“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.