Fandoms I Have Loved, Part 2: Justified

This one’s a bit of an outlier, since I only watched and fell in love with #Justified in the past year. But it’s a pretty recent rewatch, so I figured I’d get this written while the memories are pretty fresh.



Logliney Stuff:
Raylan Givens, a US Marshal with a quick draw and anger management issues gets posted back to his home state, Kentucky. Soon enough, he’s drawn back into the outlaw world of his father, Arlo, and his old friend Boyd Crowder.

What’s Up With That:
Did I start watching #Justified ENTIRELY because of Timothy Olyphant’s appearance on #TheGoodPlace? I mean, I’ve always meant to watch the show, but...yes. Yes, I did.



Otherwise, all I knew is that one of my favorite TV critics, Alan Sepinwall, counted it as one of the best shows to date. (He was not wrong.)

Metatext-Type Stuff:
Once I started watching the show on Hulu, I watched 1-2 episodes a day until I was done. I felt pretty bereft once I finished up. I rewatched some bits and pieces--mostly Mags and Loretta stuff, plus that one episode with Chadwick Boseman--but haven’t decided when to do a full rewatch.

Character Natterings:
In no conscious particular order!

• Raylan Givens:
  
  Raylan tends to come off as bourbon smooth, even when he’s in a shootout. (If ever there was a dude who embodied the Some folks need killing sentiment, it’s Raylan.) But in his first meeting with Boyd in the pilot, Boyd makes a crack about Raylan’s father, and for a second and a half, it looks like Raylan’s about to tear Boyd apart with his bare hands. And then it’s gone again.
  
  As a US Marshal, he causes nothing but grief for his team: He’s great at stopping criminals, but shit at upholding the law. And he has pretty much no friends--whether it’s because there’s some underlying wall that comes from growing up how he did, or just because he keeps getting away with it, Raylan is an admitted and unrepentant asshole most of the time.
  
  Plus. Boy is fiiiiiine.
  
• Boyd Crowder:
  So one time I wrote about my three never-fail favorite character types. They are:
  
  1. Ladies Who Slytherin (Demona, Nikita, CJ Cregg, Zoe Washburn, Lucca Quinn, Poison Ivy)
  2. Damaged Golden Retrievers (Dan Rydell, Helo, Jason Mendoza)
  3. Boyd Crowder
  I honestly don’t know what else to say about him otherwise. If you’ve watched the show, you know exactly what I’m talking about. (Except that this only works if I remain steadfast in my belief that his white supremacist schtick in S1 was mostly a costume grown out of his upbringing. He’s mesmerizing either way--but in this version, I feel better about loving him so.)
  
  
  
  But yeah, legendarily, Boyd was supposed to die at the end of the pilot episode, and they loved Goggins so much that they just...kept him forever. It’s difficult to blame them, really.
  
• Ava Crowder:
  When we first meet Ava, she’s fresh off of shooting her abusive husband with a shotgun and she is CHIPPER about it. She’s briefly involved with Raylan (more on that later), but largely gets drawn into the picture because her husband, Bowman Crowder, was heir to the Crowder criminal goings-on. After a few shifts in power, her at-first reluctant attachment to Boyd grows into a genuine love. (Yes, he is her dead husband’s brother, but I swear it all seems like a natural growth in their relationship.) She herself dabbles in her own outlawry, but then gets all turned around after she murders another dude (he had it coming), and eventually she spends a season or so in jail. Ava, like most everyone non-marshal in this series, is chaotic neutral: As long as she’s in charge of her own destiny, she won’t quibble about anything else.
  
• Art Mullen:
  Raylan’s long-suffering boss. Art is the best.
  
  
• Rachel Brooks:
  Between Raylan and Tim, it’s amazing that Rachel doesn’t die of exasperation every single day. She is hella competent and does not get enough screen time, ever.
  
• Tim Gutterson:
  One of the hardest things to explain about Justified is that it’s so FUNNY. Tim, one of the other marshals, is probably the best example of the desert-dry wit that runs through the show.
  
