If you dig down deep enough, you’re sure to find “A Thin Layer of Rock,” the title of the 10th episode of Season 3 of Big Sky: Deadly Trails. This mid-season finale reveals a character from Walter’s past, finds Jenny ready to acknowledge her feelings for Beau, and Sunny desperate to save her firstborn son. Here’s a recap of all the excitement from this episode.
“You’re a hell of a surprise,” Sunny Barnes (Reba McEntire) says to Paige (Madalyn Horcher), who surprised the owner of Sunny Day Excursions while she was alone at a campfire. Paige tells Sunny that she’s alive because Walter saved her, adding that she knows Sunny is his mother. Sunny shares that Walter is in jail and confessed to murdering her, accusing Paige of tricking her son into protecting her. Paige makes a deal with Sunny. She will go to the police station to prove that she’s alive if Sunny helps her get her journal back so she can retrieve the money she stole. Sunny agrees, vowing to do whatever it takes to free her son.
Deputy Poppernak (J. Anthony Pena) is early for the wedding of Skylar & Austin. While he tries some of the hors d'oeuvres, he meets Natalie (Anna Grace Barlow), who is a bridesmaid but is also friends with the groom. She shares that she and Austin are working on a project together after Poppernak comments on the neat stone in her ring, which she tells him is actually bone. Poppernak introduces himself by his first name, Moe. As he talks to Natalie, the bride runs out of the house screaming, covered in blood.“Austin’s dead,” Skylar (Katya Martín) yells, falling down. “Somebody killed him.”
Jenny Hoyt (Katheryn Winnick) and Beau Arlen (Jensen Ackles) enter the interrogation room to talk with Walter (Seth Gabel), spreading out the newspaper clippings that Cassie found in the cabin and asking if she murdered his parents. “They weren’t my parents,” he responds. Jenny asks about his adopted sister, who was never found after the fire and Walter says he protected her. “I set her free,” is how he answers Jenny when she asks where she is now. Since Walter was a child when the fire occurred, Jenny asks who helped him between then and now. “Was it Sunny and Buck Barnes?” Walter shakes his head, saying his proximity to them was a coincidence. Jenny nods her head, pointing out that he just admitted to knowing who they are. “You leave Sunny out of it,” Walter warns.
Shortly after, Cassie Dewell (Kylie Bunbury) joins Beau and Jenny to talk about their meeting with Walter. She speculates that Walter may be Buck’s accomplice, having a new hunch that he may be behind a lot of this. From the newspaper reports, they know the missing girl who lived with Walter is named Meredith, and they decide to try to find her in hopes of more answers. The meeting is interrupted when Jenny answers a phone call from Pop, who tells her about the murder. Beau asks Jenny if she can handle this alone because he wants to try and solve the mystery of Walter quickly. As Jenny leaves, Beau jokes that Jenny gets to be Pop’s plus one to a wedding and when she asks if he’s jealous, he says “Yeah, I wanna be Pop’s plus one.”
At her home, Sunny fills her purse with bags of beef jerky and bottles of water. She’s about to leave when Buck (Rex Linn) enters, asking his wife why she went back to camp last night when they have workers to tend to the grounds. She says she remembers that he left some saddles on a fence and went to get them to save him a trip. “You sure that’s all?”, Buck suspiciously asks, reminding Sunny that they agreed to put Walter and Paige behind them. He hugs her and tells her everything is going to be fine as he sees bags of jerky and bottles of water sticking out of her purse.
Jenny arrives at the home where the wedding was to take place, looking at Austin’s body as photos are taken of the crime scene. Pop fills her in on the facts, that Skylar is the one who found the body and she was accompanied by a wedding photographer. The coroner believes the time of death was in the early morning, The entire wedding party spent the night in the house following the rehearsal dinner, during which the father of the bride got into an argument with the groom. Jenny asks Pop to send all of the wedding guests home, but keep the entire wedding party there for questioning. Asking about the home, Jenny learns it’s the groom’s family’s home and that he was going to inherit their lucrative cattle ranch.
At Dewell & Hoyt, Beau and Cassie meet with Denise (Dedee Pfeiffer) and Emily (Cree Cicchino), who is interning there. Searches for Meredith Levinson have come up empty, but Denise suggests that they check name change records. Emily runs the search and cracks the mystery of Walter’s missing adopted sister, whose name is now Madelyn Lowe. “Smart girl,” Beau compliments his daughter.
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Poppernak brings Jenny to talk with Eli (Geoffrey Rivas), the father of the bride and his friend. She asks about the fight and he shares that Austin’s family made his daughter sign a prenuptial agreement last night, which upset him. He had no objection to the marriage itself, but that really bothered him so they had a fight in front of all the guests.
