Billy the Kid season 3 episode 7 ending explained: Did Billy kill Pat Garrett?

Billy the Kid pushes his reimagined legend to a hard stop in episode 7, The Last Buffalo, by putting Billy face-to-face with Pat Garrett and refusing to blink. Billy the Kid is alive after the Maxwell house ambush, and the hour follows his hunt to settle a personal score before any larger crusade. Tom Blyth’s Billy faces Alex Roe’s Garrett, while Daniel Webber’s Jesse Evans functions as the conscience, repeatedly asking what a second life should be for. Series creator Michael Hirst keeps the focus narrow.

Pat is disgraced, broke, and clinging to a self-serving book. Governor Catron, spooked by whispers that Billy survived, throws up guards and hikes the bounty. The road leads Billy and Jesse to a prisoner escort in the wilderness, where a formal duel ends with a shot to Garrett’s heart. It is an ahistorical twist that the show telegraphs as intentional, clearing space for a finale that is less about who outdraws whom and more about what Billy decides to fight next.

Billy the Kid season 3 episode 7 ending explained: Did Billy really kill Pat Garrett, and what does that change?

The ending is a duel by choice, not chance. Billy rides to Garrett after tracking him through embarrassments that have become public record. Garrett has lost his badge and his grip, working odd jobs and reaching for the bottle while trying to prop up his legacy with a manuscript that no one respects.

Billy and Jesse trace him using the book’s breadcrumb trail and newspaper items that feed Garrett’s ego. The show makes Catron’s paranoia the season’s metronome. He raises the reward on Billy’s head and turns his residence into a fortress after admitting there is no proof that Billy died. That posture erodes Garrett’s last claim to heroism and sets the stage for a reckoning in open country.

When the prisoner convoy stalls, Billy steps out like a ghost. Garrett knows exactly who he is looking at. He tries to steer the moment toward a truce. Billy refuses to relitigate. The hour treats their final exchange as a ritual of consent. Billy lets Garrett draw first, then answers with a clean chest shot. That choice matters.

It is not an ambush in a dark room. It is a sanctioned correction that mirrors the wound Garrett once claimed to have delivered at Pete Maxwell’s. The series signals the fiction plainly. In real history, Garrett died years later under different circumstances. Here, the kill is a narrative pivot that ends a feud and frees the finale to confront Catron and the Santa Fe Ring without a dangling personal vendetta.

Two small lines frame the cost. Right before a risky approach, Jesse checks Billy’s impulse with a reminder about the stakes. Jesse remarked,

“You’re meant to be a dead man. Remember?”

That warning sits beside Garrett’s own tired bravado at a forwarding desk, where a clerk shrugs off his whereabouts because,

“if you’re a friend of his, then you should probably already know why.”

The episode uses those plain statements to show how far the legend has drifted from the men. Billy closes the distance and ends it.

How does the hour rebuild the legend before the duel?

The episode seeds its ending with a steady sequence of falls. Catron can’t shake the idea that Billy the Kid is alive. He fortifies his home and increases the bounty to seventy-five thousand dollars, a number meant to buy certainty when none exists. Emily watches him from a new distance after learning more about Edgar’s death. That isolation turns the governor into a man talking to his own fear. Across the map, Garrett hits rock bottom.

A blacksmith’s teenage daughter lures him toward scandal, then flips the story and gets him branded. The humiliation makes the papers. Billy and Jesse rest under the trees and use those clippings to triangulate his route. The writing underlines that Garrett’s book has become an accidental guide for the people he least wants to see. It is the show’s cleanest commentary on mythmaking. Stories build reputations. Stories also get you found.

That trail ends on a prisoner transfer where Garrett is working security. Billy the Kid reveals himself, and the legend collapses in front of the man who tried to cash it in. The hour’s few words are used carefully. Billy states the obvious with a flat “Yeah, I remember,” when reminded he is supposed to be dead. The duel is brief. The camera lingers only long enough to confirm that Billy allowed Garrett to draw first. The result is final. There is no speech, no gloating. The point is not the shot. The point is the choice.

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