20 October 2021

TV Tellings V: Justified Season 1

I actually did a fandom post on Justified a while back, which was pretty fun.

For this watch-through, I was tempted to go straight to the second season, as I didn't want to deal with Boyd Crowder as White Supremacist, but then I thought that would be kind of disingenuous. So here we go with the first season of Justified, which I have only watched once before.



Logline
Raylan Givens of the US Marshals office is a bit too trigger-happy for his superiors. After a pretty public shootout in Miami, he gets transferred to Kentucky--specifically, close to his hometown. Does he get drawn back into the life he used to have, except on the right side of the law instead of the wrong one? Yup. Nobody knows what to make of him.

Dramatis Personae
I already did the character run-down in the fandom post, so just a quick ID for this round. From left to right.

Boyd Crowder (antagonist, career criminal, occasional preacher),
Raylan Givens (protagonist, Deputy Marshal)


Raylan Givens (still protagonist, also very into shooting people),
Ava Crowder (lady of ill repute, in a murdery way)


Tim Gutterson (Deputy Marshal), Rachel Brooks (Deputy Marshal)


Art Mullen (Chief Deputy Marshal)


Winona Hawkins (ex-wife and, uh, court reporter)


Wherefore Art Thou
This is pretty dude-heavy and also masculinity-obsessed. That said, there's so much crunchiness with the interpersonal stuff and at-war-with-my-selfness. Plus, it's just beautifully shot.

Season One Episode Rundown
  • 1.01 Fire in the Hole
    We begin our story in Florida, where Raylan Givens sits down at a beachside table with some dude who he'd given a really specific deadline to leave town. The criminal draws a gun on Raylan; Raylan is faster.



    While the shooting is, technically, within the bounds of the law, it's much, much too public for everybody's taste.
    "You do know we're not allowed to shoot people on sight anymore?" Dan, Raylan's boss, points out.
    "I didn't."
    "And haven't been for, I don't know, a hundred years?"
    "He pulled first."
    "It's not about who pulled first."

    And thus, Raylan is transferred to the Eastern District of Kentucky posthaste. His new boss, Art Mullen, he knew back in the day and, awkwardly, his ex-wife Winona works as a court reporter in the same building. On his first day, Art saddles Raylan down with a case in Harlan, Raylan's hometown, about Boyd Crowder, an old friend of Raylan's.

    Smash cut to Boyd Crowder, who shortly uses A ROCKET LAUNCHER to blow up a church. And then, like, straight-up executes a dude he suspects of being a snitch. A minute later, he finds out the dude was not, in fact, a snitch. Oops.

    Meanwhile, Ava Crowder, Boyd's sister-in-law, gets tired of being beaten up by her husband, so she shoots him. Nobody seems to feel bad about it, though Boyd seems to think he should be doing something about it. Ava, we should note, feels somewhat freed by her recent homicide, as evinced by the way she greets Raylan when he comes a-callin'.


    GET IT GIRL


    Anyway, Boyd, Raylan, and Ava end up pointing guns at each other over the dinner table.



    Famously, Boyd was supposed to die in this confrontation, but Walton Goggins was so charismatic that they kept him on.

    "He pulled first, so I was justified. But what troubles me is what if he hadn't? What if he'd just sat there and let the clock run out? Would I have killed him anyway? I know I wanted to. I guess I just never thought of myself as an angry man."
    "Oh, Raylan. Well, you do a good job of hiding it, and I suppose most folks don't see it, but honestly? You're the angriest man I have ever known."

  • 1.02 Riverbrook
    There is nothing remarkable about this episode and I say that having just finished watching it a minute before typing this up. It's fine? It's a quirky escaped convict case, wherein we follow Raylan through the weird community that will make up this show. Eh.

  • 1.03 The Fixer
    "Is he a knucklehead, your daddy, or is he a real bad guy?" Ah, Art. Therein lies the question.

    This episode is all about Steve from Sex and the City, who I GUESS is named Pinter in this universe. And he is, as Art describes him, "a stone-cold flim-flam man," because Art's got all the good lines in this episode.

    Raylan goes through a pretty standard case--working with a CI who gets betrayed by a couple of his employees--and in the process gets shot a couple of times, luckily whilst wearing a vest. And somehow this leads to him sleeping with Ava?

    I mean, we all knew it was gonna happen sometime.

  • 1.04 Long in the Tooth
    "But why would they send out twenty guys?"
    "I got a lot of unpaid parking tickets."

