Raylan Givens can be a smart man when he wants to be, but he
wouldn’t have survived for as long as he has if he deeply considered every
situation that he encounters. Tonight’s pre-credits sequence is a case in the
point. When a barefoot Raylan steps out of Charles Monroe’s mansion to confront
a baseball bat-wielding, car alarm-triggering goon, he has to know that he’s
entering a potentially life-or-death situation—maybe not for himself, given his
nigh-perfect marksmanship, but certainly for the anonymous goon and possibly
for the stoned and undressed social worker somewhere inside the house. Under
such circumstances, Raylan doesn’t have the luxury of earnestly questioning the
man to find out just who his business is with and whether he might have
legitimate grievances with said person. The man has made an implicit but unmistakable
threat, and so Raylan’s most sensible recourse is to match aggression with
aggression. To further assert dominance, Raylan reveals just how well he
understands what is going on, explaining that he knows the batsman is there on
Monroe’s behalf.
Never mind that the man actually seems confused by the news
that that the car and the house don’t belong to Raylan, and he shows zero
recognition of Monroe’s name. Raylan knows from bitter experience just how
quickly these situations can escalate; he could be mere moments away from drawing,
so the priority here must be on maintaining his tenuous position of control. He’s
great at dealing with immediate crises, but he’s lousy at figuring out their
true root causes once the danger has passed. He’s obstinate enough to
stick by his initial gut reaction, even when there’s plenty of evidence to
suggest another explanation, and he’s too damn incurious to wonder about any
grander design. It’s left playfully ambiguous as to just what is going on with
Allison, as at one point in the final scene she notes Raylan’s longstanding
weakness for beautiful women who run afoul of the law. When asked what he
thinks of that trend, Raylan replies that, left to his own devices, he probably
would never think about it, and that’s likely the most honest thing Raylan has
said this season. He’s so good at surviving disasters—and that includes just
about every romantic relationship he’s pursued over the past five seasons—that he
puts no effort into preventing them.
If anything, as “Good Intentions” demonstrates, Raylan is
far too good at provoking such crises. After all, Charles Monroe only takes
increasingly insane steps to retrieve his gold once Raylan tells him about
Henry. Sure, Raylan is acting to protect himself by warning Monroe about the possibility
of a felony murder conviction, but that doesn’t feel like a good enough reason
for the marshal to make that trip to the courthouse. In theory, he might be
intentionally baiting Monroe into further incriminating himself—which is
precisely what happens—but it feels so much more like Raylan to assume he was
just being a dick for the sheer bloody sake of it. As Rachel observes, Raylan excels
at bringing out the asshole in people. That scene also sees Rachel try to get
Raylan to think of Allison as a criminal, following Henry’s claims that she planted
meth in his home so that she could place his son in foster care. Raylan proves incapable
of considering the hypothetical, which Rachel—who is far more a thinker and
detective than her colleague has ever been—takes as a sign of Raylan lying to
either her or himself. But it might just be a sign of the limitations of Raylan’s
worldview.
After all, Raylan has long separated good guys and bad guys
in fairly absolute terms—most profoundly when he refused to give a gun to Drew
Thompson in last year’s “Decoy”—and what he says to Henry in that earlier
scene reveals plenty about how Raylan understands the lawman’s mindset. As he
tells Henry, even if Allison did in fact plant drugs, there was nothing
personal about it: “Whatever she did, she didn’t do it to you. She did it
because she thought it was the best way to do her job.” As far as Raylan is
concerned, the true mark of a hero is complete indifference to the villain; it’s
only corruption when an authority uses his or her position to exact petty
vengeance. That’s why Raylan is fine with goading Monroe into a fresh set of
crimes, but he does feel compelled to intercede before the guy actually kills
Wynn Duffy, even though such a result might be quite satisfying to Raylan on a
personal level.
