Review By Brandon Wolfe
Longtime viewers of Justified will have noticed that a pattern has emerged throughout the show’s five years. The storylines begin at a slow simmer for several episodes, with characters and arcs gradually coming together, before everything ratchets up and explodes about six episodes in, and then we’re off and running for the rest of the season. In those early episodes, the A-stories usually concern Deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens investigating some isolated cases-of-the-week to sort of buy time for the greater arcs to congeal in the background. You could set your watch by this pattern, and after the last couple of episodes had set off all sorts of fireworks, I had expected for Justified to continue barreling forward this week.
Which makes it surprising that this week’s Justified reverts back to a stand-alone case this thick into what is traditionally the “action” portion of the series. Raylan, busted down to handling office “walk-ins” by a still-furious Art, is met by an impatient man named Larry, who is angry that the online backgammon site he uses has been seized by the Marshals office, denying him his winnings. Raylan ascertains that the website seizure has not been administered by the Marshals office due to the fact that “Marshals” is spelled with two “L”s in the notice. Larry, realizing he has been duped, storms out while a still-barely-awake Raylan lets him go. Larry realizes that the computer hacker who set up the site, T.C. Fleming, is responsible and brings an enforcer named Kemp to Fleming’s apartment to retrieve his money, but when Kemp realizes just how much money they’re talking about, he murders Kemp, grabs Fleming’s girlfriend and attempts to blackmail Fleming into giving the money to him. When Raylan picks up Fleming’s scent, the hacker manages to elude the marshal, despite his prosthetic leg.
This sets up a cat-and-mouse game between Fleming and Raylan, wherein Fleming begins to toy with Raylan by altering trace signals so Raylan can’t find him and even draining the marshal’s bank accounts, embarrassing him when he isn’t able to pay the bill on a date. An aspect of this that is particularly amusing (and I wonder how intentional it might have been) is that this is the exact same thing that the master hacker played by Justified star Timothy Olyphant did to Bruce Willis’ John McClane in Live Free or Die Hard, but in the spirit of Justified, it’s also fun in its own right. While many shows go into procedural autopilot with stand-alone investigations, Justified always gives the proceedings enough character and humor to make it entertaining. But this is a story that belonged in the second or third episode of the year, not this deep in, not with everything else that’s going on. Raylan eventually gets Fleming, but the entire side-street feels a bit like a time-waster.
Thankfully, the other story threads in “Raw Deal” keep the season’s momentum going. Boyd takes the Crowes to Mexico to make the heroin deal with cartel representative Mr. Yoon, but his cousin Johnny has beaten him there and offers a sweeter deal. When it looks like Boyd has been uncharacteristically outfoxed, we learn that, no, Boyd set up the whole thing with Yoon to sniff out Johnny, who is turned over to Boyd for elimination. However, the volatile Crowes turn out to be the wild card that Boyd hadn’t anticipated when they open fire on Johnny’s rival crew and leave several dead American bodies on Mexican soil, something Yoon specifically forbade. After seemingly adding a taunting Johnny to the pile, Boyd begins to come up with a new scheme, of which we will learn about next week.
We also pick up with Ava’s continuing prison troubles, the thread of Season 5 that is proving the most tedious. Ava learns that the best way to stay safe and alive is to cozy up to a religious group among the inmates, who are left alone because they supply heroin to the prison population. Ava is charged by the group’s leader to obtain the heroin, which she learns involves prostituting herself to the supplier. But instead of going through with the plan, she comes up with her own, which is to plant the drugs on the supplier, remove him from the equation, and take over supply and distribution herself, earning her Crowder stripes in the process.
The button on Raylan’s story finds him confronting Art about the menial duties he is being saddled with. Art lets him know that things are not likely to change and, in a very testy exchange, Raylan asks to be transferred “anywhere” immediately, while he goes to Florida on vacation to visit his family, and Art says he will make it happen. It’s interesting to see how this feud will resolve itself, since Raylan clearly won’t be leaving the Lexington office, but the fact that Raylan’s next move is to head to Florida, away from all the Harlan County shenanigans in development, seems a bit odd at this point in the year. But it gets at something that has been on my mind lately, which is that Justified sort of doesn’t seem like Raylan’s show anymore. As fun as the character remains, the roughly 84 villains the show has amassed have made the marshal seem a bit marginalized of late. I’m sure there’s a plan in play to draw Raylan into the action, but that sending him off on vacation at this point in the season seems weirdly viable probably suggest they should put that plan into play soon.
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