For all it’s quotability (more on that in a minute) and fun, inventive, occasionally disturbing displays of violence (more on that, too), last night’s episode of Justified was mostly devoted to shuffling the pieces around the board a little bit. That’s not a bad thing by any means, especially on a show that opened up four big plotlines — Raylan going all Blank Check in a criminal’s mansion, Boyd and Wynn going 0-for-the-season on drug deals, Boyd and Mysterious Latvian Lady circling each other like snakes (who may or may not want to have steamy snake sex right there in the bar), and The Ballad of Dewey Crowe, Whorehouse Proprietor — in the first two episodes. That’s a lot of stuff that’s gonna need paying off, probably in a way that ties most or all of it together, so, yeah, shuffle away.
Since there’s not much by way of a unifying theme to discuss, I’d instead like to take the rest of this pre-bullet-point intro to point something out that you’re all probably aware of, but needs saying anyway: Through three episodes, save a shovel-whacking here and a bat-clobbering there, Raylan has spent most of his time drinking free top-shelf liquor, bowling, and playing kissyface with an attractive weed-smoking social worker in a gold-filled mansion he confiscated from the Detroit mob’s money launderer. Raylan Givens lives a charmed life.
And now, the highlights:
- Lot going on with Boyd. Let’s try to run it all down fairly quickly: He’s a drug dealer who is out of drugs and money; his beloved fiancee is in jail facing a murder charge; he’s got one man who can help him with her case and that person just woke up from a coma and proceeded to order the town’s corrupt sheriff to exact revenge on Boyd for putting him in it; he’s got said man’s shady and mysterious mail order Eastern European wife trying to extort and/or seduce him; and now Dewey Crowe is showing up at his door demanding $100,000 because some dude from Florida popped up out of nowhere and started flipping through the classifieds. My man needs a weekend in Cabo or something.
- One other Boyd note: I had mostly forgotten about his giant swastika tattoo until last night. Both the show and his character have come a long way since season one.
- I don’t condone torture as a means of interrogation, and there’s plenty of research to show that it’s not even all that effective, but if you really, really insist on using it, you could do a lot worse than handing Wynn Duffy a BB gun and letting him run free for a couple minutes. (“Ear.”)
- Here’s something special: Michael Rapaport, a man from New York, playing Daryl Crowe, Jr., a Redneck crime boss from Florida with a thick Southern accent, trying to pronounce “cafe con leche,” a Spanish term that refers to a delicious coffee concoction. We are truly blessed.
- And speaking of the Crowe family, it dawned on me last night that Boyd’s big “PUT YO’ FOOT DOWN, DEWEY CROWE” speech was basically just the criminal, Kentucky version of the “I SEE PRIDE. I SEE POW-AH” speech from Cool Runnings. I don’t really have a point here. Maybe that Boyd and Dewey should try bobsledding.
- But really, what good is a whorehouse if it doesn’t have curb appeal, you know?
- If I thought I could have gotten away with using it without running afoul of our fine sponsors (and, please, feel free to click on any of the links you see on the screen for quality products and services), this is the quote I would have used in the headline:
- For those of you tracking last night’s Failed Gold Heist Caper: Raylan thought the guy with the bat was sent by Monroe to intimidate him, Monroe thought the guy was working with either his not-maid or Wynn Duffy, Rachel thought the guy might be in cahoots with Allison, Allison said the guy was there to intimidate her, the guy said he was only there because Allison planted drugs on him to take his son into protective services, Monroe sent in his not-maid to try to steal it for him in the least thought-out heist in history, and after she got caught she helped Raylan set him up and the whole thing resulted in Wynn Duffy’s goon shooting him before Rachel could draw to arrest him. Everyone on this show is terrible at their jobs. I hope they never change.
- That thing with Monroe and his not-maid… ho-lee hell. That was… disturbing. Give me a hooker with a heart of gold shooting a high-ranking county official who surprised her by coming out of the bathroom dressed as a bear over hyper-violent racially-charged breath play every day of the week. That was a strange sentence to type.
- “You gotta spend less time screwing up other people’s lives and more time fixing your own.” – Raylan Givens, life coach.
- No joke: Every time Raylan boards the Wynnebago my heart skips two or three beats. (“So, you’re protecting me from a situation you created?” “I could see how you could see it that way, if you wanna focus on the negative.”)
- The thing where Rachel moved into the house as Raylan’s backup/chaperone and spent the whole episode busting his balls raised an important point: We’ve all discussed Team Winona vs. Team Ava vs. Team Bartender vs. Team Allison the Social Worker, but the truth is that the entire argument is moot. Raylan and Rachel need to quit screwing around and get married.
- According to the previews, next week’s episode features both Tim AND a Raylan/Boyd scene. YESSSSSSSSSS.
- Oh, and there’s this, which is made 1000000000x better by the fact that the brief, menacing conversation took place on a bedazzled pink flip phone:
That about sums it up. Feel free to chime in with your thoughts below. Please do not repeatedly shoot me in the face with a BB gun.
