“Are you going to have peace of mind when this is all over?”-Elstin Limehouse
“I don’t believe in fate. I can’t believe in fate, not anymore.”-Boyd Crowder
This will be a shorter write-up than usual so I thought it deserved two opening quotes. Frankly, point for point there is less to analyze this week. With all the excitement last week, it’s understandable that the creative team would give us a bit of a respite. Only on Justified would an episode that features several multi-person standoffs, a couple of shootouts, and, if I’m not mistaken, a quintuple cross (the rarest of animals in the wild world of negotiations) be considered a respite. Yet even with all that going on, compared to last week’s outing this hour felt positively leisurely.
Until the end, that is.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s talk about what worked. Abby Miller held up her end of the Emmy process with a performance that may be the coup de grace of an already stunning season. Her early scene with Mykelti Williamson’s Limehouse is a quiet triumph. Both characters show sides that are variations of what we’ve seen before but stray just enough to expand our view of them. Limehouse, for instance, is as slippery as they come when he is out and about in his hill kingdom. Behind closed doors with the women he protects is another story. His respect seems genuine even to the point that the hat he wears so proudly as part of his finely tuned image is graciously removed even in a whore’s presence. Have we ever seen Elstin lie to a woman? I think not.
Ellen May is a different story. In fact, she truly seems to be from a different story. She stands apart from every other character on the show and this episode is entirely about that separation. Every other character in this episode is actively trying to affect the outcome of their life. Whether it’s Boyd and Ava bargaining for Ellen May in order to silence her, Raylan and the marshals trying to get there first or Elstin trying to outwit both sides, everyone is trying to control their own destiny.
Except for Ellen May.
Only Ellen May, the bottom rung on the social (and moral) ladder has the inner peace and fortitude to accept that her life will unfold as it is meant to. I know this is just a weekly television recap on a website, so I am not, at this late date, going to start pretending that there is some great statement about the plight of the modern man to be found in hour-long chunks Tuesday nights on the FX network. Even if there is, I doubt I am the guy to find it.
That said, Justified does like to raise questions about the lives we make for ourselves and the paths we choose to follow, particularly how far we follow the paths that others (often our parents) choose for us. To this uneducated observer, it does seem curious that the only character who is calm within the storm and who seems able to gracefully accept that whatever path she is following must automatically be the right one is the only character on the show with unknown parentage. Ellen May is, for all purposes that we’ve been privy to, an orphan. Her only baggage is her own, and she packs light.
The dialogue is as dependably solid as ever with an “intuit” here and an “eccentricities” there, but let’s face facts; you could throw a dart at an episode list every season, submit whichever hour you hit and win a writing Emmy. So this week I’ll just put the highlights in the closing thoughts and we’ll move on to the bad end of Colton Rhodes.
Joelle Carter has gotten better by the minute going all the way back to the pilot, and she skillfully walks a tough line in this episode. We have to believe that there is murder in her heart when she snaps at Limehouse for letting Ellen May go free and later we must believe that her true heart is the one that can’t pull the trigger. As Elstin said, we are the choices we make. It’s the usual lovely work from Carter and what really sells it is the small crack in her voice when she apologizes to her true love for being too good a person to save herself.
Colt has no such illusions.