    Seriously, as soon as Alan Ruck appears on the screen, you know we're in for a ride. And given that we're introduced to him accepting tamales in exchange for dental work on an adorable kid AND THEN vengeance yanking the molars from an asshole WHO HAD IT COMING, well. It's one of those cases where we're gonna be rooting for the alleged bad guy.

    Then we get to play with a dozen facets of racism by having a rascally old Jones taking Rollie's car in trade for keeping quiet about the new getaway card, plus the SASS Jones dishes out to the Black cop that pulls him over and then to Rachel is just pure fun. Then one of Rollie's patients chews him out for the NERVE of coming to them for a hookup to a coyote just because they're Mexican. (Though, uh, he turns out to be right? Just because you point out the racism doesn't mean you can just go ahead on with it, guys.)

    Plus, y'know. Rachel giving Rayland the side-eye for being a good-looking white man attempting to condescend to her about her ~~struggles~~.



    Rollie's case is hopeless from the start, but dang, pretty much all of us wish it wasn't. Including Raylan. Poor Rollie. Poor Mindy.

  • 1.05 The Lord of War and Thunder
    "You can't get a warrant based on beer consumption."
    "How do you know?"
    "We tried."

    We finally meet Raylan's father, Arlo! We see him deliberately trash and set fire to a place and then call the cops on himself, then he goes ahead and...takes a nap there. Is he a knucklehead or not?

    And we meet Aunt Helen, AKA Raylan's stepmom, and there's a GREAT shot that circles 'round them as Raylan takes a seat to chat with her in the diner.



    "How have you put up with him all these years?"
    "We suffer well together."

    Given that Arlo beats the hell out of two dudes in a crowded diner and in broad daylight, that says a LOT about Helen, too.

  • 1.06 The Collection
    Oh hey, Boyd's back! But the episode centers around a dude's collection of paintings by Hitler. Raylan and Art chat about 'em with an art appraiser.

    "I'll show you my collection. I think you'll be quite surprised."
    "Honestly, I think I'd rather stick my dick in a blender."
    "Well, that might solve a few problems."

    Meanwhile, the Hitler-painting-collector has some indictment and forfeiture issues going on, so...his wife, her lover, and his art dealer murder him? Why not? But I guess it's worth it for these couple of minutes with Robert Picardo.



    And there's also some stuff about Raylan's relationship with Winona, as well as him talking about his father with Boyd. It's pretty good.

  • 1.07 Blind Spot
    We open with a scene of Johnny Crowder at the hardware store, pointedly requesting a cart full o' murder tools while Ava watches. Ava offers to pay for the lot of it, but also Helen is there, ready to plug a dude with her shotgun if he steps out of line.



    But yeah, folks seem to be comin' for Ava Crowder and she is having a lot of feelings about it. And given that Raylan shoots a would-be assassin when he's sleeping over at Ava's, there's also some work stuff that gets tangled up, too.

    For some reason, Raylan decides he's got to talk to Boyd about this, so we get a two-part prison convo where we get closer than close up on them as they spar. Why? Because we are all supposed to be way more mesmerized by Boyd than he's yet earned on this show. (He gets there, but not yet, y'all.) Boyd, however, does accurately point out the assassin could have 100% been there for Raylan, not Ava.

    Anyway, Raylan's friend, the Harlan County sheriff, is on the take with the Miami cartel. So Raylan has a tense discussion with his sheriff buddy while, ahead of them, a bound and gagged Ava straight up takes out the henchman driving the getaway van.

    Later on, Boyd's still in preacher mode when a bunch of inmates try to shiv him. And Bo Crowder swoops in to save him.

  • 1.08 Blowback
    Enter Wynn Duffy giving Winona the good ol' fashioned barely-veiled threatening. Also, Bo Crowder's out and ominously eating pie at Ava, Raylan's about to get interviewed by AUSA Vazquez, and a dude manages to take hostages right there in the middle of the Marshals office. And yet is there really more to consider than Deputy Tim Gutterson looking mighty fine this episode?



    Meanwhile, an entire building full of law enforcement and judicial officers, and they let Raylan Givens take charge of the negotiations? But Raylan treats him like a human being and talks him down with twenty-four pieces of extra-spicy fried chicken, some greens, cornbread, and a glass of bourbon. (There are a lot of complicated things about living in the South, guys, but the food ain't one of them.)

    Oh, and Boyd Crowder gets released from prison because Raylan and Ava's relationship means they're no longer viable witnesses to, y'know, his attempt to kill them.

