'Joe Pickett' Season 2, Episodes 1-2 Recap: The Western Mystery Series Goes Supernatural

It's official: Joe Pickett is the scariest show on television. The Western mystery series centered on Wyoming Game Warden Joe Pickett's brushes with danger was something of a sleeper hit when it debuted in 2021, gaining admirers for its strong performances and shockingly dark tone. Season 2 of the Paramount+ drama only takes us further into nightmare territory. Picking up a year after the brutal attack on his family, Michael Dorman's Joe comes face-to-face with pure evil (and maybe the supernatural?) in the astounding two-episode premiere. Here's all the gory details you might have missed from Episodes 1 and 2, plus some predictions for what's in store this season. Happy hunting!

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Episode 1: Keeping Up with the Picketts

The season opens with a much more sophisticated murder than any amateur killing we saw last season, as we glimpse a masked sniper shoot a hunter in the forest. (Smells like special ops to me!) Then, we catch up with the Pickett clan. It's been exactly one year since the attack on their family, which led to Marybeth (The Resident's Julianna Guill) losing their unborn son. While Wacey Hederman is dead and Vern Dunnegan is in jail, it's not the bright new day anyone was hoping for. Joe is in his truck on Game Warden business, and he hears a radio DJ dub him the "Lame Warden" because the endangered weasel he discovered last season has curbed hunting across the state. We meet his sweet, but idiotic young trainee Luke (Waco: The Aftermath's Keean Johnson), who's absolutely useless when the pair are tasked with guiding a trophy elk out of the Pickett girls' school cafeteria. 

Meanwhile, Marybeth is suffering with flashbacks. Joe is trying to be emotionally available, but he's been self-harming. In a seriously disturbing sequence, we see him dip his finger in a cup of steaming coffee, punishing himself for last season's mistakes. Yeah, these two are not okay. Marybeth is putting her law degree to use doing estate planning for wealthy older couple Blaire and Frank Urman. Blaire (Star Trek's Julianne Christie) tells her that Frank hasn't returned from his hunting trip to so-called Bermuda Mountain, where compasses mysteriously act up and GPS signals go out. At Marybeth's request, Joe heads up the mountain to find him.

Joe spots Frank's truck on the mountain, but no Frank. A hunter named Dave Farkus (Tribal's Travis Friesen) emerges from the forest complaining that he tracked the elk he shot only to find that someone had gutted the animal. Dave thinks a wendigo — an evil, stag-like creature from Native American mythology — is haunting the mountain. (Yellowjackets, anyone?) Sure enough, Joe finds Dave's gutted elk the next morning, along with a homemade arrow stuck to a nearby tree. Back in town, we catch up with Marybeth and her mother Missy (the incomparable Sharon Lawrence of NYPD Blue). She got a job singing in a local roadhouse (not wise for a recovering alcoholic) and she's still dating Deputy McLanahan (Virgin River's Chad Rook). Gotta love Missy. Marybeth spots a man named Charlie Left Hand (played by Cree actor Sean Wei Mah) handing out flyers about his daughter Marissa's disappearance from the reservation last month.

Up on Bermuda Mountain, Joe Pickett Season 2 officially becomes a horror movie. The warden encounters a pair of spine-chilling twins dubbed the "Grimm Brothers" (both brothers are played by Alex Breaux, another Waco alum). They bite the heads off fish, and their freaky encampment is filled with elk bones; one brother carries an Old Testament Bible, the other a New Testament. Weird stuff, any way you slice it. Joe writes them tickets for fishing without a license and poaching — tickets which they burn, of course. Governmental encroachment, and all that. The Grimm Brothers shoot Joe through the leg with a homemade arrow as he rides off. His beloved horse Lizzie takes a few shots to the neck and throws him off, sending his head square into a tree. Ouch.

Episode 2: The Grimm Brothers

In Episode 2, entitled "The Question Why?," Joe comes to in the forest and sees the Grimm Brothers gutting his horse and eating the organs raw. He fires a shot at Caleb, hitting him in the jaw, and limps off to a cabin in a daze, where a long-haired girl tells him, "You shouldn't be here." Meanwhile, Marybeth calls Sheriff Barnum (Big Sky's Patrick Gallagher). He didn't know about Frank's disappearance; for whatever (likely sketchy) reason, Blaire wanted to keep it on the down-low. Barnum sends the incompetent McLanahan after Joe and Frank. For good measure, Marybeth calls on Cricket (Aadila Dosani), who's been promoted to deputy since last season, to contact everyone's favorite fugitive-survivalist Nate Romanowski.

The ensuing chase on Bermuda Mountain is pure nightmare fuel, and a sign that Season 2 is boldly committing to a foreboding, even supernatural, tone. Joe is in a feverish haze as the girl feeds him a medicinal herb and yanks the arrow from his leg. When he wakes up again, she's gone — and the Grimm Brothers are firing shotgun blasts through the cabin walls. They burn the place to the ground, but Joe manages to escape. His biblical journey out of the wilderness is more of a classic vision quest than an action sequence. He mutters Marybeth and the girls' names as a pack of wolves surround him, then spots a beheaded man strung up in a tree and passes out. When he comes to, who but Nate Romanowski (All American's Mustafa Speaks) is dragging him to safety. He wakes up in a hospital bed with Marybeth beside him. 

Barnum called in the choppers to Bermuda Mountain, but they're not seeing any dead horse or burned-down cabin anywhere. McLanahan questions whether Joe's concussion could've impacted his testimony, so Barnum calls off the search thinking the witch's cabin and the ghoulish twins are some tall tale. A frustrated Joe limps out of the hospital prematurely and books it to the mountain, where the police have found what's probably Frank's beheaded body hanging right where Joe saw it. As they lower the corpse, a poker chip emblazoned with a stag (this related to the wendigo?) falls off the body. Finally, we glimpse the same masked sniper from Episode 1 setting his sights on Joe. Dun dun dunnn!

Questions and Predictions

• Who's the sniper? The Grimm Brothers aren't exactly the stealthy type. Nate Romanowski, on the other hand... the fugitive used to be a special ops agent. We pretty much know he's a good guy, but the authorities could mistakenly pin any sniper murders on Nate. 
• Who's the girl in the cabin? All bets are on "Rosie," as the Grimm Brothers call her, actually being Marissa, the missing girl. Was she kidnapped, perhaps as a stand-in for the wendigo? Or did she go willingly? Somehow, it seems like a little bit of both.
• What's with all this wendigo nonsense, anyways? Usually depicted as a humanoid creature with antlers, wendigos possess humans and transform them into insatiable cannibals. Given their propensity for raw flesh, the Grimm Brothers fit the bill. Do they believe in the creature? They're carrying around Bibles, so either: (1) absolutely not, it's just a cover for their misdeeds or (2) they're searching scripture for answers. 
• What happened to Frank Urman? Frank is likely the hunter who took the sniper's shot in Episode 1. The Grimm Brothers then came along and defiled his corpse.
• What does the poker chip mean? The stag on the chip indicates that Frank was killed in the name of the wendigo. It's a stylish signature — probably the sniper's. Is he (or she) working with the Grimm Brothers? 
• Why did Blaire keep Frank's disappearance secret? Blaire hired Marybeth to game out their estate right as Frank went hunting. Could this be a classic insurance fraud murder, somehow related to this Bull Grove Foundation Frank dumped money into? My guess is Blaire is no saint. She probably sent Joe up the mountain to be killed. 

New episodes of Joe Pickett premiere Sundays exclusively on Paramount+.