This is a review. Thus, it is likely to contain spoilers. If you haven’t, as yet, found yourself at liberty to view this episode then consider yourself apprised of the potential jeopardy and proceed at your peril.
“The past is a shadow, always there behind you.”—Avery Markham
“Don’t eulogize the past till the future gets its turn.”—Boyd Crowder
“The past is a statement. The future is a question.”—Raylan Givens
“The past and the future are a fight to the death.”—Ava Crowder
Mother of mercy, this show is really hitting on all cylinders right now. Coming off the problem-laden fifth season, it was easy to think of Justified as a show on the downward slope of its lifespan. So when creator Graham Yost announced that Season Six would be the show’s swan song, it was similarly tempting for us to expect a final season that would simply slow to a halt due a lack of creative inertia.
We were so very, very wrong (fine, I was so very, very wrong).
I fully realize that I’m setting myself up for a massive hat-eating smorgasbord if things go sideways, but eight hours ought to be enough to base a wild prediction on. So here is mine: if the creative team can keep this increasingly large snowball rolling, the final season of Justified may end up being its best. I may be mixing my metaphors, but finding the proper mix is precisely what is allowing the show to run at full throttle, with no signs of braking or slowing.
I’ve talked for weeks about the tendency for final seasons of a show to become a sort of “Greatest Hits” medley, with returning guest stars and riffs on popular moments in the show’s history. And while Justified has brought back some familiar faces, most of the appearances have been organically woven into the storyline. As far as revisiting previous moments in the show, that’s hardly a new thing in Harlan County, where past, present, and future are so interwoven that it’s often difficult to tell one from the other. My point is that until this week, I hadn’t completely understood how much of a greatest hits season this was becoming, but in completely unexpected ways. The creative team isn’t just bringing back actors and characters that worked in previous episodes; they’re bringing back slivers of plot, nuggets of narrative technique, and echoes of emotional beats. It’s a terrifically dangerous thing to try, but the results are speaking for themselves.
What we are left with is a show that is less like a greatest hit, and more like an attempt to collect those hits into something greater, even if it means veering from well-trodden territory into uncharted waters. This week’s hour seemed very much like an overt declaration that change was at hand. Many of the emotional threads that have been dangling since early on in the show’s run finally finished weaving themselves into a tightrope of singular plot. Where there were many arcs, there is now only one, and it will pull us through to the end.
For starters, consider the quotes that began this review. The characters could scarcely converse with anyone this week without the words ‘future’ or ‘past’ cropping up at least once. Perhaps more important is precisely who was having those conversations.
As a means of shorthand, I have regularly used the terms ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ this season to indicate anyone on Raylan’s side for the former, and anyone in cahoots with Boyd or Markham for the latter. Now, I knew that it wasn’t quite that simple and I usually tried to sprinkle in at least a little talk about the grey and flexible moralities of most of the Harlan denizens, but I cannot think of any previous occasion in which a single episode so effectively and completely redrew the battle lines between the opposing sides. Actually, I suppose it’s more accurate to say that they simply erased the lines, and then chided us for thinking that there were ever any lines to begin with.
No statement is clearer than the pre-credits sequence in which Raylan quite literally destroys his past in the form of his father’s old footlocker. It is a powerful way to open, and it effectively sets the tone for the night. Arlo has been dead for a while now so it was important, I think, for the writers to remind us of just how close to the surface Raylan’s pain actually is. The scene also marks the end of Raylan’s indecision about leaving Harlan. His conversation with the undertaker (which happens to be the occupation Dewey Crowe attached to Raylan when they met in the pilot episode) also begins a running theme of the land itself as an entity to be reckoned with. Whether as a result of ancestral bodies literally mixing with the dirt or simply as a gothic metaphor, land as character has been a natural symbol over the course of the show and here it dovetails nicely with Raylan’s growing urgency to leave the state. He has seen how easily the ground has inched her grasp around similar men, and it is no wonder that he later terms Harlan as “quicksand,” when talking to Markham.
Which brings me to the strange bedfellows section of our review. In a feat of partner switching that would feel at home at any square dance, it seemed that everyone was willing to “keep their enemies closer” this week. Raylan enlists Markham’s help with multiple purposes in mind: to hunt down Ty Walker and also to get Boyd close enough to Markham’s vault to elicit a reaction from the last living Crowder. It is the first in a series of excellent two-person scenes (most often across a table). All of the actors seem energized at the moment and every line of dialogue seems honed for maximum effect. There are no wasted lines. Every word is load-bearing.
Walker, in his desperation, has sought out former adversaries Ava and Boyd. I hated to see Walker go, but we did get some excellent final Garret Dillahunt moments as he made threatening Ava (while implying that he had searched for and found all potential weapons in the vicinity) sound like Shakespeare. More interesting to me were his dying words as Raylan stood over him. If it wasn’t about the money for Walker, then what? Honor? Seems unlikely. We may never know, or it could be a key tidbit of information in the grand scheme of things. Time will tell, but that isn’t the only mystery we have on our hands.
I am probably fonder than most of the D.B. Cooper-inspired fourth season that made “Who is Drew Thompson?” into a season-long mystery on a show that usually solves its cases before the second commercial break. I myself thought the Drew Thompson whoizzit (whodunit didn’t really fit) was wildly compelling and I’ve been hoping for a similar arc this year. At first I thought that the ledger with Nazi origins in Schreiers’s safety deposit box held some hope, but that puzzle didn’t even last an episode and was mostly, I think, a quick nod to Boyd’s first season supremacist army. But lo and behold, the identity of Grady Hale’s betrayer has come to the rescue. It’s very Elmore Leonard to take a meaningless question you had long thought that you had the answer to, and wind up flipping it around to be very important, and very unsolved.
