By: Brandon Wolfe
After a season beset by a certain narrative aimlessness, ‘Justified’ spends its penultimate episode moving its pieces together for its final play, and the positions many of the characters find themselves in this week are tantalizingly dark. As the heroes, villains and those in between march toward the season finale, none find themselves in a good place, and even those with the upper hand have come by it at great cost to their souls.
In the aftermath of Picker’s death by explosion, Wynn Duffy is interrogated by the henchmen of Mexican cartel big-shot Mr. Yoon, who is seeking Boyd Crowder’s head (skin, technically) due to the mess made in Mexico several episodes back. Duffy claims that he has killed Boyd and can deliver Boyd’s accomplice, Darryl Crowe Jr., to the men in exchange for sparing Duffy’s own life. Duffy turns to Boyd himself for help tracking Darryl down, which he feels is fair considering his role in getting Boyd out of the crosshairs of the cartel.
It happens that Darryl is being sought by numerous parties this week. Raylan and the marshals’ office are still bent on nailing Darryl to the wall over his shooting of Art, which he has attempted to pin on Kendal, his innocent, underage nephew. Raylan isn’t sure how to proceed with getting Darryl when Boyd walks into the office and offers to assist in exchange for the complete expungement of his criminal record. Boyd, whose full motives are left murky this week, agrees to help ensnare Darryl using the bricks of heroin that Boyd still has in his possession from the ill-fated deal in Mexico as bait. Boyd gets his men to push Darryl toward the merchandise with the expectation that the marshals will catch him red-handed.
But Darryl, true to form, enlists sister Wendy to grab the drugs on his behalf. Though she has serious doubts about the plan, she agrees, and is apprehended by Raylan, who is forced to move to a Plan B where Boyd wears a wire to get Darryl to confess to his crimes, a plan Boyd only agrees to after he is spotted by the cartel members, cluing them in to his decidedly non-dead status.
When Darryl agrees to a sit-down with Boyd to hand over the drugs, both men are interrupted by a desperate Dewey Crowe, who barges in with a gun in each hand and demands the contents of Boyd’s bag, but not before confessing to a laundry list of crimes in front of the open ears of the marshals, crimes which unfortunately are not the ones for which they were seeking a confession.
When it looks like Boyd will not be able to deliver and Darryl will skate by yet again, Raylan comes up with a Plan C. He convinces the notoriously hard-nosed Judge Reardon to agree to pull some strings and have Kendal tried as an adult for his crimes, under the hopes that putting the screws to the youngest member of their clan might be the thing that finally gets Darryl or Wendy to do the right thing.
Meanwhile, Ava’s situation in prison is growing ever worse. Though she’s picked up some protection from some of her fellow inmates due to her murder of Judith, her enemies are growing more bloodthirsty. They kill Ava’s closest confidante, Penny, and then set Ava up as a snitch, making it only a matter of time before the hammer drops on Ms. Crowder. Ava reaches out to Raylan for protection, but he no longer requires her assistance due to Boyd’s voluntary cooperation, and thus cannot (or will not) do much to help her.
The biggest thing this episode does well is to put Raylan and Boyd into each other’s orbits again, something the season has frustratingly denied us all year. It’s accepted universally that ‘Justified’ is never better than when these two halves of the same coin are bouncing off of each other, and that is definitely the case this week. However, the two men have grown testier in their interactions in recent years as their goals have become more and more diametrically opposed, and this episode culminates with a truly hostile exchange where Boyd announces in front of the other marshals Raylan’s role in last season’s murder of Detroit mobster Nicky Augustine after Raylan bitterly denies Boyd the purging of his file. When Boyd walks out of the office into an uncertain future, it does seem that the days of these two being friendly foes might have officially come to a close.
The other major point of interest is Raylan’s plan to risk Kendal’s future just to get his man. Raylan has always been a somewhat morally grey figure. Not an antihero, exactly, but someone fully willing to break some rules if it means defeating his enemies. We’ve seen some darkness in Raylan before, perhaps most notably with his culpability in the Augustine execution, but risking a child’s life and safety in exchange for getting Darryl in handcuffs is almost certainly the most merciless act we’ve yet seen from the man, who has always had a major soft spot for the welfare of children due to his own troubled upbringing. It’s an intriguing wrinkle for our hero and it will be interesting to see how willing he is to see this gamble through if things don’t go as he expects.
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