This is a messy episode of Justified, one in which nobody seems to have any clear idea what
they are doing, and that character uncertainty bleeds over just a little too
much to the storytelling itself. The choking scene between Monroe and his maid
feels particularly strange, as though the show doesn’t know quite what tone
that moment should have. The subsequent scene in which Monroe is shot outside
of Wynn Duffy’s trailer also feels off, perhaps because so much of the vital
action occurs offscreen. Allison’s sudden departure after Raylan returns from
dealing with Henry is also a bit bizarre, though that at least lends itself to
some fairly obvious explanations, starting with the fact that, well, she is stoned. On some level, “Good
Intentions” is just following the lead of its protagonist. It’s not that Raylan
believes that the ends justify the means, but rather that the right ends mean
that Raylan doesn’t have to care much about how he gets to them. Even so, to use
a term that a women’s tennis fan like Wynn Duffy would surely approve of,
Raylan makes a hell of a lot of unforced errors tonight in pursuit of those
ends.
The same could be said of Boyd, who is still trying to clean
up the six or seven messes he has created for himself. Boyd may be an outlaw,
but he’s made much the same mistake as Raylan: Just because Boyd rarely does
anything out of personal animus, that doesn’t mean that the people he screws
over won’t take it personally. The final moment of the episode hammers that
point home, as the frequently forgotten Cousin Johnny is revealed as the man
behind the massacre. Boyd’s greatest cruelty to Johnny has always simply been indifference, but that’s enough to motivate a broken, terminally insecure man
like Johnny to take horrific actions to get himself noticed. There’s even a glimmer
of this in how Boyd treats Dewey Crowe. This might just be a reflection of
Walton Goggins’ prodigious gifts as an actor, but it’s possible to hear
genuine, almost fatherly pride in the motivational speech that Boyd delivers to
Dewey, even though it’s abundantly clear that Boyd only sold Audrey’s because
Dewey is the ultimate easy mark. He never considered that anyone cleverer than
Dewey or Wade would ever pay attention to the books, and that oversight is
likely to bring him into direct conflict with the manipulative, ruthless Daryl
Jr. sooner rather than later. This just is not a good week for Boyd and people’s
cousins, basically.
In the midst of these relatively standard Harlan County
antics, there’s the scene at the bar between Mara and Boyd. It’s been so long
since we’ve last seen his swastika tattoo that it’s become all too easy to
forget that his fondness for long-sleeved, fully-buttoned shirts isn’t just a
fashion choice. Boyd doesn’t quite apologize for the tattoo, but he does say it
was from a long time ago, which segues into Mara’s discussion of the constant,
tiny sacrifices that a cold Latvian woman makes in the name of survival. Like
so much else in tonight’s episode, this is a strange sequence, particularly
since any plan that rests on convincing Lee Paxton that Boyd is dead for an
extended period seems kind of cockamamie. And yet the oddness here feels more
deliberate, as though Justified is
delighting in confounding our expectations of just what is going on between
Mara and Boyd. The tattoo on Boyd’s arm is just the most visceral possible reminder
that some decisions cannot be unmade, some parts of the past cannot be outrun. That
swastika is the ultimate emblem of short-term thinking, as Boyd was forced to become
something horrendous in order to survive a place like Elkton. Both he and
Raylan could stand to think more about the consequences of their actions,
particularly in how their choices impact others and how that can then reflect
back on them. As it stands, “Good Intentions” feels like a bitterly ironic
title for what unfolds tonight, but I wouldn’t have Justified any other way.
Stray observations:
- “Jesus, man! You almost took out my eye.” “Yeah, I know, I missed.” Now that’s the Wynn Duffy I remember.
- Meanwhile, these are dire times for Dewey Crowe. Will the world’s most sweet and innocent neo-Nazi—nope, can’t see how I could possibly come to regret that phrasing—kill his bartender and maybe best friend? It’s hard to see what possible way out of this predicament there could be, but never underestimate the man with four kidneys.
- I haven’t talked much at all about Ava this season, but both the writers and Joelle Carter are doing some good stuff with her limited screen time. Her complaints about Boyd’s handling of the situation seem entirely legitimate, yet it also has to be said that this is the one mess that Boyd is barely responsible for, if at all. She’s positioned on the show right where you might expect a wrongfully accused person to be, except she’s completely guilty—she angrily asks if all this is supposed to be her fault, to which Boyd rightly responds that he didn’t kill Delroy—and most of the mistakes that led her to that jail cell were hers and hers alone. Even so, it would be good to get her story out of that meeting room sooner rather than later.