Justified Season 5

            Last Wednesday, Justified concluded its fifth season on FX. The show stars Timothy Olyphant as Raylan Givens, a deputy U.S. Marshal, and follows his life in his home of Harlan County, Kentucky. Raylan shares a bond with local self-styled “outlaw” Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins). Boyd and Raylan live on opposite sides of the law, but have a long personal history—they dug coal together, as one of them usually reminds the audience. As in past seasons, Justified introduced a new villain to serve as foil for both Raylan and Boyd. The show introduced Darryl Crowe Jr. (Michael Rappaport) and his family from Florida, cousins of Harlan criminal, comic foil, and universal sad sack Dewey Crowe. Ultimately, the fifth season of Justified represented one of the show’s weaker story arcs, muddled by too many plot lines, and the relegation of Raylan to a side character for much of the season.

            Justified expended much of its narrative energy on Boyd’s attempts to become a large scale heroin dealer. The arc began promisingly with a darkly hilarious trip to Detroit as Boyd and partner Wynn Duffy attempted to import heroin through Canada. Murdering Detroit mobsters and their dismembered manikins waylaid Boyd’s plans—the mobsters explained the manikins thusly, “That was last week.” Once Boyd turned his focus to Mexico the plotline unraveled. The involvement of Boyd’s cousin and rival Johnny, squabbles with the Crowes, and tensions with Memphis based drug dealers devoured the middle part of the season, while offering little payoff. As Boyd’s heroin schemes faced delay after delay and disaster after disaster, even Boyd became exacerbated by the whole exercise. In a confrontation with Darryl Crowe, some Memphis hitmen, and his partners, Boyd expressed the audience’s frustration when he wished that they would all just shoot each other and figure out the heroin later.

            The imprisonment of Boyd’s fiancé Ava also dragged down the pace of the season. Her storyline grew increasingly separate from the rest of show as the season went on. The series used increasingly bizarre means to keep Ava in jail, culminating in having a county jail guard shiv himself to get Ava sent to state prison. Justified showrunner Graham Yost has explained in recent interviews that the writers wanted the plotline to force Ava to rely on herself and compel her (at the end of the season) to turn against Boyd. Watching Ava’s storyline over the course of the season, the show’s writers mapped out storyline accordingly instead of letting it evolve organically. What could have been an interesting idea about the power of prison to strip away Ava’s humanity, instead dragged on too long and had little relation to rest of the action in Justified.

            Raylan spent most of the season as a secondary character with Ava and Boyd carrying the longer narrative arcs. Raylan, instead, became enmeshed in standalone episodes. Justified has always balanced episodes of the week with longer story arcs, but the show put Raylan largely on the sidelines for much of the season. The best seasons of Justified—the 2^nd and 4^th—have Raylan and Boyd working at parallel goals. The second season featured a confrontation with Mags Bennett and her family and the fourth attempted to unravel the identity of a mob-connected man named Drew Thompson. With the two main characters working at totally different purposes, Justified suffered from a lack of narrative focus. Even Raylan’s dealings with the Crowes, the ostensible villains of the season, lacked the dramatic tension present in other seasons. The show talked much more about the villainy of the Crowes rather than actually demonstrating it. In the season finale, Darryl Crowe Jr. slipped past a tailing Marshal by running a red light. The writers should have slipped Darryl some of Mags Bennett’s “apple pie” moonshine much earlier in the season.

             While a weak season by Justified standards, the fifth season featured some funny and strong character moments. Timothy Olyphant shined in the season finale describing his difficulty in taking a life when his father made him shoot a feral pig. Walton Goggins had some strong moments especially his growing exasperation at the heroin business and his transformation of a pack of cigarettes into high explosives. Even in its weaker seasons, Raylan, Boyd, and the stupidity of Harlan’s criminal class make Justified an enjoyable and essential viewing experience.