TV Review: Justified “Restitution”
By: Brandon Wolfe
The fifth season of ‘Justified’, as I’ve mentioned several times before but can only say with true certainty now, was not quite up to snuff. The show kept many, many plates spinning from week to week, yet there never came the sense that anything truly mattered or was coalescing into a greater whole. Ultimately, in spite of the busyness of the storylines, there simply wasn’t much that felt new or impactful the way previous years had. And watching the season finale, “Restitution”, one can’t help but notice, as it puts the final bow on the year, how little there was to show for it all at the buzzer.
Raylan is still playing out his questionable gambit of letting young Kendal Crowe’s life and future dangle as a method of coercion to get his uncle, Darryl Crowe Jr., to come forward and admit he was the one who shot Art. Raylan hopes the boy will recant his story upon news that he will be tried as an adult for the crime, and even attempts to bond with the boy over their similarly abusive childhoods, but Kendal will not budge. After Darryl manages to elude Tim while being surveilled, Raylan plays the only card he has left to get Darryl, which is to convince his reluctant sister Wendy to wear a wire and get Darryl to confess.
Wendy does agree to this, finally, and does succeed in getting Darryl to spill his guts within earshot of her cell phone’s recording device. And when Darryl steps forward to menace her, Wendy pulls a gun and shoots him fatally while Raylan hangs back and watches. This brings the tale of the Crowes to a close, and as the aspect of the season that was given the most prominence, these characters amounted to astonishingly little. They were never consistently written, they never emerged as a major threat, they never really did much of interest at all. They were villains worthy of maybe an episode or two, not a full season’s focus, and the fact that their story was wrapped up so simply, in what felt like basic housekeeping, speaks volumes for how much the time spent with them felt wasted.
Meanwhile, Boyd is forced to finally face the cartel members who have marked him for death, and finds that his silver tongue has no effect on such men. But Boyd’s wiliness always winds up taking root and he’s able to finagle a stand-off between his captors and Tim and Rachel that leaves him alive, but not before Rachel vows to make good on the threat to bring Boyd down once and for all. Boyd leaves and seems disquieted and lost in light of the entire season of unfortunate events he’s had to endure when he finally gets something resembling good news: Ava is being released from prison.
After the endless cycle of position jockeying and misfortune Ava has had to endure in this prison storyline (a storyline which I would point to as easily the low point of the entire series), that Ava was out so abruptly and with so little fanfare came as both a relief and an annoyance. A relief in that it was all finally over and an annoyance in that we went through all of that just for her to be set free with a couple of tossed-off lines of exposition.
But then we get to the final scenes and find there’s much more to it than that. Raylan has been granted the transfer back to Florida that he asked Art for several episodes ago, but will not be allowed to leave until he fulfills one final task: the apprehension and conviction of Boyd Crowder. And the tool Raylan decides to wield to finally get Boyd is Ava, whom Raylan got released so she could be his woman on the inside, something which she is not happy about participating in, but decides quite reasonably that it beats being shivved.
That “Restitution” seems more invested in setting up next year’s final season than it is with wrapping up the morass of this year says a lot about where the writers’ heads were at. I don’t think any previous ‘Justified’ season finale spent this much time on tablesetting for the future. So while “Restitution” essentially condemns Season 5 as the halfhearted shrug it always seemed to be shaping up as (though, it must be noted, the season was certainly not without its pleasures; this show still has the best dialogue currently on television), it does promise big things for Season 6. Raylan’s last hurrah in Harlan will come down to a final battle with Boyd, as it always seemed destined to. There’s something a bit melancholy about the prospect of these two men finally shedding all tenuous pleasantries and stepping officially into the roles of actual adversaries, but ‘Justified’ at its core has always been the story of a cowboy and an outlaw. And those always end with a showdown.
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