I grinned when I saw the episode’s title (“Moonshine War”) on my DVR. In a nod to Dr. Taulbee, it looks like there’s going to be a storyline involving a man who gets involved with underage girls.
I love how they’ve been incorporating elements from other novels (Riding the Rap and Maximum Bob come to mind) into the series.
Man, that was some show. The peek at future episodes gave me chills. They hurt that little girl, Jesus, then this series will have created a truly classically unique villain. That is one cold woman.
JUSTIFIED is a great example of interpeting Elmore’s fiction properly. Mr. Yost and his personel are doing a more than competant job, adding their ideas to the narrative in such a way that doesn’t detract from the source material. The end result is top shelf television. FX channel original programming have some of the best shows for basic cable. One of them, TERRIERS, was something I DVR’d
and was sorry to read it would not be coming back. I read somewhere that FX had considered bringing Richard Stark’s “Parker” character
to t.v. THE GREEN EAGLE SCORE was the source material, and it had the blessing of Donald Westlake (Richard Stark). Unfortunately, the production stalled. FOX MOVIE CHANNEL has a segment called “Life After Filmschool” and this week features Graham Yost, JUSTIFIED’s
producer. I hope Gregg can put it on the web site.
Is it just me or is Boyd fast-becoming the atypical Mr. L bad-guy character turning introspective, trying to fly straight within loosely defined parameters for ‘straight?’ He’s becoming Stickley, or Foley right before our eyes.
Now only if the next time he chances across a small fortune he manages to walk away with it into the sunset….
Such a type of character truly drawn by The Man, that’d be the case. Hollywood, he’ll fail to redeem himself, believe he can’t change, rather than seize the opportunity to walk away, a little cash in hand for his troubles.
And what was his new boss said to Raylan about their relationship, Sounds like a romance?
The Spoil, night of 3-30, was wonderful. So many good scenes, such good writing and acting.
Give Margo Martindale, Mags Bennett, the emmy nomination for her church scene alone tonight on the heart and soul of the area and the behavior of the people.
Raylan turning Carol’s sarcasm into a screed on how his job is better than those of miners.
Raylan telling Carol and Boyd and Sheriff Bennett sooner or later their corruption will blow up in their faces and he doesn’t even want to be around to clean up the bodies.
The byplay between Boyd and Ava, where is that going?
I think they keep Boyd ambiguous on purpose, because like most of Elmore’s characters, he is human and complex, and is good and bad and is ambivalent and changes his mind and is lost and searching, and is cool and funny, and is ominous and calculating.
Even Raylan is restless too, will he stay or go, will he and Wynona get solid, what about Carol putting the moves on him, and what of Ava?
Olyphant as the center of the series makes Raylan interesting and is even getting producer credit now.
Great to see it just got renewed for a third season.
Loving this series much more than I expected to. They’re doing a fantastic and fun-to-watch job on most fronts translating EL for the small screen. I was skeptical of Olyphant as Raylan, but he has brought me around for sure.
My only gripe (?) is with the Loretta storyline (I’m only up to S02E06) - Elmore, as an unofficial rule I would say, has never included a “kid” storyline. (closest to my recollection is a brief mention in Stick) I’m finding the surrogate daddy thing a bit off direction.
Nowhere near enough to turn me off of watching though: when CSI:Miami is the bar set for TV drama, this sh*t is still gold.
Wednesday night’s entry had quite a bunch in it, too. And twists.
When you think the episode will tame down, it just keeps going, with more action, more twists, more character development.
Stop here if you don’t want spoilers.
Mags all but stole the show again, showing she can play chess with the coal company girl (miss thing, sit your bony ass down), and trump her to milk the buyout offer, and Boyd changes sides from coal to Bennetts. Boyd prefers the winning side, and gets a littlel help from Raylan’s Dad, and Mags sees tons of cash and the heck with the local populace she lovingly extolled last week, as they will lose the mountain; they’ll adapt and be fine, she says. Happy with her financial killing, she even sings on the porch. This series is Margo Martindale’s best work, and she’s been around the block awhile.
