Marshals Kills Off Riley Green’s Garrett in Episode 11

Marshals just delivered its most gut-punch episode yet — and country star Riley Green’s acting debut has officially come to a close in the most heartbreaking way possible.

Sunday’s Episode 11 killed off Garrett, Green’s character, after he died in the hospital from injuries sustained in the fire at Kayce’s (Luke Grimes) ranch. The news hit Kayce, Cal (Logan Marshall-Green), and Andrea (Ash Santos) like a freight train when they returned from their shift to check on him — only to be told by his doctor that he was already gone. “The damage from the fire meant he wasn’t getting enough oxygen into his body,” the doctor explained. “The strain of it all was too much on his heart.”

Kayce noticed that Garrett’s phone background was a photo from their time in Afghanistan together. “Brothers forever,” Cal said quietly. Kayce’s response landed like a eulogy: “The best of us don’t come home.”

The Truth About Roner — And Why It Changes Everything

The episode spent much of its runtime in flashback, finally cracking open the wound that’s been festering between Kayce, Cal, and Garrett all season. The three of them — along with their fallen friend Roner (Jay Reeves) — were Navy SEALs together, and the guilt over Roner’s death has quietly poisoned their relationships for years.

The story everyone believed: Cal, as team leader, ordered the squad to abandon Roner during a mission after declaring him dead. They returned to base, only to learn Roner had still been alive when they left — and died fighting off enemies alone. Kayce and Garrett had blamed Cal ever since.

The truth: it was Garrett who told Cal that Roner was dead. Cal had been covering for him all this time, letting himself take the blame rather than blow up Garrett’s life. “I just thought burying the truth was best for double G,” Cal finally admitted to Kayce, “but maybe digging it up gives us three a chance to move forward.” Those hopes were extinguished hours later, when they found out Garrett was already dead.

The reveal reframes the entire season — and makes Garrett’s death land even harder. He never got to hear that Kayce knew the truth. He never got the chance to own it.

The Yellowstone Train Station Is Back — and It’s a Problem

The episode opened with the aftermath of the prison bus crash, with Kayce and Cal tracking down the last escaped inmate, Neil (Sterling Jones), on the mountain in a snowstorm. What made Neil immediately dangerous wasn’t just that he was a fugitive — it was that he used to work at the Yellowstone ranch, and he had the brand to prove it.

Stranded in an abandoned cabin while Cal warmed up after breaking through ice on a frozen body of water, Neil seized his moment. While Kayce was out gathering firewood, Neil told Cal about the train station — the Dutton family’s off-the-books dumping ground for bodies, just over the Wyoming border in Montana. When Kayce came back, Cal was furious. “All that crap that the Cleggs and Gifford said about you is true?” he demanded, calling the Duttons “gangsters on horseback” and turning the Roner guilt-trip back on Kayce. “I brought you in to give you purpose,” Cal told him. “And you’re going to be the undoing of mine.”

Kayce ultimately confirmed that the train station is real — and Cal agreed to keep it secret, in honor of everything they’ve been through together. What Kayce didn’t know was that Neil was already dead. He’s presumed to have drowned under the ice, and the episode strongly implies Cal made sure of it.

The train station’s return isn’t just a Yellowstone Easter egg — it’s a live grenade in Kayce’s new life, and with two episodes left in Season 1, it’s hard to imagine it stays buried.

Riley Green on His Acting Debut

Green, 37, first appeared in Episode 8 back in April, and his run across four episodes marked his first time in front of a camera as an actor. The whole thing came about through his friendship with Grimes, 42 — who, in a nice bit of symmetry, has been building his own music career in Nashville.

“It was through Luke Grimes, who’s become a real good buddy of mine,” Green told People ahead of the season. “He’s starting his music career and was starting to come to Nashville and doing some co-writing and stuff. I was trying to help him out in that world a little bit with some people that I knew. He was like, ‘Man, you should try acting, you know? I think you’d be good at it.’”

Green said he was already turning the idea over in his mind before Grimes made the pitch. “A lot of my music career, other than writing new songs and adding things to a set, there’s a lot of monotony of playing the same songs over and over again, showing in and out during a tour,” he said. “[Acting] is something that’s brand new every day.”

Getting inside Garrett’s head wasn’t easy, though. “He’d been through a lot, and had a lot of problems, and that’s not the easiest thing to just jump into,” Green admitted. “This guy was somebody that really had a lot of deep emotional problems from things that had happened to him in the past. And when you haven’t lived those, you really kind of just rely on feedback from other people in the room.”

“I’m so excited to be joining the cast of Marshals,” Green said in a statement earlier this year. “Being on set with my buddy Luke Grimes made the experience even more memorable. This is my first go around in the acting space and I couldn’t have asked for a better introduction to this world.”

It’s a debut that tracks closely with Lainey Wilson’s breakout arc on Yellowstone — another country star who used the franchise as a launchpad into acting. Green’s run was shorter, but Garrett left a mark.

Garrett’s death is the second major loss of the season. When Marshals premiered in March, fans learned that Kayce’s wife Monica (Kelsey Asbille) had died off screen after battling cancer — a decision showrunner Spencer Hudnut explained carefully. “Kayce had such a perfect ending in Yellowstone,” Hudnut told TVLine. “His dreams had finally come true. As we were trying to figure out how to tell the next chapter in Kayce’s story, it felt like he really needed to be shaken out of that. Unfortunately, tragedy tends to find Kayce.”

Marshals has already been renewed for Season 2, and with two episodes left in Season 1, the train station secret and Cal’s uneasy alliance with Kayce are set up to collide. “Brothers forever,” Cal said standing over that empty hospital bed.

Whether that holds — with what both of them now know — is a very different question.

Marshals airs Sundays at 8/7c on CBS.