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, b...
