“If this is the way the good lord wants it to end, I consider myself prepared.”
-Shelby
The end is coming. It’s so close now that I can smell it, and it smells like blood.
During the first two seasons of Justified you could sense the way things were shaping up; there was an order that the pieces were falling into. You might not have known exactly how it was going to play out, but there was a sense of inevitability and looming resolution.
The only thing that feels inevitable this season is chaos. This season doesn’t feel like it’s headed for a showdown or a shootout; this feels like a bomb is about to go off. That bomb’s name is Robert Quarles. There won’t be any defusing him; the best we can hope for is detonating him in an unpopulated area.
As last season wrapped up, I never had any overwhelming concern for anyone except for Raylan. Even with Ava being shot and Gary putting hitmen on Winona, it was still Raylan that the Bennetts were gunning for and so I never really worried that anyone else I cared about would get hurt (with apologies to Aunt Helen). This season, however, there is a palpable looming dread over the proceedings that grows by the week. The breakneck pace over the last couple of weeks isn’t helping any. It’s hard to relax when you don’t even have time to breathe.
Bottom line, I think we’re in store for some serious tragedy.
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves; this was another stellar episode and I’m feeling more and more that this is the best overall season of the show to date. Mags Bennett may have set season two as the benchmark from a character perspective, but episode for episode I think season three has a stronger pace, better plotting and higher stakes. There’s no fat on this show as this point. Every piece of story impacts the larger arc and there hasn’t been a wasted line of dialogue since the season began. This show is leaner than Limehouse’s ribs.
Case in point, this episode gets the election out of the way, gets Raylan some loving, gets Dickie out of jail, and probably gets Florida citrus growers a healthy spike in grapefruit juice sales. Seriously fellas, if your significant other tries to get you to drink more pineapple juice, just do it.
The election is dealt with quickly and though Quarles successfully rigs a victory in the comically corrupt popular vote, he forgets rule number one of facing off with a Crowder; even when you win, you lose. Boyd, on the other hand, after successfully disqualifying Napier with a brilliantly Crowderian legal loophole almost makes an unusual, and I fear costly, mistake. He underestimates Quarles badly. I think Boyd sees Quarles as a slicker mirror image; ambitious, morally flexible, and cunning. What Boyd misses is how terribly, terribly unhinged Quarles is and Boyd’s verbal devastation of Quarles outside the sheriff’s office, while entertaining, had the opposite effect than intended. Instead of driving Quarles out of Harlan for good, he is intent on not only staying, but destroying. This isn’t a man with moral flexibility, this is a man who laughs at the mere idea of morality.