Sunny goes to the Blue Fox Diner to meet with Tonya (Jamie-Lynn Sigler) and Donno (Ryan O’Nan), telling them that Paige is alive and offering them the chance to share half the money if they help her retrieve her journal pages and get to safety to decipher it. “What’s in it for you?”, Tonya asks Sunny, who tells her it’s personal. They shake hands on the deal, but Tonya pulls Sunny in to warn her not to mess with them. “Likewise,” Sunny replies, tugging Tonya towards her.
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Avery (Henry Ian Cusick) goes to a store and looks at the gun counter, assisted by a clerk named Sue (Otgadahe Whitman-Fox). He tells her he needs a gun now and she tells him there’s paperwork and a background check, but seems eager to help him. Avery says he needs one that’s easy to use and she pulls out a Walther PPK, sharing that it’s the same type of gun James Bond originally used. She offers it to him for $650, with bullets and a shooting lesson included. “I’ll take it,” Avery agrees.
Skylar is in tears as she meets with Jenny and Pop, worried that her dad is a suspect. Jenny asks Skylar about the prenup and she says it wasn’t an issue for her, adding that she doesn’t care about the land, cattle, or “Anything more valuable.” Jenny asks what would be more valuable than land and cattle. “A dinosaur,” she says. Austin had found a dinosaur fossil on the property and was going to unveil it at the wedding, planning to name it Skylar after her. Jenny asks for more information on Austin’s archeology interests and Skyler shares that he didn’t know much, so he called a friend to come help. “What can you tell us about this friend?”, Jenny asks.
Beau and Cassie arrive at the home of Madelyn Lowe, knocking on the door and introducing themselves when Madelyn (Abby Pierce) answers. She steps outside and closes the door to talk to them privately and when Beau offers his condolences for her deceased parents, she says “They weren’t my parents.” Cassie shares that Walter is in police custody for alleged murder and asks about the fire. “Walter set the fire, but the Walter I know wasn’t a killer,” Madelyn defends. When Cassie points out that their adopted parents were killed in the fire, she says it was self-defense. Their adopted parents were beating and starving them. “He did what he did so that we could escape.” Cassie asks what happened when they fled the home and she shares that Walter’s birth mother arrived to pick them up, suggesting that Madelyn change her name. She can’t remember the name of the woman but recalls that she had a lovely singing voice while they drove. “Oh, and she had the most beautiful red hair.”
Avery’s hotel room is littered with empty mini-alcohol bottles. He calls Carla (Angelique Cabral), who answers the phone while driving. “I love you, Carla, and whatever happens, I want you to know that,” he says as he loads the gun. She suspects something is wrong and asks what he’s doing. “Whatever it takes to make you and Emily safe,” he says. His tone scares her and he reaffirms his love before hanging up. He begins to cry as he looks at the loaded gun.
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Buck visits Sunny Day Excursions and notices the saddles Sunny said she picked up are still on the fence where he left him. He lets out a sigh and calls out to ask if anyone is on the property. His call wakes up Paige, who was asleep in one of the tents. She gets out of bed and mores to the flap to peek out, instantly seeing Buck and jumping back in terror. Buck is staring at the tent she’s in.
Jenny arrives at the corner of the property where the dinosaur was found, stepping over caution tape as she looks around. A man jumps from behind her, pushing her into a cleared pit of land, causing Jenny to roll on her back and draw her gun in response. “This is private property, who are you?”, the man asks. He introduces himself as Carson Price (Callan McAuliffe), Austin’s best man and the friend he called to help excavate the fossil. Jenny asks why he didn’t stay at the house like the entire wedding party was told to do and he shares that he wanted to protect their find, worried that someone will try and steal it. He takes Jenny to the fossil they’re digging up, which appears to be a nearly complete T-Rex. She asks about his prior fossil experience and it’s as simple as he found a dinosaur tooth once and sold it for $300, estimating that this find is worth millions. Jenny asks where Carson was that morning and he says he was asleep in his room at the house. When she asks if anyone can verify that, he says no, he had his own room and was alone.
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Beau and Cassie discuss what they learned from Madelyn on their drive back to Helena, both suspecting that Sunny Barnes is Walter’s mother. Beau asks Cassie if Cormac knows and she isn’t sure. Carla calls Beau freaking out about Avery, asking him to meet her at his hotel room.
Back at the site of the canceled wedding, Poppernak makes a comment about how much money was wasted and how he will never marry. Jenny says she would do it again for the right guy, prompting Pop to tease if she already met him. Through talking with the contractors, Pop learned that a florist saw someone leave the groom’s room that morning and remembers that they wore a jacket with a reflective mountain logo on it. Jenny just saw one like that… on Carson!
