A review of tonight’s “Justified” coming up just as soon as I preserve 18 inches of my intestine in lucite…
“Everyone’s capable of doing something like this, Winona.” -Raylan
When I got to the end of last week’s episode, I half-assumed, half-hoped that the business with the stolen $100 bill was finished. That story felt very much like “Justified” at its most self-contained – get in, let Raylan make a quip or 3, get out – and if I was wrong, I wasn’t so sure I wanted to see Raylan have to play Vic Mackey for another hour and clean up a huge mess in between doing his regular job.
But damn if I wasn’t hooked throughout “Save My Love,” an extremely tense – and at times darkly comic – hour demonstrating the many different ways the world had of letting Raylan and Winona know it wasn’t going to be easy to put that money back.
It helps that they were able to largely confine the action to one setting, since Winona, the Marshals, Judge Reardon (a welcome return for Stephen Root) all work in the same place where the money belonged. I don’t know if this was intended as a bottle show (a budget saver that predominantly uses pre-existing sets), but it played out as a very effective example of one, with each obstacle unfolding in a logical pattern.
And what made everything work so well was Tim Olyphant, who had one fantastic reaction after another to this ever-expanding mess, whether he had to listen to Winona’s stream-of-consciousness monologue about why she took the rest of the cash or when he learned what Boyd was doing in the courtroom. We all know Olyphant has the swagger and the wordplay down, but it’s nice to be reminded of just how strong (and funny) he can be when Raylan is simply, silently, reacting to the craziness around him.
Boyd’s new job, meanwhile, not only brings in a welcome new recurring character in coal company Carol, played by Rebecca Creskoff from “Hung.” I’ve been waiting to see how the show was going to bring Boyd back into the orbit of both Raylan and the Bennetts (absent for the second week in a row but at least discussed here), and now we know. Very, very interesting.
Less interesting but still somewhat welcome was the return of Jere Burns as Wyn Duffy. Glad to have Burns back; just not sure I want to go through Gary being an idiot with him again, as opposed to the show just using Wyn as part of the larger Dixie Mafia issue.
Perhaps most interesting of all, though, was the penultimate scene in the evidence locker. Just what, if anything, does Art suspect? Raylan was acting hinky all day, Art’s not a stupid man, and he’s had issues with his tallest Marshal in the past. Was his presence there just to add one more potential obstacle to an episode full of them, or is this going to wind up getting Raylan into more trouble with his boss?
What did everybody else think?