'Justified' Postmortem: Graham Yost on Winona's Return, Ava's Camping Trip

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Spoiler alert! If you haven’t watched the March 3 episode of Justified — “The Hunt,” written by Taylor Elmore and Keith Schreier and directed by John Dahl — stop reading now. As he’ll do throughout the season, showrunner Graham Yost takes Yahoo TV inside the writers’ room to break down key scenes and tease what’s to come.

But first, a report on the cast’s wrap party last Friday: “There were some tears, but mostly celebration, and a lot of drinking, and some really bad karaoke,” Yost says. Pressed for details, he adds, “Listen, Kaitlyn Dever [who plays Loretta] did 'Ice Ice Baby,' and knew every word without looking at the screen. T.O.N.E-Z got up, who does our main theme, and we only use a snippet of the song, and there was Kaitlyn in the audience just bopping along and she knew every word, so that was fun. I got up with my assistant in the company and Jacob Pitts [who plays Gutterson] and did 'Sweet Home Alabama.' They didn’t have my song. My karaoke song is 'I'm Gonna Be ('500 Miles') by the Proclaimers because you can do a Scottish accent and hide the fact you can’t sing. Tim [Olyphant] said some words, and they were very heartfelt and appreciated, and I got up and rambled on a little too long, but set up the gag reel, and the gag reel was fantastic. It was a good evening.”

Now on to the episode…

Winona (Natalie Zea) made a trip to Kentucky with Willa and, in the end, told Raylan he can be with her and still be him. I loved the way she put it: Not knowing whether he’ll be coming home is better than living with the certainty of him not coming home.
We try to be a very fun Elmore Leonard show, and Elmore has these flashes of real grown-up reaction — the characters operate and discuss things in a very adult way — and we were shooting for that… The thing that we hit upon in the room is that, “You give us 50-50.” “Let’s make it 51-49.” They both understand their history. They’re not idiots. They’re not teenagers. They know that it’s not going to be easy because of who they are. But as Raylan basically says, “We’d be stupid not to give it a shot,” because they love each other. They’ll always love each other.

Related: Graham Yost on the Death (and Easter Egg) in ‘Alive Day’

What did you like about bringing Winona back in this episode specifically?
There’s the other thing that’s going on in this episode that we’ll get to, and we just felt it was the time for us to do something big about both relationships — Boyd and Ava and Raylan and Winona. We feel it’s kind of an episode unlike any other episode we’ve ever done in that it’s so focused on those two stories. But you get Tim and Natalie together working, playing these parts they’ve played for six years, and they’re just so good together, and we’re reminded why we fell in love with Natalie and just loved having her on the show. Having Raylan with a wife and playing that story all six years would have been difficult. So it’s been wonderful to have this sort of contentious, but very alluring relationship.

The scene where Winona is holding the screaming baby, and they’re having the conversation about Raylan not saying what kind of custody he wants — that baby was really screaming.
That baby was really screaming. I forget if it was two sets of triplets, or three sets of twins — there were a lot of babies. We had more babies than they did in American Sniper, and it paid off for us. I don’t know if you heard the story about American Sniper, but the baby fell ill on a particular day, and they had to use a doll. We used a lot of babies, and they were fantastic. Crying, smiling, everything.

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Raylan taking Willa to work was adorable. Art doing the whole, “Daddy better go talk to the bad man” stuff.
It had some of my favorite Raylan-Gutterson stuff in it, sitting at the desk, and also a great little Nelson bit. Poor Nelson: “Can I hold her?” “No.” Every show has to have their designated whipping boy, and Nelson is ours.

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

Raylan staying with Winona in the hotel room seemed to be a moment that he was choosing family over the job. Will he pay for that?
You’ll see in the next episode, there’s not a lot of fallout of, “Oh, boy, if only Raylan had been around for X and Y, things would have been different.” We’re always trying to have Art and everyone else remind Raylan that the United States Marshal Service is a very competent organization with or without him.

The whole point of the Raylan and Winona thing was to remind Raylan what’s at stake. He gets so involved in the job — in the Boyd of it, in the Markham of it — that he forgets his priorities, and I think you’ll see in the next episode his priority is rekindled.

