The Nerd here, reporting on episode one of the new FX series Justified, created by Graham Yost and based on characters created by living crime god Elmore Leonard.  Every week I’m gonna post my thoughts and opinions about the show here at Spinetingler and you bet your sweet ass there’s gonna be some major fucking spoilers.  So you’ve been warned: these posts are for when you’ve caught the episode in question already.  That said, if you haven’t seen the pilot yet, check your local listings and then fucking do so.  This show has promise coming out its ass and I think you’ll dig it.

You’ve been warned, so let’s get fucking started with some recapping, shall we?

We first meet Raylan Givens as he approaches a suspect eating dinner on a Miami restaurant patio.  Seems U.S. Marshal Givens has given the man 24 hours to get out of town or he’ll shoot him dead.  In the confrontation that opens the episode, the other guy draws first but Givens draws faster, shooting him dead.  But would Givens have kept his word and shot the guy if it hadn’t been clear-cut self-defense?

Givens’ superiors are not happy with the shooting.  It’s ruled as a justified killing, but it seems Givens has pulled this kind of Old West stunt one too many times.  He ends up kicked back to the hills of Kentucky where his new beat includes Harlan, the mining town where he grew up.  Still living in the area are his old flame Winona Hawkins and his old mining buddy Boyd Crowder, now a dangerous white supremacist gang leader. 

Boyd is established as bad fucking news from the get go.  He blows up a black church with a fucking rocket launcher then murders a new member of his gang because he suspects he’s a rat.   Immediately after he blows him away, he gets word the guy was clean.  Oh well, is essentially his response.  Dude is cold. 

Givens and his fellow Marshals investigate and quickly surmise that Boyd and his boys are behind the chaos, but Boyd is too smart to leave evidence or witnesses, at least witnesses that aren’t scared shitless of him, anyway.  Then Boyd’s brother is killed by his sister-in-law Ava in a domestic dispute.  Ava’s killing is also ruled justified and Givens comes to her offering protection from Boyd, who will no doubt want revenge.  Sparks fly between the two, but Givens keeps it in his pants…for now.

When Givens confronts Boyd, the two old friends reveal one another’s depth to the audience.  Boyd knows that Givens isn’t just some old cowboy but the son of a drug smuggler, and that deep down he just plain likes killing bad motherfuckers.  Givens knows that Boyd is too smart to actually believe the racist ignorance he spouts, and that his acts of murder, thievery and arson are less about the neo-nazi cause than they are about good old-fashioned fun and money for Boyd himself.  The scenes between Givens and Boyd are when the show soars, but for fans of Timothy Olyphant (Deadwood) and Walton Goggins (The Shield) that should come as no surprise.

Seeing Givens as a threat to his hold on the town, Boyd throws Givens’ line back in his face, offering him twenty-fours to leave town or else he’ll shoot him on sight.  This inevitably leads to a final showdown at Ava’s house.  Givens wins this shootout as well, only this time he doesn’t shoot to kill - only wound.  After all, it’s hard to kill your other half, no matter how evil it may be.  The final scene finds Givens musing to Winona about whether or not he would have shot the man from the first scene regardless of him drawing first, to which she ominously replies that he is the angriest man she’s ever known.

“Fire in the Hole” is based on a short story by Elmore Leonard and Raylan Givens should be very familiar to those who’ve read Pronto and Riding the Rap.  I’m fucking over-joyed to say that this episode kept true to Leonard’s style in every sense.  Our protagonist Givens is smart, cool and a wiseass but believably flawed.  The women are all tough and sexy.  Our bad guy Boyd is evil but also charming and surprisingly likeable.  The criminals surrounding Boyd are dumb as rocks and fucking hilarious but nasty as hell.  The dialogue is smart and funny, the pace quick and pain-free, and the violence is sudden and often.

So yeah, this guy Graham Yost kept true to the source.

If I had to guess I’d say that Justified will probably follow the formula that FX usually likes to employ with their dramas.  The espisodes will stand nicely on their own but have solid elements of serialization.  I’ll bet Givens will have a different suspect to catch or some other cop-ish conflict each episode that’ll be wrapped up in forty-five minutes, but a larger arc will slowly unfold, certain surrounding characters will develop and eventually be given bigger storylines.  Hopefully the show will find a following and then  eventually shit’ll be like in the later seasons of The Shield where the one-episode-length storylines are pretty much scrapped in favor of just running with the larger story arc, like The Wire was doing  from episode one.

I would guess that Givens and Boyd will butt heads and that Givens will wrestle with his violent nature episode to episode (Olyphant already did the same thing in Deadwood but what’re you gonna do?) and also grapple relationship-wise with the comely Ava and the no-nonsense Winona.  We’ll no doubt see more of Boyd’s hilarious redneck gang and Givens’ spry team of small town marshals.

Also, I am pretty much banking on right now is that Justified will not really go “full-dark” like The Sopranos or The Shield.  Certainly, I think from what we’ve seen so far that Givens will flirt with doing something really fucked up, but I doubt he’ll ever truly break his code in a way that would really shock.  I mean, that would go against Elmore Leonard’s patented style – cool, funny, and violent, but never truly noir.  It’s the Elmore Leonard way, and that sounds like a perfectly badass way to kill an hour each week to me.

Fingers fucking crossed they keep it up.  What do you think, dear reader?

Related posts:

1. Justified – “Riverbrook” – review
2. Justified – “Blind Spot” – review
3. Justified – “Bulletville” – Review
4. Justified – “Fathers and Sons” – Review
5. Justified – “Veterans” – Review

Tags: elmore leonard, graham yost, Justified

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 17th, 2010 at 1:33 am and is filed under Reviews, TV. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.