Taylor Sheridan Is Finally Telling The Foundational Yellowstone Story That Was Criminally Ignored

Sep 11, 2026 - 01:09

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Taylor Sheridan Is Finally Telling The Foundational Yellowstone Story That Was Criminally Ignored

Published Sep 10, 2026, 5:30 PM EDT

Cathal Gunning has been writing about movies, television, culture, and politics online and in print since 2017. He worked as a Senior Editor in Adbusters Media Foundation from 2018-2019 and wrote for WhatCulture in early 2020. He has been a Senior Features Writer for ScreenRant since 2020.

While Yellowstone already ended over a year ago, Taylor Sheridan’s show is only now getting around to a major storyline from the show’s lore in Marshals season 2. Although Timothy Olyphant’s Justified remains the greatest Neo-Western TV show ever made, the FX hit is not the biggest or most famous series in the genre. That title goes to writer/director Taylor Sheridan’s show Yellowstone, a sprawling family saga that updates the melodrama of Dallas and Dynasty for a new generation.

Green lit after the success of Sheridan’s screenplays for the movies Sicario, Hell or High Water, and Wind River, Yellowstone followed the fortunes of the Dutton family, a group of billionaire criminals holding onto the gargantuan titular ranch in Montana. Across the show’s five seasons and 53 episodes, the series saw the family members lie, cheat, steal, and even kill to maintain control of the family ranch, with one of Yellowstone’s wildest deaths using a weaponized rattlesnake as an unconventional hitman’s accomplice.

As this synopsis implies, Yellowstone was always over-the-top and outlandish, but that didn’t stop the show from getting seriously dark, seriously often. Like most melodramas, Yellowstone was full of family tragedy, as were its prequels 1883 and 1923 and its sequel shows, Marshals and Dutton Ranch. While Yellowstone’s antihero John Dutton was eventually killed by a hit ordered by his own son, Jamie, who was then killed by John’s daughter, his sister Beth, Marshals season 2 is set to go back in time to fill in viewers in on one of the Kevin Costner character’s worst offscreen moments.

Marshals Season 2 Will Finally Show Kayce's Branding Moment

Kevin Costner's John Dutton in Yellowstone

In the trailer for Marshals season 2, viewers see a teenage Kayce staring at his newly-branded chest, a sure sign that the sequel spinoff’s sophomore outing will finally explore the story of how and when Kayce was branded with the Yellowstone brand. For those unfamiliar with the original series, ranchers who work at the Dutton family’s Yellowstone ranch are branded as a show of loyalty to the property’s owners, despite their pitiful wages and the transient nature of ranching work as an industry.

However, Kayce’s branding is unique, primarily because he is the ranch owner John Dutton’s son. In Yellowstone, the show established Kayce’s branding backstory when John explained that he burned the symbol into his son’s flesh permanently after Kayce refused to demand an abortion from his future wife, Monica. After Kayce got Monica pregnant, John told his son to force her to onbtain an abortion. Kayce refused, and John subsequently branded his son as a symbolic reminder that his teenage body was his father’s property.

Kayce understandably left to join the Navy SEALs after his father’s unique outburst of paternal abuse, and the incident itself was left offscreen until Marshals season 2’s story, which draws some hitherto-unnoticed parallels between John and Kayce. While John is long since dead, ultimately outwitted by his older son Jamie, Kayce realizes that he runs the risk of turning into John in Marshals season 2’s trailer, where he warily intones that no Dutton should end up turning into their father.

Why Yellowstone Skipped Kayce's Branding Story

Since Yellowstone featured a lot of flashbacks to pad out the show’s story, it might seem striking that the show skipped this one. One could reasonably assume that the original series didn’t include the flashback since depicting John’s sadism toward his young son could have alienated viewers. While all of Sheridan’s shows, from Lioness to the prison drama Mayor of Kingstown, feature plenty of graphic violence, Yellowstone still shied away from the more grotesque displays of power that John indulged in.

Portraying such a baroque act of cruelty on such a young victim, whose only crime was supporting his love interest in her decision to keep her child, could have resulted in viewers of Yellowstone finding John harder to root for. Since Yellowstone was never all that interested in committing to depicting John as a monster, instead typically justifying his actions through platitudes about family, honor, and machismo, the series most likely needed to keep this misdeed offscreen, so viewers weren’t confronted by just how gruesome his abuse of his children is.

This is all the more reason for Marshals season 2 to address the storyline, since it gives the series an opportunity to reckon with John’s deplorable personality in the original show. Dutton Ranch heroine Beth uncritically admired her father’s brutality, not that it saved him Jamie’s wrath in the end, whereas Kayce was always more critical of his father’s viciously competitive, debilitating-ly paranoid outlook. This was why it was something of a surprise when Kayce and Beth sold the Yellowstone ranch in the series finale.

How Kayce's Yellowstone Branding Moment Is Pivotal To Marshals

Kayce Dutton riding his horse in Marshals season 2

In the series finale, Kayce’s decision to sell the ranch back to its rightful historical owners, the Broken Rock Indian Reservation, on cents to the dollar proved that he was fundamentally unlike his father, and refused to live his life in fear, a weak, meager shadow of a man clutching onto power with his last breath. However, throughout Marshals season 1, the seasoned killer repeatedly used extra judicial violence to solve problems in his job as a US Marshal, forcing Kayce to contend with the reality that the apple may not have fallen so far from the proverbial tree.

As Marshals season 2 returns to the world of the Yellowstone franchise, the show poses a pivotal question to Kayce. Namely, he must contend with whether he wants to turn into his father or not, and, if not, he must work out how to reduce his reliance on knee-jerk violence as an answer to his problems.

Thus, his branding flashback will be a perfect way to remind Yellowstone viewers of what is at stake for Kayce. The injury, after all, is a constant visual reminder that, unlike the conflicted Marshals protagonist Kayce, Yellowstone’s cretinous central character John Dutton was a weak man so terminally terrified of failure that he disfigured his own son in a failed attempt to gain his respect, only to then end up outsmarted and mercilessly murdered by another one of his children thanks to passing down this cowardly, unprincipled attitude.