“You must be the one they call Devil.” -Quarles
Without the capitalization, it would be difficult to tell from that quote just which Justified character Quarles is talking to. Harlan County has devils and gray-souled sinners in abundance. Saints are a little thin on the ground.
Quarles only joins us for the opening scene this week, but his proposal to Devil proves to be the catalyst that turns Devil’s bubbling discontent with Boyd’s leadership into a full-blown boil. By episode’s end, Boyd’s crew will be one man lighter. For Quarles, this must have seemed like a win-win (much like sending Glen Fogle after Raylan). If Boyd ends up one soldier shy, then great. If Devil succeeds, all the better. As Quarles so eloquently yells, “Give me a goddamned amen.”
Amen.
The primary focus tonight is the flight of Dickie Bennett and Dewey Crowe from the high security confines of the penitentiary. Unfortunately for Dickie and Dewey, their escape occurs under duress from greedy guard, Ash, who is after the Bennett money stash. As we learned last week, said stash is being kept by the community banker, Ellstin Limehouse. Limehouse is rapidly becoming this season’s most interesting new character. While Quarles is entertaining enough, he’s no more complex than a shark; deadly, but predictable. You would no more try to reason with Quarles than you would a hammerhead. Limehouse, like so many other Harlan-ites (Harlanians?) isn’t evil so much as a product of his raising. He has a code, but it is his alone. Part of the fun of the show is in figuring out just where those codes begin and end.
This week we learned that for Limehouse his code begins at beating up abusive husbands (including Arlo) and ends somewhere around killing two men to save Dickie. Whether those two acts are at the top or bottom of the scale of virtues is a question for another day.
Art, Tim, Ava, Winona and the rest of the secondary all take the week off as the story streamlines down to the major players. Rachel returns to partner up with Raylan this week and actually gets some lines of meaningful dialogue. Pretty much all the dialogue on Justified is meaningful, but in this case I’m reminded of how well the show works when everything flows through Raylan. We learn things as he learns them, and our perception is often colored by his reactions. Rachel and Raylan have a nice dynamic here, and the way the two of them play off each other in their conversation with Limehouse (and how it echoes with past events) makes Rachel more relevant than she’s been since season one. The issue of race and its importance in gaining a suspect’s trust is raised but not belabored. A lesser show would have jackhammered that point home. A lesser show would also pit Raylan as an outsider in his office and have numerous subplots about how none of the other marshals can trust him. Justified neatly avoids both of these pitfalls and keeps the focus where we like it, on the characters.
Part of the genius of Justified is that this is a fully realized universe. These characters didn’t just come into being when our story started. This is a county and a people with generations of backstory and texture, and all of it is interwoven. Every week one more connection gets made and another thread gets added. The knowledge that Raylan and Limehouse met years earlier when Limehouse gave Arlo a beating for trying to cross the tracks and bring Mrs. Givens home doesn’t move the story forward, but it does pile on meaning to multiple characters and relationships. It affects how we see the Raylan/Arlo relationship. It affects how we see Limehouse. It even affects how we remember last week’s moment of eye contact between Limehouse and Arlo on the bridge. These aren’t characters just being drawn or written; these are characters being sculpted.
The payoff for the viewer is that with weight comes momentum. At this point, every conversation is so densely packed with subtext that every word seems to pull the story forward a little bit and there is a palpable sense of picking up steam.
At episode’s end, the season arc proper is about to begin. All the pieces are finally on the board (now that Dickie is out of prison) and the strategies are set. It will be interesting to see where Dickie goes from here. The family fortune is a fraction of what it once was, and the only power he ever truly wielded was based on simply being a Bennett. His efforts to exert any personal authority have consistently failed miserably (assaulting Raylan with a bat doesn’t count since he was only able to do it once Wade Messer strung Raylan up). Whether being isolated, angry and desperate makes Dickie more dangerous or less is yet to be determined.
Finally, we bid farewell to Boyd’s symbolically named henchman, Devil. Never a true foil, Devil was a mirror of sorts for Boyd. He was what less observant opponents might mistake Boyd for: uneducated, racist and blindly ambitious. Boyd is, of course, none of those things (except racist when it suits his needs) so it was fitting that Boyd executed Devil not with malice, but with resigned pity. Boyd is constantly searching for glimpses of himself in others. With his true twin Raylan on the other side of the law, I think Boyd hoped that Devil might prove himself a worthy apprentice and eventually, an heir. When faced with Devil’s betrayal, Boyd’s response is not anger; it is disappointment. His final moment of mercy is as telling as it is chilling. Gutshot and writhing in pain, Devil asks for and receives the closest thing Harlan County has to last rites—a gun pressed to his forehead and a final blessing.
“You close your eyes, son.”
Amen.
Some closing thoughts:
-In a sea of excellent scenes, the standout was Raylan’s reunion with Loretta. Kaitlyn Dever plays her as 16 going on 47. Despite her age, she is the one character that always gets the better of Raylan. He just can’t handle her. This is interesting since she is portrayed as being extremely maternal (the fact that she scolds one of her off-camera foster siblings is a perfect example). Given Raylan’s feelings toward his own mother and the constant pain of her absence, it is a brilliantly conceived relationship and the execution is even better than the conception.
-No week would be complete without a quality Boyd/Raylan interaction, and we get another winner this week. I’m not sure who is happier when Raylan leaves the bar, Boyd because he got to sell out the prison guard and maybe keep Dickie away from the money or Raylan because he got Boyd to help. Regardless, those two are never happier than when they’re within 90 degrees of each other’s moral compass.
-Pop culture reference sidenote: Just before Raylan enters the bar (cantina?), Boyd makes a Star Wars reference in that he ‘feels a disturbance in the force’. This is the latest of such references including the clever ‘Greedo shoots first’ commercial before the second season. I mention it only as something people like me (read: nerds) can keep an eye and ear out for down the line.