The party at Mags’ place had it all, music, dancing, drinking and fighting.
Someone mentioned the Loretta thread being unlike Elmore in that it is a kid. But it was perhaps just a loose end in establishing that Mags was no girl scout when she cold-cold-cold-bloodedly poisoned Loretta’s dad and merrily took her in like a kind old aunt. But the girl showed the common decency of Raylan, who just tried to help a kid who might need it. The girl was also an entre into Raylan dealing finally with Coover, the dumbass, drunk or high hulk who had a little trouble with impulse control. In protecting the girl, and keeping Coover from giving Loretta the same fate as her dad, Coover had to be dispatched, and Raylan did not hesitate. Brad William Henke as Coover pops up a lot on TV and movies these days, apparently a go-to guy for a sympathetic or villanous hulking big guy, and does a good job.
Ava dressed for the party is truly a sight for sore eyes, as she accompanies Boyd as he makes his play with Mags for his piece of the big pie.
And Raylan is, well, Raylan. I liked Olyphant in “Deadwood” and in an obscure film called “Hitman,” in which he is a hitter set up for a fall in a political intrigue suspenser, but has a heart for a hooker, the beautiful Russian Olga Kurylenko, and protects her from nefarious forces without using her. Even in that he displayed this cool under fire, get it done kind of guy we see in Raylan, a little laid back, knows what he likes and wants and what he doesn’t. Raylan’s hat even tops it off pretty well.
Now we got to see how this plays out with Mags who will be seething over losing Coover to Raylan’s hand, and whom Raylan had to tell she can no longer see Loretta. You got to figure Dickie and Doyle Bennett will be comin after Raylan, which may just leave Mags without them and Loretta, all alone by the telephone and her big pile of coal money.
We might have seen the last of coal Carol, who made her play for Raylan, who just wasn’t that interested.
Winona didnt make the scene this time, but seems to be coming back in the next episode, which will spell some captivation and probably some trouble for Raylan.
And so it goes. Only a few shows I wait for each week and this is at the top of the list now, with “House.” Bravo.
There have been little things here and there that have taken me out of the story. In the last few episodes, City Hall housing the federal court (federal courts don’t share space in municipal buildings; the city builds its city hall, the Feds build federal courthouses), all the outdoor shots, which look like So Cal and nothing like Kentucky, Coover beating up a US Marshall and not finding himself in cuffs looking at doing 86% of 18 years…, but one big thing really jolted me. Last night, Boyd meets with Arlo and and Arlo says, essentially, “go fuck yourself, I’m not selling.” The scene ends. Then we see Boyd looking at a map and telling Ava he’s got it all figured out. Then later at Mag’s party we see Boyd telling Carol and Ava that Arlo’s on board. At that moment, I believed 100% that Boyd was running a game on Carol, because I KNEW that Arlo had said “hell no.”
Today I read the interview with Graham Yost linked up at Facebook and he’s saying that when Boyd told Carol about Arlo, we were supposed to know that off-screen, he’d talked Arlo into selling. Boy, did that not come across. For that scenario to have been believable, they should have at least inserted a line somewhere—during the meeting between Boyd and Arlo, or in a subsequent phone call—like, “hang on Arlo, I haven’t yet told you the best part.” Without something like that to at least make you wonder, it’s unbelievable that Arlo might sell; the idea of it totally runs against his ornery, atavistic, hill-person personality.
When Arlo says, “hell no,” and there’s no subsequent interaction between him and Boyd, then Boyd’s next comment is “Arlo’s on board,” obviously you believe Boyd’s running a scam on Carol. How could you think otherwise?
One other thing: did anyone notice that Raylan says to Carol he’s going to crack open a bottle of Jim Bean? Whoops. (BTW, back in those parts, sure, people drink Beam, but they also drink JW Dant and Ten High).
I thought Boyd mentioned that he had stopped to see Arlo the morning of or before the shindig, pretty sure, and that now he was on board. With figuring out Megs’ plan, he would be able to offer Arlo more, a piece of a bigger cut. Makes sense.
