How Justified: City Primeval Pulled Off the Finale’s Closing Twist — And What It Means for Any Possible ‘Season 2’

Matt Webb Mitovich
·3 min read
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How Justified: City Primeval Pulled Off the Finale’s Closing Twist — And What It Means for Any Possible ‘Season 2’
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The following contains spoilers from the Justified: City Primeval season finale, which aired Aug. 29 on FX and begins streaming on Hulu Aug. 30.

Walton Goggins told a little white lie — though Justified fans are likely to forgive him.

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Ahead of Justified: City Primeval’s July launch, TV’s erstwhile Boyd Crowder indicated that he would not appear in the eight-episode revival, saying (albeit in a roundabout manner), “There’s a season… for everything” and, “This isn’t the right place and time.”

And yet there Boyd was in the finale’s closing coda, orchestrating a successful prison escape — and in doing so, possibly luring longtime frenemy (and fellow coal digger) Raylan Givens out of a barely begun retirement. (Fun fact: If one were to parse Goggins’ words, he did say that he himself would be watching City Primeval “to the bitter end,” emphasis ours. Wink-wink…?)

“Walton was out there doing a lot of press – for [HBO’s Righteous] Gemstones and stuff,” and yet he kept a lid on his encore, notes Justified: City Primeval co-showrunner Michael Dinner, who co-wrote and directed the finale. “He’s a pretty good poker player!”

Elaborating on his and co-showrunner David Andron’s approach to the crowd-pleasing cameo, Dinner tells TVLine, “Here is the thing — we did it for fun.”

“Originally I was going to develop this as its own thing, as City Primeval,” Dinner reminds. But when Quentin Tarantino suggested to Timothy Olyphant (on the set of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood) that Elmore Leonard’s City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit novel could be rejiggered into a Raylan Givens story, Dinner and Andron had to consider “the Walton of it all,” Dinner says.

“What we didn’t want to do,” Dinner asserts, “is have the scene where Raylan ‘can’t understand’ Mansell, so in the middle of the episodes he goes to talk to ‘the Hannibal Lecter character'” — imprisoned Boyd Crowder — “to say, ‘I don’t understand the bad guy! Tell me about him!'” Instead, “David’s pitch to me was, ‘It’s the elephant in the room, everybody’s gonna be wondering, ‘Where’s Walton?’ So let’s just do it and have fun with it at the end.’ That was the intention.”

After securing star and executive producer Olyphant’s sign-off, Dinner and Andron got to penning the finale scenes involving Boyd. “We then sent it to Walton, and he loved it,” Dinner recalls. “He was actually the first one to say, ‘Welllll, you knowwww… if we have a good time… he’s out there in the world, isn’t he? We can always do another rodeo.'”

“It was so great to have him back,” Dinner says, “and with both with him and Tim, I think their performances are fantastic. I feel with both of them that they’re 10 years down the road and that there’s a maturity in the characters, where it wasn’t just picking up where we left off. There’s a lot of road beneath their feet. But just seeing [Walton] do this again, and seeing the character after spending time in prison, it was a ball.”

So is it safe to say that Raylan does take that phone call on the boat, setting up a hunt for fugitive Boyd? “Or, it’s gonna keep ringing…,” Dinner counters. (Read our full Q&A with Dinner, including about Winona’s return.)

What did you think of City Primeval, and do you want more Raylan stories?

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