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| The showdown we all wanted, never got, and still came out happy |
"I believe you dictate the river of fate through your actions." - Boyd Crowder, Justified, S04E12
When I finished Justified's finale, titled "The Promise," I was disappointed. I've been waiting six years to see the final showdown between Raylan Givens and Boyd Crowder. When our dark and light knights finally stared each other down in Loretta McReedy's barn, I, along with all audience members, thought it would be the showdown we've all wanted to see. Raylan demanded that Boyd pick up a gun and draw on him. This way, the killing of Boyd Crowder would be justified. However, Boyd knows just as well as the rest of us that pulling on Raylan spells doom. To top it off, Boyd's already taken a bullet, and his quickdraw skills are miles away from Raylan's. Thus, he makes the only decision that he can to escape death: he refuses to draw. And, if Boyd refuses to draw, Raylan, by his own twisted moral code, is unable to shoot. And with that climactic scene in the barn, Boyd, Ava, and Raylan all survive Justified. When I first finished the finale, I was disappointed. However, in retrospect, it was just as masterful as the rest of the final season.
The first major conflict for the finale to touch upon was the seasonal villain Avery Markham, played by Sam Elliott. His lackey, the wannabe John Wayne, Boon was also a loop to close. Avery has Ava kidnapped and ready to be killed, when Boyd shows up at the barn, pointing a gun at one of Avery's corrupt police officers. Avery threatens to kill Ava, but before anyone can kill any hostages, Boyd shoots Avery and, in a final Boyd Crowder badass moment, dispatches of all the corrupt cops as well.
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| The Turtle Visaged King |
Avery Markham was an interesting character for the final season. He wasn't as crazy as Robert Quarles or as deceptive as Mags Bennett, but his motivations seemed the most clear. While others were driven by self-preservation (or destruction in Quarles's case,) Avery Markham was driven by love. He had come back to Harlan to start a weed empire legally, after marrying his eternal love, Katherine Hale. Thus, though a villain who was willing to do whatever is needed to get Harlan county land, Avery was far from the all-knowing power of past villains. Instead, Markham threw a wrench into the way that Harlan works, disrupting the past (Katherine and Avery), the present (Boyd and Raylan), and the future (Loretta) of Harlan. Instead of being the force that splits worlds apart, Markham brought them together. He raised the stakes of Harlan County, bringing the inevitable showdown between Boyd and Raylan to a head. Avery says it best when he tells Raylan, "You're just jerking me around and using me to get to Boyd." Indeed, the point of Markham is to add an extra layer of conflict to the final season, but also to draw our longtime main characters together, goading them into their final standoff. When Avery is finally killed, it was rewarding, but on a greater level, it represented the changing of the guard in Harlan. Boyd has slain an old King and is subsequently jailed, opening the door for a new Queen in Loretta to step up to the plate.
Our other seasonal stooge, Boon, is a fascinating minor character. Introduced only five episodes ago, Jonathon Tucker's character is a young man who's obviously had nothing in his life aside from a gun. His use of an old-style revolver, a gunslinger's hat, and an out-of-time mustache makes him the perfect endgame foil for Raylan Givens. Raylan has purpose to his life. He has a child and an ex-wife in Florida. He got all of this from escaping Harlan. Boon however, represents Raylan had he stayed. Both are masters of the quickdraw, both revel in staring death in the face down the barrel of a gun, and both men, when they meet on a barren Kentucky highway, are dying to see who's the faster shot. However, it's Boon's weakness that he tries to go for a headshot, while Raylan merely shoots him in the chest. The real casualty is the situation is Raylan's hat, who takes the bullet for him, while Raylan shoots Boon clearly, ending their gentleman's duel.
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| The Tick-Tock Man to Raylan's Roland Deschaine |
Justified has always been a modern western, and this legitimate duel at High Noon only proves it. Neither men were poltroons, and staying true to the western genre, both men put their lives on the line for no real reason other than to see who's the better shot. We've seen Raylan shoot many men, but none parallel the old-style standoff the way that Boon did. It could have been 2015 or 1875, and this showdown would have gone the same way. And, despite our lack of a Boyd-Raylan gun-slinging battle, the show fulfilled our lust for a match of the quick-draw.
Then, there's Ava. The titular "Promise" spoken about in the episode title comes in the form of what Ava tells Raylan four years after the events of Justified. After she escaped Harlan due to Raylan being distracted with Boon, Ava escapes to California, where Raylan tracks her down. In their first meeting in four years, Raylan questions how Ava was able to escape so well. He speculates that perhaps Ellstin Limehouse helped her, but lands on the conclusion that it had to be the ultimate rat; Wynne Duffy. While Ava neither confirms nor denies this, it is rumored that Wynne has been spotted surfing in Fiji, perhaps the most fitting conclusion for any character ever.
Anyway, Raylan tells Ava that its time to bring her in after a four years dead case. However, Ava has something to reveal to Raylan: a child by Boyd. The kid is hilarious, dressed in the exact clothing that Boyd would wear, only for some reason chubby. Perhaps he takes after M.C. Gainey's Bo Crowder? Whatever the case, she makes him promise to never alert Boyd to the existence of little Zachariah Crowder. Raylan agrees to this, and coming to the realization that he can't justifiably take a single mother in after a four year dead zone, leaves California empty handed. He instead goes to the one place where this story can end: Harlan County.
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| Our last, nostalgic, look at Boyd. |
In our final scene, Raylan goes to visit Boyd in jail, where he has taken up preaching again. Our two main characters, hero and antihero, sit down one last time to swap words. Raylan sadly informs Boyd that Ava is dead, thereby dissuading him from ever tracking down his lady love and his unknowing son. However, it is not with contempt that he tells Boyd this. No, after the six years that the two men have spent on opposite sides of the law and the many years they spent digging coal together back in the old days, Raylan is done with his quest to kill Boyd. He arrested him, locked him away forever, broke his heart, and now that the quest is over, he can sit down with Boyd as two men, rather than an adversary and a knight. It's said in the last words of the show why Boyd and Raylan have the bond that they have. The last lines of the series are, "We dug coal together," revealing that no matter whether Boyd or Raylan ended up dead, whether it be by one of the others hands or not, something would be missing from the other. Old relationships die hard, even if it's between ostensibly mortal enemies.
In the end, Justified delivered a more emotional than explosive conclusion. We saw the deaths of our seasonal villains, but the show-long characters, namely Ava, Boyd, and Raylan all survived the series, achieving semi-happy endings.
I'll miss Justified. It's one more fantastic western off the air, leaving us with only Hell on Wheels to get our fair share of whiskey and badass gunslingers. It's not too much of a stretch to say the witty dialogue, the innovative characters, and the idiosyncrasies of Wynne Duffy made for some of the best television of the recent years.
Labels: Elmore Leonard, Erica Tazel, FX, Graham Yost, Jacob Pitts, Jere Burns, Joelle Carter, Jonathon Tucker, Justified, Mary Steenburgen, Natalie Zea, Nick Searcy, Sam Elliott, Timothy Olyphant, Walton Goggins