TV Review: Justified Series Finale - "The Promise"

Hat's off to a great series.

Review by Brandon Wolfe

For nearly every year of its run, Justified has ended each season with some version of the song “You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive,” written by Darrell Scott. The song, a mournful ballad about the oppressively magnetic pull of Harlan, a hard-luck coal-mining town in eastern Kentucky, lent the series an air of impending dread from the start, seemingly laying out the immutable path its characters were on. The song's recurrence, year by year, seemed to drill home the point deeper and deeper that when the end comes, there is going to be a body count and nobody’s ever after is going to come happily.

Harlan’s inescapable grasp was set up in the pilot episode of Justified, when our hero, Deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant), is sent back to the sleepy hamlet, his hometown, from Miami as penance for gunning down a sleazy kingpin. That shooting, Raylan claimed, was justified, as the man pulled his weapon first, but that’s a generous read on the situation even if it is technically accurate. Raylan, a man out of time possessing an old-fashioned gunslinger mentality, gave his opponent 24 hours to leave town, like the sheriff in an old Western, effectively engendering their fateful showdown. Harlan, the site of a lifetime of bad memories, is the last place Raylan wants to be. It means confronting a past he was desperate to escape, in the form of his mean old cuss of a father, his ex-wife who works in the same building and his childhood friend, wily outlaw Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins). It also creates a lot of workplace friction between Raylan and his new boss Art Mullen (Nick Searcy) and fellow marshals Tim Gutterson (Jacob Pitts) and Rachel Brooks (Erika Tazel), who are used to doing things above-board, as opposed to how they did things in the late 1800s.

Justified was based on the short story “Fire in the Hole” by Elmore Leonard and was reverently faithful to the author’s sensibilities, which gravitated toward crime stories about wisecracking heroes, bonehead villains, colorful dialogue and an overall air of breezy mayhem. Many shows are content to saddle their characters with leaden dialogue and mirthless exposition, but Justified was deeply in love with language, with kicking back and listening to its characters toss witty down-home asides at each other like lit firecrackers. The series cultivated a convivial vibe among adversaries, a sort of “Morning, Sam/Morning, Ralph” air of amiability between foes. Nowhere was this more evident than in the relationship between Raylan and Boyd, two men from similarly tumultuous backgrounds who bonded while digging coal in their youth, but now find themselves on opposite sides of the law. The characters are constantly knocking up against each other given their stations in life, yet the bond they once forged remains, imbuing their interactions and threats with an undercurrent of affable playfulness. No matter how many times the two men butted heads, their familiarity always alleviated much of the hostility.

That relationship starkly changed in Justified’s final season, as Raylan was charged by his superiors with the task of finally taking down Boyd once and for all, using the outlaw’s fiancé (and Raylan’s old flame) Ava (Joelle Carter) as a reluctant informant while Boyd was busying himself attempting to grab one last big score from local top-dog criminal Avery Markham (Sam Elliott). Suddenly Raylan’s demeanor toward Boyd, whom he had always previously viewed as more a secondary nuisance than archnemesis, grew extremely hostile and he became laser-focused on putting down the man who had inexplicably become his white whale. The shift was jarring, and it seemed like the show had opted to turn a blind eye to the fact that some of its finest moments were when Raylan and Boyd showcased their prickly camaraderie, and occasionally backed each other up and saved one another’s lives. The show had always painted the two as neither friend nor enemy, but as occupying some nebulous gray area in between. The eleventh-hour decision to recalibrate them into more simplistic “hero vs. villain” roles, making the charismatic and likable Boyd more outwardly villainous than ever before for good measure, had felt profoundly disappointing as the season progressed.

This leads us to “The Promise,” which stands as one of the best series finales in several years, if not one of the best ever. The episode opens with Ava in the clutches of Markham, Boyd on the lam leaving a trail of bodies in his wake, Raylan in custody for defying the higher-ups in his quest to find Boyd, and millions of dollars in the wind. The episode appears to set up a climactic showdown between our hero, our antihero and our villain before leading to one final showdown between Raylan and Boyd to see which will walk away intact. What’s stunning about “The Promise” is how it pays off these things abruptly in mid-episode and then leaves us completely in the dark on how it will fill up its second half. After Markham is felled in a hail of bullets, Raylan arrives on the scene and attempts to manufacture another fateful showdown, this time with his childhood friend turned sworn enemy. So determined is Raylan to put Boyd down that he kicks an errant firearm over to the man upon learning that his present weapon is out of ammo. But Boyd won’t play ball. He maintains that if Raylan wants to kill him so desperately, he won’t be an active participant in that. After some consternation, Raylan opts to keep his gun holstered and take Boyd away lawfully. Then, while transporting Ava back to her fate in jail, Raylan is confronted by Boon, Markham’s similarly trigger-fingered henchman, who finally gets the showdown with Raylan that he’d been itching for, and which he does not survive. While a wounded Raylan is indisposed, Ava drives off with the marshal’s car.

