'Justified' Postmortem: Graham Yost on the Death (and Easter Egg) in 'Alive Day'

Spoiler alert! If you haven’t watched this week’s episode of Justified — “Alive Day,” written by Benjamin Cavell and Jennifer Kennedy and directed by Peter Werner — stop reading now. As he’ll do throughout the season, showrunner Graham Yost takes Yahoo TV inside the writers’ room.

But first, an important update: Shooting of the series finale wrapped last Friday. Yes, there were tears. “My nickname’s Weepy McWeepster. That goes back to Boomtown days,” says Yost, who was reminded how he handled that show’s less ceremonious end. “We had a gathering at an Irish pub in LA the night that it was canceled. I went around and I had a fistful of $5 bills, and if ever I started tearing up, I would hand $5 to someone. It was a way to coax me not to lose it. We’re having a big-ass wrap party on Friday night, and there’ll be more tears there. I may have to do that again…. Maybe $6. One for each year the series aired.”

Let’s start with Choo-Choo (Duke Davis Roberts), who met his end this hour. Hearing Seabass refer to him as “dumb” was tough to take. Did you always know that Choo-Choo could be a character that would elicit that kind of response from viewers?
No, it was almost entirely due to the actor. It’s just one of those things we’ve been blessed with on this show: an actor pops, and you just want to write more and more for him. I will tell you, there was almost an uprising on set with people saying, “No, no, you can’t kill Choo-Choo! No! Bring him back!” Because he was just a beloved character, and the actor was just beloved as well. But for story purposes, we needed to start the unwinding of this particular coterie of Markham’s henchmen.

Related: Graham Yost on the Kiss and the Cattle Prod in ‘Sounding’

The car scene with Choo-Choo and Calhoun’s escort, whom he was ordered to kill, must have been a tricky one to write: There needed to be an instant connection that was believable.
It needed an instant connection, but the connection goes deeper than whatever’s between them. It’s more Choo-Choo and his history. You get a little more glimpse into the weight that that carries for him, and that sense of before and after things happening in life and the desire to go back. For him, it’s going back before the IED went off, but it’s also now he’s here in this situation. This is where his life has gone, and boy, he wishes it was different. He didn’t require much humanizing because, again, the actor did such a great job making Choo-Choo this interesting charterer, but it added a level to it.

The conversation between Walker and Markham, when Walker was resisting Markham’s order to murder Choo-Choo after Raylan and Gutterson figured out Choo-Choo had killed Calhoun, was a different kind of scene for those characters.
It’s just fun to have the two of them in a really intense scene where it’s not just a story point. It’s not just Markham berating him and saying, “You got to do this or that.” It was much more of a man-to-man talk, and there was a little Easter egg in there. It’s unrelated to the character beats in a way, but at one point, Markham refers to being in Vietnam, which was an idea that Sam had, by the way — what if he was a Vietnam vet? — which we thought was interesting in terms of Arlo having been as well.

And he talks about coming upon a Vietcong who had stepped in a punji pit. Punji sticks were basically, if you don’t know, like sharpened points of bamboo, and you would step on one, and it would go right through your foot. And they would smear them with excrement so that you would get infected. But the whole point of them, as he says in the scene, is that an injured man would slow down the whole group, and so they came across this Vietcong who killed himself. Well, back in Season 2…this is a long story. Are you ready for this?

Go for it.
Back in Season 2 — when we were concocting the opening episode, when we wanted to meet Loretta McCready — before it became Loretta in a marijuana drying shed being chased by a pedophile, we had had ideas about marijuana fields up in the woods, you know, in a meadow, and the various booby-traps that people would employ to protect their fields. And we came upon this idea that, given the history of the people in the area and how many would’ve served in Vietnam, someone had, in fact, laid out punji sticks hidden in the ground that people would step on.

And at one point, one of the writers said something to the effect of, “Well, how many punji sticks would be in a pit?” And we all just stopped, and it was like, “How…what…that’s not helpful. We don’t need to answer that. We need to move on.” But for the rest of the series, from that point on, any new writers coming in would have to be told this story and why we use the term “going to Punjitown,” which is when you’re breaking a story and you get into too much detail, you’re getting lost. You need to pull back and just move on with the story. You’ll work out how many punji sticks are in a pit later. So there were many funny runs in the room about going to Punjitown. People would say, “It feels like we’re going to Punjitown,” and someone would say, “Yeah, what’s the weather like today? Is there a chance of rain in Punjitown?” And it would just become this whole thing. So, at one point, in one of the cuts [of this episode], his punji speech had been taken out, and I wanted it back in — both as a little nod to the history of the writers’ room and because I thought it was a great story.

Related: Graham Yost on the Return of Familiar Faces in ‘The Trash and the Snake’

Love that. When Choo-Choo phoned Walker to say he didn’t want to kill the girl, Walker realized he had to take out Choo-Choo. But Choo-Choo still sided with Markham’s men when Raylan and Gutterson arrived for a shootout. Was there a debate about that?
It was just the sense of a little suicide by cop. Like he couldn’t see any other way out, and he’s not someone who’s going to want to go to jail. He was willing to be taken out that way. And then, even if Walker was there to kill him, he ultimately has his own loyalty to depend upon.

