Last week saw the end of the modern-day western Justified, which was based on the Elmore Leonard short story "Fire in the Hole." The six-year confrontation between criminal Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins) and U.S. Deputy Marshal Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant) was finally on tap, and the fate of Ava Crowder (Joelle Carter), who had been in love with both men and married (and shot) Boyd's brother Bowman, would be revealed.
The episode was a good conclusion for the series, and interestingly its construction probably mirrored the series' uneven final season. Justified came out of the gate with a lot of potential but a loose first season; a show finding its way. The second season, with main villain Mags Bennett (Emmy-winner Margo Martindale), got next to everything right as Raylan fought against Mags and her more-or-less competent but completely evil sons and their scheme to enrich themselves at the expense of their neighbors. The third season was also uneven, meandering around in the middle with too much filler and wasting the potential of Neal McDonough as Detroit-based mobster Bobby Quarles.
Season Four, featuring a 30-year-old mystery and the hunt for the elusive Drew Thompson, came in just a notch under the second. It offered some great character development in the form of the former hooker Ellen May and a fascinating sub-plot with the conflict between Deputy Marshall Tim Gutterson and Boyd's henchman Colton Rhodes. It exposed how Ava's greed and resentment about her poor childhood would lead her to embrace too much of Boyd's criminal enterprise. It took religion -- a fixture of life in rural Kentucky that most shows probably would ignore -- seriously as Ellen May's religious awakening brought her to make decisions she might never have otherwise made, and showed her as a much stronger person than the woman we met in season 2 fellating a crooked doctor for oxycontin. But it lacked a real heavyweight villain, which made it just a little less satisfying than Season Two. And it ended with Ava's arrest, which set up much of the time-wasting nonsense of Season Five. Five spent much of its time in what I've seen called "fan service," meaning giving fans what they clamor and ask for. Fans hated Raylan's ex-wife and current baby mama Winona, so Raylan chased everything in a skirt. Boyd was criminal genius mastermind, so he criminally masterminded all kinds of plots to manipulate Ava out of prison and build his drug empire and outsmart everyone else because he was smart. Loretta McReady had a sassy mouth and Kaitlyn Dever is a great actress, so let's shoehorn Loretta back into the plot for no good reason whatsoever. None of it rang true and very little of it was all that interesting, as it mainly marked time until we could finish things out in Season Six.
The final season began strongly, with Raylan running Ava as his confidential informant spying on Boyd. The Marshals sought evidence to put Boyd away on racketeering and other serious charges, and the race was on to see if she would learn anything of value and keep herself out of prison before Boyd discovered her treachery. Although the criminal enterprise that Boyd undertook was dressed up with a couple too many complications -- the presence of Mary Steenburgen as Katherine Hale and her sometimes beau, sometimes foe Avery Markham (Sam Elliot) being the main culprits. Along about mid-season, we began spending way too much time on Katherine and Avery; the skill of both actors couldn't overshadow that these two were not the people we had been watching this show to see. It was almost as though producer Graham Yost thought he was shooting a ten-episode final season only to learn somewhere around episode eight or nine that he was actually doing thirteen episodes and he'd better start stretching. There aren't too many other reasons that Wynn Duffy (Jere Burns)'s Mikey the goombah bodyguard gets his own death scene. Nor for Loretta to return again and set up a confrontation with Markham and alliance with Boyd that never goes anywhere before the show runs out.
Garrett Dillahunt's charismatic sociopath Ty Walker, Markham's lead henchman, bows out in episode eight complaining that Raylan shot him in the back -- so the last words he hears on earth are Raylan saying, "If you wanted me to shoot you in the front, you shoulda run towards me." But Avery still needs a henchman and Raylan still needs an antagonist to dance with, so we get the ridiculous collection of performance tics called Boon (Jonathan Tucker). His fascination with Western myths and gunfighting foreshadows a final showdown with Raylan, but I didn't watch seventy-eight episodes of this show to learn what happens to a guy who only shows up when it's 94% over.
Yost also seems to think he needs to remind us of some things so we will expect a proper resolution. Raylan, even though he has shown what Martin Blank once called "a certain 'moral flexibility,'" is the Good Guy. Boyd, even though Walton Goggins' charismatic performance has made him fascinating and often great fun to watch, is the Bad Guy. They may bicker a little like a buddy cop movie that's swallowed William Faulkner's thesaurus, but they are not friends, so Yost must remind us of Boyd's Bad Guyness in the penultimate episode with a speechy, writerly monologue about being an outlaw. Followed by Boyd shooting his listener in the head, when of course the kind thing to do would be to have reversed the order.
The final episode, though, wraps up the season plotline with about 15 minutes left as we see Ava take off on the run, Boyd head off toward the lengthy prison sentence that awaits him when Raylan doesn't shoot him and Raylan himself head to Florida for a reunion with Winona and their infant daughter Willa. It's muddy but fairly satisfying, but the real resolution comes from the coda, set four years later. Raylan and Winona didn't manage as a couple, but they are sharing custody of Willa and Raylan is an important part of her life. He's settled into the Marshals' office in Florida when he gets a hint about Ava's location. She lives on a pumpkin farm in California and is raising Boyd's son in secret. She asks Raylan not to bring her in but even if he does, to keep the knowledge of his son from Boyd. Raylan leaves her in place, and visits Boyd to tell him that Ava died in a car crash in Texas. When Boyd asks Raylan why he would come to deliver this news in person, Raylan allows there is one thing they shared. "We dug coal together," Boyd says through a plastic window in the prison visiting room. "That's right," Raylan answers.
A lot of internet commentary suggested that Leonard's traditional storytelling sense guided the show in ending this way, with the Good Guy winning, the Bad Guy in jail and the Misguided Woman With a Good Heart turning her life around but still always paying a price for what she has done. Unlike the Darrell Scott song from which this post title takes its name, they do leave Harlan alive, although they have left something behind. Ava has left behind the ability to get through a day free of watching for pursuers, either with badges or without. Raylan left behind his past, for better or worse. Boyd left behind his freedom. Even though the author himself passed in 2013, this is the kind of "old-fashioned" ending that he would have argued for, rather than a more modern ending such as that in a show like Breaking Bad.
My own position that Breaking Bad was a nihilistic flimflam con job may influence my ideas, but I would agree that Justified ended the way it ought to end. The final episode set things right in a season that had lost most of its focus, but it did so with an epilogue that set things right in an episode that had lost most of its focus. It may be that Justified's ingredients were only going to mix right in a couple of ways, and that most of the other possible combinations were always going to be off, either a little like in seasons one and three or a lot like in season five and the last half of six.
Tuesdays won't be as much fun without Raylan's laconic humor, Boyd's hyperkinetic polysyllable-laden snowjobs, Tim's Sahara-arid interjections, Erica Tazel's no-nonsense deadly glare as Deputy Marshall Rachel Brooks, Nick Searcy's I'm-getting-too-old-for-this Chief Deputy Marshall Art Givens or Wynn's World's Fussiest Hitman. But more seasons would probably increase the chances for more misfires like Michael Rapaport's supposed southern accent as Darryl Crowe in season five, so perhaps ending now was not the worst move.
And no matter how much I miss the show, I must confess that not hearing again the mumbled banjo-rap theme song from Gangstagrass instead of the far superior "Harlan County Line" from Dave Alvin will cost me nary a minute of sleep.