It’s here where “The Promise” further subverts whatever expectations we brought with us into it as it flashes ahead four years. Raylan has relocated to Florida to be with Winona, his ex-wife, and his daughter Willa, as he had planned to all season after Boyd was taken care of. However, we learn that Raylan’s attempt to rekindle things with Winona has yet again failed to pan out, as we meet her new beau. Still, Raylan is an active part of their lives and seems happy. One day, a tip comes in that someone fitting Ava’s description was glimpsed in the background of a news photo and Raylan finally tracks Ava down, finding that she has settled into a quiet life in California and now has a toddler fathered by Boyd. Ava begs Raylan not to take her in and to never let Boyd know about his son. Raylan grudgingly agrees and that keys up the final scene of the series, with Raylan sitting down for a prison visit with a born again again Boyd to sell him a lie about Ava’s death by car accident to ensure that he never seeks her out in the future. Then, with enough time having passed since the chaos that enacted a war between them, the two men settle into their previously displaced friendliness, with Boyd even getting Raylan to admit that his visit was at least partially motivated by the marshal’s sentimental desire to see his old buddy again. Because, despite everything, they dug coal together, a bond in Harlan County that transcends all else.

That scene beautifully corrects what had seemed to be a fundamental season-long miscalculation of what was so unique about the relationship between Raylan and Boyd all along, and is the most satisfying final note that Justified could have struck. The entire season had seemed to point toward an apocalyptic ending of violent bloodshed, one in which Boyd especially seemed unlikely to survive. For the series to allow all of its characters to not only live, but to achieve the happiest possible endings they each could have logically expected (even Jere Burns’ slippery secondary villain, Wynn Duffy, got out to lead a life surfing in Fiji, we’re told) was a welcome surprise, and the overall unpredictability of “The Promise” is what makes it so strong as a series finale. The finale of Breaking Bad, while satisfying, felt a little check-the-boxes inevitable, with most developments playing out more or less exactly as one might have expected. The thrill of “The Promise” is in its refusal to allow us to see where it’s heading. By burning through what was expected to be its blood-soaked climax with a half-hour still left on the clock, the finale plunged us into uncertainty before delivering an incredibly satisfying denouement that essentially no one had even considered, and it did it all within a standard episode’s length. That’s how you end a show.

Honestly, it was probably time for Justified to hang up its hat. This final season has been strong, a substantial improvement over the aimlessly misbegotten fifth season, but also exuded the feeling that the show was starting to lose its juice. We had seemed to run up against the limits of Raylan as a character, one who, while fun, only really ever evidenced two modes: cucumber-cool or simmeringly angry. The large collection of characters engaging in double and triple crosses to fulfill their competing agendas was a well the show had gone to a bit too often. Markham never really emerged as one of the show’s greatest villains, in spite of how unsettling a clean-shaven Sam Elliott’s mouth looked. Ava, though she was the third lead, always seemed to struggle for something substantial to do. Also, the season never quite solved the problem that plagued the whole series of what to do with Tim and Rachel. The show usually did a decent job of keeping Art in the mix, but the other marshals never really carved out firm roles on the show, which was always too focused on Raylan, Boyd and the myriad Harlan shenanigans to integrate them properly. This was especially troubling with Rachel, who always felt like a glorified extra in spite of Tazel’s name appearing in the opening credits for all six seasons (somehow, Rachel getting promoted to interim chief deputy this season resulted in even less screentime for her). Tim fared slightly better, mostly because Jacob Pitts was frequently handed killer one-liners, but never rose above the level of second banana. When Raylan has his final farewell with his co-workers in the finale, it’s the least warmest goodbye in television history, and that actually felt about right.

Justified was well-received as a series, but it never quite earned its place among television’s most prestigious shows. It rarely had much luck with the Emmys and its ratings were always fairly earthbound. Though critically acclaimed, it never had a ton of buzz, and good luck trying to find many people who’ve ever seen it. And truthfully, it was a level down from heartbreaking masterpieces like Breaking Bad or The Shield, content to be more an entertaining lark than something more substantial. Yet it quietly showed up and did great work for six years (well, five years; not much great work was done in that fifth season), standing as a rare bit of perennial joy in the desolate post-holiday winter months (it’s basically been the only reason to tolerate January for some time). And in its final hour, it proved something that didn’t seem conceivable – that it is, in fact, possible to leave Harlan alive. Who knew that was even an option?

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