Raylan took his badge off, made it personal. Now, knowing you’re a lawyer and used to politicians — mostly lawyers, right? — and law enforcement, officers of the court and such, have no real honor and jump back on their word as if such had never been made, even if on tape, I can see you saying Coover (what is that name from, cross between Coolidge and Hoover?) would have been locked up for whupping on Raylan.
But Raylan at heart is a backwoods boy and Old West Marshall at heart. He took off the badge, got his hat handed to him, accepted the consequences of his actions. It was personal, an affront to the badge and what it means, which is why he took it off.
But agreed, a real world lawman would have pussied out, called in his boys to haul Coover in after some “he resisted” bruises, sent him off for the long haul you mention.
I think the Arlo selling angle was massaged because it was inessential, and we can assume that like Mags who rejected the first offer out of hand, Arlo is all about the money, so Boyd sweetened it enough to get Arlo on board. But there is a slim possibility Boyd was BSing Mags and doesn’t have Arlo onboard, though I think he said he owns Arlo’s land now and is putting it up as part of Mags’ deal so the coal idiots have land to build roads to the coal. All that made oh-so-smart Carol look like a real duh. Didn’t she and her coal buddies figure they would need roads to haul the coal? Hard to believe Mags was that far ahead of the coal company, but I guess she was. Carol should have known overalls don’t make idiots, since she was something of a local girl. This went a long way toward Raylan rejecting her, and he was on record as saying sooner or later her corruption would blow up in her face.
Right, mk, about the Raylan fight with Coover, which was Raylan’s worst move so far. It’s how they settle things in the hollers. But it was bad judgment for Raylan to fight him and he surely wouldn’t if he were not so hung over. The really hard thing to believe about the fight is that Coover didn’t kill him. Coover is hardly ever given to restraint. And he is such a big guy and was hitting Raylan so hard while Raylan was on the floor, it should have killed him. Anyway, it all builds the Raylan mystique and legend, tougher than nails, than Coover, than the backwoods itself. Took a lickin, kept on tickin
I have a feeling Boyd loves Ava, Ava is still in love with Raylan, and when Raylan finally gets tired of Winona’s shenanigans, he will move back toward Ava, which would put him in conflict with Boyd again. Boyd and Raylan seem to have a grudging respect for one another, probably because they each know the other is an exceptional man, willing to think and act big, and to be ruthless when necessary—but in any case someone not to be trifled with but a man to be reckoned with. Joelle Carter as Ava is gorgeous this season and the beautiful Natalie Zea as Winona looks like she lost a bit of weight and is a bit bonier than before; put on a couple more pounds and fill out the face again (imho).
The scenery, courthouse, Beam (maybe Bean is colloquial) didn’t bother me at all. Small potatoes and everyone has a budget. Drama trumps verisimilitude.
Without that gun, even without a hangover, without Lorreta Coover was still kicking Raylan’s ass.
Sometimes I think Raylan is one of those guys, a legend in his own mind. But I’m okay with that. That’s real life.
And Coover only stopped because of his Ma. Although, with that beating he took, yeah, in real life, if not dead, Raylan would have had a days-long headache. I’ve seen it in real life. That’s sometimes why you see boxers walk out of a ring, then days later they’re in a hospital fighting for their lives.
Dain bramage is only funny when you don’t have it!
Speaking of Mags, while still a truly remarkable villain, she is not in the line of a Hannibal Lector as I had thought.
While at times, with Lorreta being dolled up, I had creepy-crawlies all over, Mags revealed that there was a little bit of humaness within all that sociopathy, talking with her boys later. While we could argue her desire for a daughter was more than a do-over because shed had all boys, that it was a manifestation of hatred for men (seen in her treatment of said sons, Lorreta’s dad), her desire for Loretta even after getting Coover killed was moving.
And surely she wasn’t wanting her back for revenge…right?
I’m here to tell you, boys, evil is evil. Don’t go off showing doubt and mercy to an evil person; they will eat your lunch for sure!
Come to think of it, Maga and Hannibal, such a deserving couple they’d make…