Sunny returns to camp with Tonya and Donno, escorting them to the tent she left Paige in only to find that she’s gone. Donno accuses Sunny of lying to them and Tonya draws her gun, pointing it at Sunny. She asks Donno to go look for Paige. “If he can’t find Paige we are all in big trouble, especially you,” Tonya threatens.
Jenny brings Pop to Carson and she shares that someone was seen leaving Austin’s room in a jacket just like his. When she asks Pop to handcuff him, Carson says he might know who it was. “Austin wasn’t always the most faithful,” he spills, “I thought he’d ended things with her, but maybe not.” Carson reveals that Austin was having an affair with Skylar’s best friend Natalie, saying that it was the two of them who found the dinosaur. Jenny and Pop now speculate that Natalie killed Austin, upset that she had no claim to the dinosaur she helped find.
Cormac (Luke Mitchell) comes to see Cassie at Dewell & Hoyt and as she prepares to tell him what she believes about Walter’s lineage, Cormac shares that he found out yesterday. “She’s been lying to me my entire life, but she’s my mother,” he says, promising that he didn’t know about this earlier. Cormac holds Cassie’s hand. “I want you to know that whatever you find, I’m my own man.”
Beau and Carla stand together in Avery’s hotel room, several laptops still in place. Beau notices the bullets and comments that Avery got a gun, but Carla says he hates guns. They begin to look around and Beau finds the pages that were torn from Paige’s journal with the encryption key on it. He hugs Carla as he promises to find Avery and vows to protect her and Emily.
Jenny and Popernak return to the dig sight to find Skylar holding a pick axe next to a pit. As they get closer, they see that Natalie is in the pit, a bleeding wound on her head. “They weren’t just sleeping together, Moe,” Skylar sobs, “They were in love.” She reveals that in the prenup paperwork, she found all the details of the dinosaur, which Austin was going to name Natalie, not Skylar. As Pop distracts Skylar, Jenny dives into the pit to check on Natalie and finds that she’s still alive, calling for backup. Pop tackles Skylar to the ground, handcuffing her. “I’m not sorry,” she snaps.
That night, Jenny pulls up to Beau’s Airstream trailer with a 6-pack of beer, saying it was a rough day and she wanted to see him. Beau brushes a strand of hair away from Jenny’s face and behind her ear, but the tender moment is interrupted by headlights. Jenny looks over and sees Carla and Emily arriving with overnight bags. “I asked them to come here and stay with me,” he tells her, sharing that he thinks Avery is going after the stolen money. Jenny offers the beer to Carla, saying she probably needs it more, and excuses herself. As she goes back to her truck, Jenny sees Beau hugging his ex-wife, comforting her as he brings them into his cramped living quarters for the night. Jenny’s eyes seem watery.
In The Boot Heel, Tony (West Liang) and his henchman Winston (Alex Fernandez) wait for Avery, who is late. At last, Tony’s phone rings. “Where’s the money?”, he asks. “Somewhere safe,” comes Avery’s response from a car. He says he wants to renegotiate their deal for a larger finder’s fee and guaranteed safety for his family. Tony hangs up the call, looking at Winston and saying “I don’t renegotiate.” Winston is given orders to track Avery and his family down. From his car, Avery removes the SIM card from his phone and throws it out the window, rendering his phone untrackable.
Crestfallen Jenny returns home to discover that her front door is ajar. She draws her gun and nudges the door open, seeing a trail of bloody bandages dotting her floor. She takes a few steps, turning into her living room. Her jaw drops. “Mom?”
Buck has abducted Paige, who is bound and gagged in his attic. “I don’t know why you thought it was a good idea to stick around,” he shakes his head at her as his doorbell rings. It’s Cassie, who calls inside between knocks to say she just wants to talk. Buck quietly moves to the other side of the door, holding a sharp knife at the ready. Just as his hand reaches to turn the doorknob, the screen goes dark.
We will have to wait almost a month to find out what happens next, but it looks like Rosanna Arquette will be making another cameo as Jenny’s mother Gigi. While we don’t know much about what happens when the show resumes on January 4th, there was a blurb in this episode description that seems to have been cut. It said, “A deadly attack at the diner changes everything.” My guess is it was just too much excitement for one episode, so perhaps a deadly diner attack is where we’ll pick things up in the new year. Y’all come back in 2023 for more recaps of Big Sky: Deadly Trails. Until then, you can relive the mysteries through our recaps or streaming on Hulu.