Moving on to Boyd and Ava… Boyd took her to his late daddy’s cabin in Bulletville, a place where we saw a lot of people die in the Season 1 finale. Let’s start with their conversation comparing Boyd to Bowman: Ava slapped Boyd, he grabbed her neck, and then they had sex. How did the writers approach that scene?
We were feeling nervous about that. We liked the idea of angry, energized sex between them, and again, always not knowing if Ava is just doing it to stay alive. I can’t say, “Oh, we are the authors of this, and therefore, we know exactly what Ava’s thinking.” We allow Ava to have her own agency. We don’t always know; we just know that it’s a possibility either way. It was a difficult thing to get to, and we were wary in the room if it would play or not play. But they’re such great performers, I feel it played.

The other thing is, John Dahl directed the episode, and every year, he’s delivered one of our best episodes. It’s his last, but it was a great way for him to go out.

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Boyd forced Ava to go hunting. They’re talking about Johnny and Devil, they heard a razorback, and then he tells her to stay put and she’s worried he’s going to shoot her. How did that scenario come together?
So the writers were off wrapping up a previous episode, and I drove a fair amount of the break, and I had Boyd taking Ava hunting at night. I grew up in Canada. I’ve ventured into the country, but I’ve never done hunting in my life. So Taylor, who grew up in Florida with a little more hunting in his background said, “Oh, excuse me, who put this in there? Who goes hunting at night? Are they wearing night-vision goggles? What are they hunting at night?” So that was a nice little bit of embarrassment on my part.

It was just the idea that came up: There’s a reason for Boyd to have a gun, and it’s just dangerous out in the woods, and you think this could be it. That was the whole goal.

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

I appreciated the symbolism of the blood on Boyd’s hands and the pig hanging there since it was Limehouse who’d set this in motion.
[Laughs.] I love it when you find symbolism that was not intended. It was more, what do they hunt up in the hills? And wild boar is something that there’s a certain season for, and blah, blah, blah.

It was still a nice touch.
Thank you.

In their final confrontation, Ava finally told Boyd the truth about why she had to rat. He said he understood, then handed her the gun and told her to shoot him if she’d slept with Raylan. In the end, we saw that the gun had been empty and Boyd reloaded it. So we still don’t know what Boyd is thinking. That was the goal?
That’s the whole point. We think he’s done this big, heartbroken, kind of romantic, kind of heroic gesture of saying, “You kill me,” and then you find out that the gun was empty, and then he loads it back up with bullets. So Ava’s danger continues. This is not something that Boyd has just accepted and will move on. We don’t know what Ava is thinking. We don’t know how much she is just saying to stay alive, and how much she really feels toward Boyd. I think the key to Ava, and one of the keys to Joelle [Carter]’s great performance this season, is that Ava herself doesn’t know.

Joelle would ask some questions, but she knows Ava better than anyone at this point, so it’s up to her. We’d give her a little clarity. That big scene was a lot of work with Taylor, and Walton [Goggins], and her, and John Dahl. The way it was first scripted, the scene broke in the middle after she says she’s a snitch, and we went away on that break and then came back. Taylor said, “Can we just look at that scene if it didn’t break?” For one thing, FX has never liked us breaking in the middle of a scene. That’s part of their mandate. So we were able to keep it as one big scene. I think it played better that way.

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

We also need to talk about Walker going all Rambo in the bathroom.
That was fantastic. We just knew we needed something like that, and it was actually really hard to find a rest area we could shoot in. Again, me, pushing the original break, I had it be at a gas station. It was, like, “Well, that’s not going to work. There are too many people around who could see him, and blah, blah, blah.” When Keith came up with the idea of a rest stop — that was really Keith’s scene — I just loved it. I mean, it’s [Garret] Dillahunt at his best when he comes out and confronts the two frat boys off to Disney World and maybe The Wizarding World of Harry Potter. Dropping stuff like that in is just so much fun.

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Walker calling 911 was clever.
We try to follow the logic. OK, he needs more medical help and he can’t go to a hospital or a doctor, what would he do? Before Justified, Taylor wrote a pilot about EMTs, so he had a window into how they operate. I had not envisioned the twist, that they had been alerted to look for this guy, so they’re going to try this maneuver of sedating him.

Walker shooting the second EMT because, “It’s been such a day…”
It was pretty rough. But you know what, he is a bad guy, and they do what they do in order to survive.

We have not seen the last of him?
He’s still alive.

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