By the end of The Madison Episode 3, the Clyburns are in a very different place than they started. They came to Montana as strangers both to grief and to the land their husband and father adored, and three episodes in, they are beginning to become something else, at least a bit more present to one another.
The Madison follows the Clyburn family, trading New York City for the Montana wilderness after a devastating loss, and Episode 3 is the first of the series that firmly establishes that something real is changing in all of them.
The Madison Episode 3: Montana is slowly becoming home for the Clyburns
At the moment of the first episode, when patriarch Preston Clyburn and his brother Paul die in a plane crash, the family had no map of where to go. Preston had spent decades driving out to his cabin in the Montana Madison River Valley. His wife, Stacy, and their daughters had never visited. They were city mice: comfortable in Manhattan, and not at all used to life without indoor plumbing.
But grief will make you go places you would not otherwise go. Stacy, for example, was the one to call the shot and move his whole family west.
In The Madison Episode 3, it’s apparent everywhere. The family that arrived addicted to their phones, arguing at supper, is now spending nighttime hours laughing in the dark. In one of the show’s most subtle moments, and certainly one of its most revealing, everyone is cracking up, except for Stacy, at Abby’s kiss with a guy named Van.
It’s a small thing. But it means great things compared to the icy, distant scenes at the dinner table in the pilot.
Stacy’s grief is the heart of the story, and the gun changes everything
If there is one moment in The Madison Episode 3 that is going to set the tone for the entire season, it would be Stacy discovering a gun in Paul’s truck.
She had gone to retrieve the car from the sheriff’s office: a familiar, if painful task. When she looked in the center console, she saw the large gun. Later, she took it out again while she was alone in the truck. Neighbor Cade pulled over to ask if she was okay, and what ensued was one of the most poignant moments of the episode. Cade informed her that three members of his family had died by suicide. No scolding, just his truth, and with his truth, Stacy found the strength to put down the gun.
She finally calls her best friend, Liliana, and asks her to come to Montana good sign. She is calling out instead of hiding. But Gun is still out there, now in Cade’s hands. Taylor Sheridan doesn’t put a gun in your story just for a quiet little talk. We can expect this to come back into the storyline. Whether she uses it to kick start her healing or just as a warning shot in the wilds of Montana, is yet to be discovered.
Abby and Paige are both growing up
Abby (Beau Garrett) has been one of the most difficult characters to follow. Stacy, her mother, has been anxious about Abby’s decisions, and we see the reasons in The Madison Episode 3. We see flashbacks of Abby’s turbulent divorce and the discussion her mother and Preston are having about whether they should keep supporting her or allow her to stand on her own.
But things are changing. Abby is beginning to get comfortable with Van, the widowed parent of two kids who is clearly trying to do right by them. He is kind and dependable more than her ex-husband ever was, it seems. Things feel real between them, and the rest of her family appears to be rooting for whatever emerges.
More than anything else, Abby is becoming a better mother, as she sometimes has trouble doing. In a brief, crucial moment, in The Madison Episode 3, she scolded her daughters for cursing with the same tone and words she had been using with herself at the start of the episode. Growth isn’t usually that obvious. Sometimes it looks exactly like that.
Then there is Paige (Elle Chapman) and her husband Russell (Patrick J. Adams). They came to Montana fighting and completely ill-prepared. A few bee stings, an awkward swim in the river, and a few days in the real world have changed things for them. They are more relaxed now. More united. Paige, previously of a quiet command over Russell, is treating him more as an equal. In The Madison Episode 3, Montana is doing what New York never could.
The Madison Episode 3 – The land is the real healer
Taylor Sheridan has always utilized landscape as a character. In The Madison, Montana is doing some serious work on these people.
Stacy has been reading Preston’s journal since she arrived. Through his journal, she has come to know a side of him she never knew. She learns that a patch of golden grass reminded him of her hair, so he named it Stacy’s Valley. She learns how he made coffee with river water. She is mourning not only the man who lived but the man she missed. And somehow, being in the place he loved the most is helping her hold both versions of him.
The second half of the season will air on March 21 from Episodes 4 to 6. Those episodes will tell us if the Clyburn family will stay in Montana or go back to New York. By our guesses, one of them will stay right here. Abby has Van. The girls have the land. And Stacy still has a journal that is packed full of unread pages.
Edited by Sahiba Tahleel