'Justified' Season Premiere Review: Say Goodbye to a Bad Guy

There was a point during the fifth season of Justified when I believed the best way to revitalize the show in its sixth and final season would be to ship Timothy Olyphant’s U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens down to Florida, where we’d first seen him in the pilot episode and where the mother of his infant child (Natalie Zea) has been far-too-patiently awaiting his arrival. My solution to the final season had the added benefit of bringing the series back to a location Justified’s ultimate creator, the late novelist Elmore Leonard, had set many of his novels. (After Detroit, Miami was Leonard’s most frequent go-to geographic area for crazy crime.)

Well, the sixth season premiere on Tuesday night found Zea’s Winona continuing to be alluringly languid on the phone from Florida, even as Raylan, that silly fool, was resisting her siren calls in order to stay in Kentucky, setting up an ultimate showdown with Justified’s most effective villain: Walton Goggins’s Boyd Crowder. For a series that has always excelled at creating vivid villains (one example: Margo Martindale’s Mags Bennett, an Emmy-winning role), it’s really an achievement that Boyd remains the series’ most complex and consistently engaging foe. Two things ensure this.

First, Boyd — an intelligent man prone to explosions of violence — is the kind of man Raylan might have become had he not chosen law enforcement, which makes them mirror-image antagonists, an always compelling dramatic set-up. Second, Boyd is, despite their similarities, also everything Raylan dislikes: Boyd is a loquacious braggart where Raylan is hardboiled-laconic; Boyd maintains a hold over women (especially Joelle Carter’s Ava, with whom Raylan had a relationship early on, as we were reminded in the premiere) that is both charismatic and manipulative; and Boyd is an immoral man who is fully aware of the spiritual consequences of rejecting morality.

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There have been moments over the course of Justified when Boyd embraced a Christian faith he knew he would finally betray. Music question: Have you ever heard the recording of Jerry Lee Lewis’s 1957 debate with producer Sam Phillips about the morality of rock and roll, in which the Killer comes to the conclusion that he’s going to go to hell, literally, for performing this music, but that he just can’t help himself? That’s Boyd Crowder’s dilemma, in essence.

So the end-game for Justified that commenced on Tuesday night is a Raylan-Boyd showdown. For the moment, Raylan is being a good boy, obeying the rules, using Ava as a confidential informant to set up a RICO case to imprison Boyd, just the way his superiors want him to do. But we know Raylan can’t remain a good boy for very long. Indeed, we count upon his random acts of violent justice, just as we are made eager for Boyd’s random acts of violent retribution, to give the show its juice.

And here I arrive at a big spoiler if you haven’t seen Tuesday’s season premiere.

The shooting of one of Justified’s best, most beloved characters — dopey screw-up criminal Dewey Crowe, played by Damon Herriman, was both shocking and inevitable. But it was made more shocking for the way the show’s producers opted to have the inevitable occur in the season premiere. In reintroducing Dewey into Justified’s criminal slipstream, we were expecting him to carouse for a while longer, helping or hurting Boyd’s criminal enterprises as he has done so entertainingly before. A scrawny no-account who deserves the epithet of “hillbilly thug” as much as anyone on Justified, Dewey was also a lovable dunce, ruled by greed, his libido, and a nostalgia for a youthful comradeship with Boyd that long ago dried up. He’s come close to death many times, so his comeuppance was perhaps overdue, but his death scene also served to emphasize the extent of Boyd’s renewed ruthlessness. “I think I couldn’t trust him anymore,” Boyd said heartlessly, after blasting Dewey’s brains against a wall. Not for nothing did Boyd say just a few minutes before that: “It’s all coming to an end.” Indeed it bloody well is.

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There are other potent villains popping up this season, including Mary Steenburgen’s Katherine Hale, who makes coldbloodedness enticingly cheerful, Olyphant’s former Deadwood co-star Garret Dillahunt as a chatty thug, and, just on the horizon, Sam Elliott, shorn of his moustache but bristling with menace as a deceptively polite meanie. I look forward to seeing more of them all, but we both know that Raylan vs. Boyd is the main event in the final rounds of Justified’s heavyweight bout.

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