Better still, it gives us a reason to put Nick Searcy and Mary Steenburgen in a hotel room and let the magic happen. It cracks me up a little that the only Marshal that seems to be doing any work is the semi-retired one on wounded leave. It must really chafe Rachel that when the bad guys call and want to talk, they all seem to ask for Art. Seriously, it’s yet another deliriously entertaining scene with dynamite pacing and tremendous dialogue matched only by its delivery.
Where all of this takes us is to two more unbelievably good meetings between our big three. First up is Raylan and Boyd. Past seasons have doled out Raylan/Boyd moments sparingly to ramp up their impact. This season we get a clash of the titans at least once a week and somehow they keep getting better every time. with the emotion rising with each meeting. This time they finally just drop most of the nonsense and get down to it. I’m out to get you and you’re out to get me, so let’s stop putting this off because I have better things to do. Like I said earlier, this week was all about declaring a new status quo, and it appears to be a place of imminent violence with no sides to speak of.
Capping the night is what I fear will be among the final times that Raylan and Ava will be able to just talk to each other. It’s a shame that they spend most of it yelling at each other but none of that really matters. What matters is the aftermath, the realization of their natures, the acceptance of their shared history, and the regret of right choices made at the wrong times. With Raylan’s correct insight that Ava’s cover is burnt, their relationship can never be this way again.
The night ends with a fitting coda to Raylan’s pre-credits excavation of Arlo’s house. With a night-time visit to Arlo’s always previously forbidden man cave (it really cannot be any more literal), Raylan closes the door on a chapter of his life, and the audience closes the door on a chapter of the show. We’ve never seen a segment quite like it before; it was sparse and creepy and not only haunting, but possibly haunted as well. To my recollection, we have never seen a character hallucinate before or be visited by a spirit but in an episode that seemed so intent on staking out new ground, it seemed fitting. Besides, I just don’t think that anything, not his voice or a flashback shot, could have had the same chilling effect as watching Raylan’s flashlight beam swing around to catch Arlo’s gaunt, judging face. It was the best use of a returning guest star yet.
For most shows, their greatest hits are a collection of moments that can be brought into a clip show complete with a very special guest host. For Justified, greatest hits means pulling a theme from an early season, referencing a moment that worked later on, revisiting the mystery genre that buoyed a later year, and then meshing them all into a more perfect union. We know by now exactly how great the sum of its parts is. The only question that remains is if it can be something greater.
Some closing thoughts:
—Big kudos to director Gwyneth Horder-Payton. In a season of excellence, this episode stands out and I can tell you already that it stands up nicely to multiple viewings. She has a real feel for tone and pacing that elevates this kind of material.
—Jeff Fahey still hasn’t quite locked down his accent, but he’s so invested that it hardly matters. Plus, he’s developed this multi-purpose guttural grunt that works wonders. Besides, if we’re going to talk about questionable Southern accents, we should really start with Kevin Spacey.
—I loved absolutely everything about Tim’s obsession with Raylan’s lawn problem.
—The task of warning Raylan that things may not play out the way he thinks they will falls to Zachariah this week.
—Isn’t it awfully convenient that Wynn Duffy just happens to have a folder of info pointing away from himself and toward Markham as the identity of Grady’s betrayer? Katherine is getting increasingly suspicious, I think.
—Wonderful reference by Walker to the classic crime epic Heat when he’s talking to Boyd at Ava’s kitchen table. His “born to lose tattoo” line is from the scene where Deniro’s criminal character has coffee at a diner with Pacino’s cop character, right before all hell breaks loose. The topic? Except for what we do for a living, we’re actually pretty similar, but that won’t stop us from killing each other if we meet up in the middle of a heist. Sound familiar? It bears mention that one of the co-stars of Heat was Limehouse himself, Mykelti Williamson. It also bears mention that Williamson’s plotline involves the blonde wife of a bank robber, and hinges on her ability to covertly convey to her husband that she has been burnt and that he should make a run for it. I’m just saying.
—While I do think that the Arlo bookends worked in general, it did seem a bit shortsighted to hinge so much symbolism on Arlo’s key that he carried on his dogtag chain. It took a little away from the impact that it was something that we had never heard about before the start of the episode.
And now for some of the week’s best dialogue (Chris Provenzano and VJ Boyd really outdid themselves, so there are plenty of gems that I just don’t have room for):
“Did I interrupt a goat sacrifice?”
“Dude, what happened to your lawn?”
“How come no one down here is ever named Steve or Justin?”
Both uses of “the cheapest piece of shit available.”
Both uses of “shit apple redneck.”
“I happen to know Gordon Keith is not a vodka man.”
“I guess I’m all out of duct tape, Mr. Walker.”
“If you wanted to get hit in the front, you should have run toward me.”
“I gotta admit, there’s a small part of me that’s gonna miss this when it’s over.”
Jack McKinney is a professional camera salesman by day and a freelance filmmaker,Paste contributor, and amateur prestidigitator by night (and occasionally weekends). You can cyber-stalk him on “Twitter”:https://twitter.com/one_true_jack.