You Make Me Pull, I'll Put You Down

There may not have been a cooler beginning of a television show than having the protagonist walk up to a bad guy twenty-three hours and fifty-five minutes after telling said bad guy he had twenty-four hours to leave town or he would shoot him. Unfortunately for Raylan Givens of Justified, the shooting got him transferred from sunny Miami to the one place he didn’t want to: home. He spent his whole life distancing himself from his father and even when back in Kentucky stayed away from him until of course he got in trouble with the law. It didn’t help that his ex-wife moved back to the area with her shifty new husband.

Now there is a premise that Seth Bullock could get behind and thankfully Timothy Olyphant doesn’t seem to care about typecasting as Givens might as well be the great grandson of his previous Deadwood character. We even get a couple of Deadwood reunions in the first season of Justified most notably with Bullock trading wits one more time with Dan Dougherty who played an escaped convicted holding hostages in Bullock’s office.

Aside from former Deadwood cohorts, there was plenty of other great casting choices including Stephan Root as a judge who wears little under hid robe but a gun. Alan Ruck as an informant turned on the run dentist. And then there was MC Gainey as the local kingpin, father of the guy Raylan shot upon return to Harlan, and former father-in-law to the girl Raylan bedded upon returning home.

Aside from the casting, another strong point for the show was the case of the week that never sank into the same rut of “ripped from the headlines” of other procedurals. Some of which featured criminals of the week so stupid that some even tried to out draw Raylan even knowing of what happened in Miami.

But it was the overarching storyline of Raylan and the one person that survived his bullet, Boyd Crowder. After coming out of surgery saying he was a changed man, Boyd still straddled the line of morality the rest of the season using whatever means necessarily to get everyone on the right path. Even if that means blowing up a truck full of meth supplies meant for his father (and not so coincidentally shipped by an associate of the man Raylan shot in Miami and unsuccessfully tried to have him killed twice already this season).

Raylan may have 99 Problems, at least two of them are female thanks to Ava seeing his ex leave his room last week. Everything comes to ahead tonight when the first season comes to a close. The Givens and the Crowders have been crossing each other paths all season and with Bo’s shipment getting blown up by Boyd and Raylan wanting Arlo to wear a wire to bring the Crowder clan down, there are plenty of double crossings going down tonight.

Justified 1.x gets a on my Terror Alert Scale.