Monthly Archives: April 2011

What a fantastic episode.  It did what I love Justified doing.  It took you on a somewhat expected path but did so in some very unexpected ways.  Lots of twists and turns and unexpected ways of dealing with the expected.  Surprisingly the whole Winona subplot didn’t amount to much tonight.  We also never saw the real resolution of last week.  We know Raylan resolved the assassination attempts on his life but it would have been worth showing the inevitable conflict between Art and him over all this.  I’d say we’d get that next week but judging by the ending tonight I think things are about to get out of hand.  It’s probably just hard to fit all this stuff in an hour episode.

The best thing about tonight is that we know Raylan is out for revenge but he never quite tips over the edge into blood letting.  He comes close in a pretty unexpected scene towards the end.  Rather than just doing a recap I’m going to assume everyone watched it and highlight my favorite scenes.  And the best one by far is the final confrontation between Raylan and Dickie.  We knew it was coming.  We know there’s a long history of bad blood here.  Yet Raylan clearly just wants Dickie in jail and methodically goes about his police work to figure out who was behind Helen’s murder.  He finally wraps it up after getting Mags to betray her own son.  He and Doyle are walking away and then out of no-where he clips Doyle in the head.  (That is a cliche of crime films but it never works in real life – you typically either hit them too hard doing brain/skull damage or even killing them or you just hit them hard enough to piss them off)

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An other week an other great episode. The writing tonight was particularly great. At least as good as any this season.

What I loved about tonight were all the little moments between characters. Once again a lot said that isn’t said. A feature pretty common in this show and quite difficult normally to pull off.

We start out with Raylan giving statements to the FBI and find out the assassins were former soldiers. Raylan is distracted though by Gary talking to Winona. Gary’s whole personae has changed and Raylan is suspicious. (Justifiably as we discover) More interesting is Art’s treatment of Raylan – ordering him off the case and having Tim be a minder. Tim is one of those characters on the show we’ve not seen a lot of. I kind of wish we had. Hopefully next season. Of course as expected Raylan isn’t going to take Art’s orders sitting down. The banter between an obviously frustrated Tim and Raylan is pretty funny. Yet there’s a lot of tension going on. The directors and writers know that the way to play an Elmore Leonard character is to make it straight and somewhat tense with the humor being a kind of surface thing hiding utter seriousness. It’s a hard line to walk. (Note the difference between Get Shorty and Be Cool for examples of how to do it and how not to do it)

What I really love about these scenes that continue through the episode is that Raylan always plays it straight with Tim but Tim isn’t willing to give a wink and a nod to pretense.  Is this a sign that Tim knows something is up with Raylan on the missing money issue?  I suspect so.  All the characters are smart and Raylan wasn’t exactly being subtle.  (Which is why Art figured things out fairly quickly)  The real issue is what they think of Raylan.  As you might recall Art wasn’t exactly happy that Raylan was back with Winona at the beginning of the season.  Is Winona bad news?  I suspect there’s more to learn there.

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