The sixth, and final, season of FX’s Justified draws to a close on Tuesday. The at times uneven show is going out on a high note, having refocused in this last season on the Raylan-Boyd-Ava triangle that gave the program dramatic heft when it began.
Set in the hills of Kentucky coal country, Justified was always most riveting when it concentrated on U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant) and his various emotional and familial entanglements. And no relationship was more tangled than the one Raylan shared with Ava Crowder (Joelle Carter) and Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins). The series premiere opened with Ava shooting her abusive husband (and Boyd’s brother) and closed with Raylan shooting Boyd for threatening Ava.
Things only grew more complicated from there. Raylan and Ava were together during the first season, before Ava and Boyd joined forces both physically and criminally. She’s now sworn both off, terrified one of them will put her in the ground—if the other one doesn’t throw her in jail first. The tension there would be enough to propel lesser shows for years.
But a lover’s quarrel is not Justified’s real strength. It’s the relationship between Boyd and Raylan. Each man hails from a clan of criminals, and neither family is terribly fond of the other. They are reverse images—lawman and criminal—that emerged from the same background: both spent time in the mines during their youth, both decided they were never going back. And the idea that, with just a few choices made differently, either man could be the other has driven both of them a little bit nuts.
You can see their similarities expressed in their different lines of work. Raylan is frequently under investigation for being forced to pull the trigger in the line of duty. Similarly, Boyd has no compunction about putting a bullet in a stoolie—or even a random son of the soil whose truck he has hijacked. They’re both trigger-happy.
The scene in which Boyd put a bullet in the aforementioned hillbilly’s head to keep him from talking came midway through last week’s episode, and some have speculated that the show wanted to inject a wanton act of cruelty in order to give audiences some peace of mind if Boyd is to meet his maker in the finale.
If you needed that last little push, you probably haven’t been paying much attention to the show (or you’re a contrarian trying to construct a rationale for Boyd actually being the more virtuous of the two). Crowder’s a drug-pushing murderer many times over, a one-time white supremacist who doesn’t have much use for the show’s few black characters. He’s also a silver-tongued trickster, Harlan County’s Joker. He’s a charming villain—but a villain all the same.
Raylan, meanwhile, is a rather straightforward hero in a media landscape where the "anti-" prefix is everywhere. Sure, he’s gunned down a few bad guys. Sure, he wasn’t the best husband. But he’s not pocketing cash or protecting criminals like Vic Mackey did. He’s not Heisenberg. He’s made something of himself when nothing was expected, while remaining authentic and loyal to his roots.
Justified is as concerned with the concept of "home" as it is with just about anything else. As Matt Zoller Seitz noted a couple of weeks back, the show manages to provide a spry sort of apolitical social commentary on the nature of change and how we deal with it. It’s no surprise, then, that Justified was at its best when dealing with the efforts of outsiders to manipulate or transform Harlan: the Bennett clan’s second season attempt to sell out their neighbors to a powerful mining interest; the Detroit Mafia’s effort to make a movie down south in season three; this season’s central struggle between an out-of-town weed baron and a local teenaged girl who wants to corner the market. These plots were all more interesting than when the show traveled to Mexico in its disappointing, muddled fifth season.
You’ll get no predictions from me on who will live and who will die this Tuesday. It’s kind of beside the point, anyway. Justified has given us a piece of America infrequently examined in popular culture, and populated it with interesting characters. What more could you want?