Justified Season 5 Premiere Review

Justified is back and thank god.  Just when there’s a dearth of good new shows, Justified is back to save my week.  They open the show with a nice little tribute to Elmore Leonard.  With the opening credits we got a few little surprises.  David Koechner, Dave Foley and Will Sasso all being credited kind of threw me for a loop.  Was this going to be a full on comedy or what?  Michael Rapaport is added to the cast in a more permanent role this season, and that’s awesome.  He’s always that goofy kid from the Bronx with that thick New Yawk accent, but he’s able to pull off a hillbilly pretty well.  Justified is a great showcase for fledgling/underappreciated character actors to come in and shine in real redneck flash.  Margo Martindale was amazing as Mags Bennett, Mykelti Williamson as Limehouse, I feel like Taryn Manning’s “Pennsatucky” character from Orange is the New Black would fit right in here.

Rapaport plays Darryl Crowe, kind of the head of the Crowe family based down in Florida.  Dewey gets a $300,000 settlement from his mistreatment at the hands of Raylan in a fun courtroom scene and then we’re introduced to another Crowe, Dilly.  Dilly kills a coast guard in a drug deal accompanied by a Cuban who acts as this episodes’ one off nemesis for Raylan.  Finding the Cuban is Raylan’s main motive for going down to Florida and teaming with David Koechner.  He fails to see his ex-wife and child, even though he was given the opportunity for some reason.

Ultimately the trip to Florida was to introduce us to Darryl, who appears to want to keep the Crowes together, even if it means murdering one of the more incompetent cousins.  Now he’ll be heading to Kentucky most likely to see Dewey and what he can squeeze out of three grand.  Dewey’s always acted as comic relief more than anything, but I’m excited to delve into another one of Harlan’s deep and dirty criminal families.

Boyd’s arc this episode was all over the place.  He loses his Detroit connections, and takes Wynn Duffy on a road trip to Detroit to get some product.  Maybe I’m dumb, but some of this is confusing as fuck as immediately one of the Tonin gang’s top guys kills Sammy Tonin.  The guy, Picker, explains that he had to or the Canadians would kill him.  So Boyd meets the Canadians, Dave Foley and Will Sasso, and they reject Boyd’s business too.  Disappointingly the two Canadian comedic actors playing Canadian gangsters weren’t even funny.  They didn’t even seem necessary to the story, as I was never even aware of the Canadian connection to Detroit in the first place.  So now Boyd has to go through Picker to gain some Mexican connections.  This all felt extremely rushed.  In other fronts Boyd is unable to bribe or intimidate the judge presiding over Ava’s case, so he instead tries to bribe the judge’s important funeral home director friend.  This also fails and Boyd ends up beating the man to death in front of his hot younger wife.  He has to pay off this bimbo now, too.  Don’t lose your cool, ladies and gentlemen.  It could lose you a hundred g’s..

Overall, I’m very glad Justified is back.  I love the gritty atmosphere, and all these characters.  The Boyd stuff didn’t really click for me this time.  Raylan was cool as always, if not a little hard to understand, and Michael Rapaport has me excited as fuck to develop another worthy adversary for Raylan and/or Boyd.

Three out of Five stars

 3stars

  • noman

    “Margo Martindale was amazing as Mags Bennett,” This was the last season that I watched, I couldn’t see the writers ever matching this story line. I might give this show another go.

    • http://screensnark.com/ Cameron

      True, season 2 is my personal favorite.

  • Rob

    I hope they never kill off Wynn Duffy. My wife says he’s this show’s Saul Goodman. His eyebrows are a character unto themselves.