By: Brandon Wolfe
It might be time to concede that this current season of ‘Justified’ just isn’t going to pull it together. Sure, the show remains as funny and entertaining as always, but the ramshackle storytelling on display all year continues to be very much in evidence this week. I’m still genuinely not sure what story Season 5 is trying to tell us, and I’m not certain the writers know, either. Nothing is emerging as the core to the season’s narrative. I hate to kick a show while it’s still a pleasure to watch, but rarely has ‘Justified’ ever lacked such focus.
Poor, inept (yet weirdly affable) Dewey Crowe is on the run with the shipment of heroin in his possession, and finds himself for the first time ever in a position of some power over his cousins, as well as over Boyd Crowder. The problem, of course, is that Dewey isn’t shrewd enough to devise a solid course of action, so he simply calls up Boyd and demands to be paid $250,000 in exchange for the goods. Boyd agrees to Dewey’s terms out of necessity, but delegates the responsibility of handling matters to Darryl, who has no intention of meeting Dewey’s demands. Dewey decides to turn to the only friend he can think of for help: the incarcerated Dickie Bennett, Dewey’s peer in terms of both brainpower and criminal social standing. Dickie points Dewey to a former dealer under his employ, but also attempts to sell Dewey out to Raylan, who is able to surmise Dickie’s machinations without having to meet a single item on the prisoner’s wishlist.
Danny, the craziest of the Crowes, intercepts the heroin, but Raylan manages to intercept him with the contraband in his tow. Danny finally attempts to prove his cherished “21-Foot Rule” on Raylan, but unwittingly charges into the grave recently dug for his dear departed dog, Chelsea, and winds up with his own knife lodged deep into his throat before Raylan has barely gotten his gun unholstered.
Boyd, meanwhile, continues to have a pretty lousy time. On top of having to contend with retrieving his drugs in the midst of this Crowe Family quagmire, he is still attempting to get Ava out of prison. Ava has given up hope that Boyd will save her and bids him farewell as she consigns herself to killing “Mother Superior” Judith to fulfill her revised agreement with her prison-nurse insider and stay alive. However, Ava decides she cannot go through with killing Judith and attempts to forge an alliance with her, only to be forced into putting her shiv to use after all when Judith attacks her out of vengeance. With Judith dead, Ava’s fate is unclear at the moment, though Boyd attempts to get the prison guard that put her in hot water in the first place to recant his story through force, only to free him, somewhat mysteriously, when the man claims he did what he did to Ava out of love for her.
‘Justified’ keeps presenting us with events that could conceivably become the things that snap the season into some sort of greater focus, only to extinguish them almost immediately. All the various factions out hunting down Dewey Crowe could have been such an event, but he gets swindled out of the drugs easily and without incident before long. Loose-cannon Danny could have instigated something big, but he’s out of the way now. Even that drug shipment didn’t lead to anything other than to be confiscated by Raylan without taking any criminals down with it. And Ava’s prison woes just seem to cycle around endlessly without becoming particularly interesting.
I think the aspect of Season 5 that most exemplifies the aimless marsh ‘Justified’ has found itself in is the character of Darryl Crowe. Apart from the obvious issue of Michael Rapaport’s atrocious attempt at a Southern accent, it’s been ten episodes now and I still cannot get a read on this character. Is he a goon who’s smarter than he looks, an imbecile who can’t do anything right or a partially concealed psychopath? He sometimes seems to be all of these things in a single episode, including this one, and it’s frustrating to attempt to parse out. As the primary villain of the season, the character’s murkiness has been highly problematic.
And yet ‘Justified’ still has that sparkling wit and humor that it’s always had, so it’s hard to get too upset with it. But it usually manages to marry that wit to stronger storytelling than we’re getting this year. The showrunner, Graham Yost, has admitted that, like most showrunners, he and his staff don’t know where they’re going when they begin writing a season, but they always figure it out as they go. There’s the sense this year that, unlike Raylan with Dickie Bennett, they haven’t managed to crack the case. Though, with three episodes left, a strong finish could still be in the cards.
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