Lots to get to from last night’s season premiere of Justified. Raylan is back fighting the good fight on both sides of the border, Boyd is basically hillbilly Danny Ocean now, and a bearded Garret Dillahunt is trying to acquire large amounts of Kentucky real estate with nothing but a politely menacing tone and a briefcase filled with money (seems legit, btw), but first — first — we need to pay our respects.
Dewey Crowe is dead now. If we’re being honest, this was a long time coming. He was a simple doofus working in a field where doofus simpletons get killed quickly, so the fact that he even made it this long is half a miracle. But God protects babies and fools, so there he was in Boyd’s office, a dreamer staring at a picture of dreamers, until a dangerous man who just declared himself a friend snuck up behind him, put a bullet in his brain, and ordered an associate to dispose of him in a rolled-up carpet. He never even saw it coming, somehow, which was fitting. Of course Dewey Crowe never saw his execution coming. The man was essentially a seal who spent his entire adult life swimming with sharks, thinking the sharks were his friends because they picked off the meatier options first.
That doesn’t mean it wasn’t sad, though. My Lord, was it sad. First of all, selfishly, because Dewey was the funniest character on the show, constantly mispronouncing words he had no business attempting and being in awe of simple facts about the human. (Hopefully we was an organ donor. If the authorities ever find his body, those four kidneys could come in handy.) But also because Dewey was … kind of sweet, in his own way. I realize this is a tricky case to make when discussing a violent repeat offender whose body is half-covered with Nazi tattoos, but he was, really. I mean, you get the feeling with Dewey — unlike Raylan and Boyd, who seemed destined for the lives they ended up with — that things could have been different if he grew up somewhere else or had a better role model. He was never going to be a doctor or accountant or anything, but he was a man with simple dreams, as his speech to Boyd about the good old days indicated. He liked loud music, his turtle dog, and $6 blowjobs. He could have been perfectly happy pushing a broom somewhere, or mowing lawns. He could have had a life, you know? That’s what makes it sad.
One last thing on the subject of Dewey. It didn’t really fit into the narrative of our Justified oral history, but this outtake from our interview with Walton Goggins seems relevant today.
So I agree to do [the show]. I get on a plane, I connect through Detroit on the way to Pittsburgh, and as I’m making my way from one gate to another a guy comes up to me with this heavy Aussie accent. He says, “Are you Walton?” And I said, “Yeah, yeah.” And he said, “I’m Damon Herriman.” And I said, “Well nice to meet you Damon.” Then he said, “I’m playing Dewey,” and I thought, no, man! No! They have an Aussie, this gentrified, polished, world-traveled Aussie playing Dewey Crowe? Are you kidding me? No! And I had all these fears and insecurities from that conversation. And then the first words came out of his mouth in that read-through and it was like, Oh. My. God. That guy is brilliant. In a million years I wouldn’t have seen it. And he killed it. And then I thought, here we are. And here we go.
Rest in peace, Dewey Crowe.
And now, the highlights:
– Let’s do a quick check-in with everyone, shall we?
- Raylan’s on what appears to be a one-man international task force that exists above the law and solely for the purpose of hunting Boyd Crowder. I approve of this.
- Boyd is robbing banks for Wynn Duffy and Katherine Hale, as well as taking on woodworking projects and quoting Thomas Jefferson on the dangers of banking institutions like a mustache-free Ron Swanson.
- Ava is waking up at 4 p.m. and immediately drinking cheap vodka out of a coffee mug, which seems … bad.
- Winona is wearing kind of a lot of makeup, working the graveyard shift, and pouring her heart to a baby she’s raising by herself in Florida while her significant other hunts bad guys, which seems … also bad.
- Art is sitting around in a bathrobe dispensing advice from his couch while sipping expensive free bourbon, which seems … better! (Related: “Bourbon is easy to understand. It tastes like a warm summer’s day.”)
- Tim is doing Tim things, as Tim does.
Good talk.
– Just over two weeks ago I pleaded with the television industry to make a heist show. Last night a masked Boyd Crowder and his crew ripped a bank apart with a pickup truck after spraying safety deposit boxes with chemicals the day before. I’ll take it!
– Justified added to its long, storied history of bad guys getting kabonged in the head with metal objects — see here and here — by having Raylan cold-cock a fleeing small-time drug dealer with a shovel. This commitment to tradition should be lauded.
– They also addressed Boyd’s magnificent hair, with Raylan joking with Ava about him getting a can of hair spray from the salon she works at. This brings us to another outtake from the oral history. Chloe was the one who handled the actual interviews, and before the one with Walton Goggins I sent her an email BEGGING her to ask him a very important question:
UPROXX: There’s a theory at Uproxx that the crazier Boyd’s hair looks at the beginning of a scene the more likely he is to do something crazy by the end of that scene. What are your thoughts on this theory? Can it be confirmed?
GOGGINS: [laughs] I think there is no weight to that theory whatsoever. I think that is part of his follicly challenged nature [laughs]. It’s a bad hair day and sometimes I get a not-so-bad hair day. That’s about the extent of that. Really.
I’m devastated.
– Between telling Raylan he needed a $6 blowjob, asking hooker-cum-waitress Abigail if he could “throw one last bone” in her, and saying of his beloved turtle dog figure “I have it to someone special and the bitch lost it,” Dewey Crowe really proved his bona fides as television’s greatest romantic.
– Hey, speaking of wordsmiths…
– Possibly my favorite exchange of the night: When Boyd was very suspicious of Dewey’s story about how he got from jail to Harlan and asked what song was playing on the stolen car’s cassette deck:
DEWEY: [terrified] ARS live, “Champagne Jam.”
BOYD: [with the same intensity he had just been using to question Dewey] I love that record.
– We’ll get more out of Garret Dillahunt and his beard in the coming weeks, obviously, but as far as first impressions go… this is gonna be fun.
– Raylan and Ava are meeting on Shady Crime Bridge and discussing having her play Boyd the same way she played his brother before blowing his chest open with a shotgun. The woman is single-handedly wiping out the Crowder family.
– Or is she…
Thank God this show is back. Your thoughts below.