We wanted a shootout, and we wanted it to be quick and brutal, and we had a lot of debate over the weeks as to how many men Markham had. How many people were working under Walker? You only really saw Ty Walker, and Seabass, and Choo-Choo, and now we’ve got these other guys. So it’s a little bit of figuring out the numbers, but it’s also Peter Werner and his ability just to shoot the hell out of a big shootout scene and do it economically. It was a wonderful little bit of filmmaking, but it also didn’t kill the day. Peter’s been one of the great gifts to the show.

Walker got hit with one bullet. We’ll see him again?
Yeah. That’s not a big spoiler.

Let’s talk about Choo-Choo’s actual death. The train stopped, but he still died on the tracks. How did you guys decide on that moment?
Well, there was a huge amount of back and forth. Originally, the character was called Mundo, and Tim [Olyphant] came up with the idea of, “What if he’s called Choo-Choo, and he died on train tracks? He got hit by a train? Wouldn’t that be awesome?” We didn’t know exactly how to make it work without it feeling too jokey, and it was really, really tough. So this was the version that we landed on, that the train doesn’t hit the car and it’s just a matter of he was bleeding out anyway.

There’s also another thing in our business, and it’s apropos now because Friday was the one-year anniversary of the death of Sarah Jones, who was a second assistant camerawoman on a [film] shooting in Georgia. She got hit by a train, and so there’s just a real sensitivity across the business for any sort of train work. So we wanted to pay attention to that.

There was that nice conversation between Zachariah and Ava, where we learned that Ava’s dad died in a mine. He was trapped, she’s trapped — was that the thinking?
Joelle [Carter] would just sort of ask questions, and occasionally ask for a little more, and she just asked Ben if there could be something more between her and Zachariah, and this is what Ben came up with. I think it’s one of the most simple and beautiful little scenes that we’ve ever done. There was just the great light, and being at Disney Ranch on Ava’s house porch — it was pretty wonderful.

Zachariah ended up killing Mr. Handsome, a.k.a. The Pig, who hadn’t realize he’d figured out that Zachariah had tried to kill Boyd in the mine.
We wanted to establish in this episode that this is what Zachariah’s got in mind. That mine was built on a stage. The production design team did a remarkable job. It’s not just one hallway — you can walk around.

Related: Graham Yost Talks ‘Noblesse Oblige,’ Avery’s Warning, and Wynn’s Tanning Bed

Let’s go back to the beginning of the episode, the scene between Ava, Raylan, and Boyd. That was a callback to the end of the pilot.
To have the three of them in a scene together doesn’t happen that often. We originally talked about having an actual chicken dinner scene, and we went back and forth on it. Tim was bumping up against it: He wasn’t really sure why Raylan would let it get that far, but he did see the point of Raylan wanting to make sure that Ava was okay, that Boyd hadn’t found out anything about the Fekus quandary. By the way, in the writers’ room, we would just giggle every time we said Fekus’s name because it’s sort of like fecal…we are just such children. So he wanted to make sure that Ava was okay, and that she wasn’t freaking out, and that she wasn’t about to run again. That then became, well, instead of doing a chicken dinner scene, we’ll do the chicken dinner preparation scene and have it between these three and yet quote back to the pilot.

And that bookended nicely with the end of the episode, when Limehouse phoned Boyd to offer him information about Ava.
Boyd finds out at the end of the episode that something’s up with Ava, and that was really the goal of the episode, to get to that point.

Since you won’t tease anything about how that will play out, let’s talk about Avery proposing to Katherine and then immediately asking her if she’s the one who ratted on her husband. The look on his face as they hugged… you’re not sure who’s playing who at that moment. How soon will that part of the story heat up?
Not in the next episode. Not in the one after that. But that is definitely part of the story. What’s she going to do? What’s he going to do if he finds out [her plan]?

We also saw Rachel, after consulting with Art, decide not to pull Raylan from the case. Will there be consequences?
You’ll see. There are repercussions to how this all shakes out and how this story goes.

Related: Graham Yost Talks ‘Cash Game,’ Sam Elliott, and a Twist Straight Out of Harlan

A question popped up in the comments section of last week’s postmortem: Some fans are wondering if the Marshals are lying to Ava when they threaten her with a return to jail. If Albert Fekus recanted his story, they should have nothing to hold over her. But Albert didn’t really come clean?
Albert didn’t just come clean. I mean, the reality was that they got him to recant knowing that it was bulls—t, but they forced his hand. They’re not dangling bulls—t over Ava: They could be mean about it and just send her back to prison on the original charge, and the idea is that you can do a whole thing with charges pending. So you can leave someone in a certain amount of limbo, which is what they’re doing, and that’s where they’re being a—holes.

Glad we cleared that up. Last question: Did you hear about the real Harlan PD issuing an APB for Queen Elsa from Frozen because of the weather?
Yeah, I did. It was funny: It was our last day of shooting, and someone was saying, “I heard on the radio…” There’s Harlan County in the news. We thought that was kind of appropriate for us on the final day of shooting.

Justified airs Tuesdays at 10 p.m. on FX.