  • 1.09 Hatless
    Raylan picks a fight and loses his hat. Gary, the straight-up idiot, enlists his friend Toby to pretend to be muscle in an effort to get Wynn Duffy to back off. Toby, a sweetheart and a family man, gets the crap beaten out of him. There's a whole thing; everybody we care about survives. And Raylan gets his hat back.

  • 1.10 The Hammer
    I kind of love that Boyd got out of jail and realized, hey, becoming a tent preacher for ex-cons is just as heady as being the lead of a white supremacist gang.



    Boyd, on behalf of one of his parishioners trying to quit meth, takes his congregation and lights up a meth lab with one, uh, accidental fatality. Or, as he put it, "I asked him to shut down his poison factory and merely made an observation about its combustibility." Is he legit on a violent path of righteousness, or is he sneakily undermining his own father's stranglehold on criminal dealings in the area? WHO CAN SAY. (To be fair, he seems genuinely distressed about accidentally killing the one dude.)

    Meanwhile, this week's overly-colorful character is Judge Mike "The Hammer" Reardon, who we meet in the immediate wake of him getting snakebit in bed, with his bedmate sucking out venom as "a precautionary measure" while the EMTs stare uncomfortably at the scene.

    Raylan officially dumps Ava after ghosting her for a few weeks. I mean, it's good because yeah, their affair is how Boyd accidentally killed the dude, but also, geez, Raylan.

  • 1.11 Veterans
    "You strike at the shepherd that the sheep may scatter." Yeah, Our Heroes have zero luck with Boyd's congregation. But after the last episode's unfortunate accidental meth lab murder, the law is taking it all a bit more seriously.

    Meanwhile, the rest of the episode is all daddy issues: Raylan finds out Arlo was working Bo Crowder's protection racket for a while, badly. As for Boyd, his father seems quite sure that the whole church revival thing is his way of getting back in the family business. Hilariously, there's a scene where Arlo and Bo have an argument about whose son is the worst.

    Side note: We get a reminder (or revelation, I don't remember quite) that Tim Gutterson was a sniper for the Rangers in Afghanistan, because man oh man, he should get way more attention on this show.

    Raylan asks Winona to take charge of a drunken and resentful Ava. Because he's a frickin' jackass.

  • 1.12 Fathers and Sons
    So Arlo, fully under threat from Bo Crowder, agrees to become a CI for the Marshals, but hilariously (to me), they're all still fixated on proving Boyd blew up that meth lab for his family which he did not. *shakes head* Anyway, Arlo's a pain in the ass, as expected.

    Meanwhile, Papa Crowder's under the gun with the Miami cartel, so everything's at a boiling point. (Is Kentucky really so closely associated with Miami? Like, I know nothing about how cartels work, but Bo flying down to a golf course in Florida feels way, way outside of expectations.)

    Winona and Raylan sleep together again, and it's wholly unfortunate that Ava bears witness to it. I guess we're supposed to care? Ava goes to Helen to get herself a shotgun and I love them both.

    In other news, is Boyd Crowder full of shit? Yes. Knowingly? Still unclear. But let's all agree: It takes a special kind of chutzpah to condemn your criminal overlord father in church.



    And there's an absolutely spectacular scene where Arlo, very quietly, very calmly, talks down a young vet who's aiming for suicide by grenade.



    Oh, and then Boyd uses a rocket launcher to blow up the Miami cartel's shipment.

  • 1.13 Bulletville
    We start off the episode with Boyd apologizing to Ava for all the sins he's committed against her, and...he's sincere? He seems pretty sincere. Like, nobody witnessed and nobody told. He knew she was likely to shoot him as not. He apologized anyway.

    And then Bo, immediately knowing who blew up the meth truck, has Johnny beat the crap out of Boyd. And then he kills all the men in Boyd's camp. It's a rough watch.



    I think Boyd's whole conversion thing was real? Like, he was always going to blow stuff up, but he decided to blow stuff up in the name of keeping some penitent dudes away from drugs. And then they all died. "Maybe I've just been talking to myself this whole time." And where does he go next? Right to Raylan.

    Bo kidnaps Ava to get to Raylan. Raylan brings Boyd along for the showdown.

    "You were telling the truth, huh? This conversion."
    "Was I? I don't know now, Raylan. I'm so confused."
    "Yeah."
    "Do you believe in God?"
    "I do."
    "Tell me about your God, Raylan."

    In the end, there's a big shootout. The Miami folks take out Bo. Raylan and Boyd rescue Ava and take out the cartel. And Raylan lets Boyd go.

    "I'm gonna bet my life on you being the only friend I have left in this world."

    It's a spectacular last couple of minutes, guys.



Bottom Line
This show, man. It's so good.

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