  
  
• Winona Hawkins:
  She’s just so pretty, y’all. She was just saddled with some extremely dumb storylines (the counterfeit bills, UGH) and, despite some intense chemistry with Raylan (bc, TBF, Olyphant has chemistry with everything surrounding him), did not have enough integration into the world of the show.
  
  
• Mags Bennett:
  So Boyd is the principal antagonist of the show, but Mags is its very best Big Bad. Unlike the rest of the crooks in Harlan, Mags is solely concerned with her empire of marijuana farms. Margo Martindale won an Emmy for this role and of COURSE she did. She almost never raises her voice, and she rarely threatens, but she scares the shit out of pretty much everybody who knows her. (The video below is SUPER spoilery, btw.)
  
  
  
• Loretta McCready:
  The daughter of a marijuana farmer, we first meet Loretta when she taunts a pedophile into running into a faceful of barbed wire. Loretta is more cunning than pretty much anyone else in this show and I love her. Mags adopts her after her father is murdered (by Mags, which makes for some serious awkward), and by the end of the show, she’s pretty much running Harlan County.
  
  
  
• Limehouse:
  They never, ever, explored the issues of race in Harlan County sufficiently. (ESPECIALLY since Boyd started out running a gang of Nazis, oof.) Limehouse exists nicely in the background as the dude that holds the money for the outlaws, but we later also find out his corner of the county is also known as a safehouse for white women fleeing abusive husbands and dang. That’s a thing that cries for more story.
  
• Ellen May:
  A local prostitute and a low-key drug addict, Ellen May is, I think, the most innocent soul in this entire series. You just kinda want to give her a hug and get her the hell out of that town.
  
• Wynn Duffy and Mikey:
  Wynn Duffy is the ever-present middleman between the crooks of Harlan County and folks from bigger organizations--sometimes Miami, sometimes the Dixie Mafia of Tennessee, sometimes folks from organized crime in Detroit. He’s always perfectly tailored and always prepared to flip sides to whoever is the least likely to kill him. Mikey’s his usually silent right hand. You kinda grow fond of them by virtue of their familiarity.

The Shipping News: I legit only cared about Boyd and Ava together, and the dissolution of their relationship in the last couple of seasons hurt.



ALL THAT SAID, Ava’s first scene with Raylan all the way in the pilot had so much chemistry it took me a season and a half to move on.


Because let’s be clear: Girlfriend was fresh off of self-defense murdering her abusive husband, then her childhood crush shows up on her door, and she goddamn goes for it. Ava’s my hero.
Anyway, if we’re gonna be real, this whole show is the love story of Raylan and Boyd, and you can interpret that “love” however you wish.

Live for the Memory:
And there’s just no getting over that final scene of the series. It sinks into itself and recreates its universe.



World-building Obsessions:
Because of Raylan’s position as interlocutor between the law and the outlaw, and the anti-hero positioning of Boyd, the entire show seems to exist in a “green world”--that is, a world where a specific slice of against-the-law that’s still considered moral in its own way. (I don’t know where I got the term “green world,” and Google is not being helpful.) It’s the space where “honor among thieves” falls, I think. Except with #Justified, it’s not so much thievery as quickdrawing and wrangling your way to the top of a criminal hierarchy. It’s...weird. And compelling.

What the Hell, Show?:
But seriously, how does Raylan get away with killing so many folks? Art and the DA guy seem to be the only ones boggled by this.

Capacity to Fic:

And, as many noted at the time, Olyphant wasn’t actually playing Raylan when appeared on #TheGoodPlace--Raylan, never in his life, ever radiated an aw shucks attitude--but how FASCINATING would it be to see actual Raylan grapple with #TheGoodPlace universe? Man oh man.

Does This Suffice?:
I honestly thought this would just be a once-through, but it’s rich enough that I think I might do a rewatch in the future. Maybe next year? It’s not so much a narrative that capture the mind as a feel that demands to linger.