Monica and Tate, finally breaking down. Kayce, we’re reminded, keeps surviving while everything and everyone he loves is taken from him.

Verdict : Marshals continues to be cheap popcorn fare, all of the action and guns-blazing stuff from Yellowstone without any of the layers, character work, philosophizing or smart dialogue. You have to watch it with all that in mind, knowing that this is very much a CBS procedural rather than a prestige streaming drama. Still, I would like to see the writing tightened up a bit. The dialogue can be so heavy-handed and the characters from Yellowstone often feel so washed out compared to their former selves.

Rainwater, for instance, telling Kacye he’s “happy to call you my brother” just feels deeply out of character. Then again, Rainwater going to East Camp in the first place was weird. Tate packing and leaving on a fishing trip with Weaver out-of-state – directly after he killed a man – was weird.. The writing is just all over the place. It’s clear that the writing room just needed to position all the pieces for this big showdown regardless of how nonsensical it all was.

I’m glad we’re done with the Weaver storyline, at least, and hopefully onto something a little more original than . . . more attempts by outsiders to get hold of Dutton land. The most impressive part of this episode was the fact that it came out four months after the Season 1 finale, though I have to wonder if this was originally intended to be the Season 1 finale given how much this was just Part 2 of the last episode.

What did you think of the Marshals Season 2 premiere? Let me know on Twitter , Instagram , or Facebook .