This post contains spoilers through the February 14 episode of Justified.

Despite the fact that Dewey spent much of this episode running around convinced that he’d lost his kidneys and Raylan shot a woman—”I can’t believe you shot me,” she protested before dying. “I can’t believe so either,” a drug-befuddled Raylan told her—it struck me as a warm and loving episode of the show, as close as Justified will ever get to doing a Valentine’s Day-themed episode.

First, let’s take Raylan and Winona. He’s coming home late to her, but he’s developed, if not a feminist consciousness about how little work he’s doing to get ready for their new life, a conscience about it. “Seriously. You’re seven weeks pregnant. Ready to move. I haven’t done anything to line up a place for us. I’m just out there running and gunning,” he castigates himself. I’m almost sorry Winona lets him off the hook, telling him, “Alright, you’ve convinced me. I’m angry, but I’m still not going to fight with you. I’m done thinking that I could change you. And I’m done trying to convince myself that I could ever feel about anyone the way I feel about you.” But it’s interesting to see Raylan seriously consider changing his life on his own, and not because, as Art suggested, his woman is just telling him that he should. Fatherhood is a serious thing, and I’m glad the show respects Raylan, and us, enough to show him doing some independent thinking on the subject.

Then, there’s Raylan relationship with Dewey, which ends up being critical to finding the man who cut him up. Dewey’s misadventure is as tragicomic an exploration of the changing mechanisms of American commerce as anything I’ve ever seen on television. Who knew the rise of credit cards could put such a hit on small-timers? “I don’t have time for that! I need cash! Where do people use cash?” he wails to the appliance store salesman, before complaining to a stripper that “Don’t tell me guys pay you by credit card? I saw some girl on television who said she could make $3,000 a night on the pole. Given she’s a nine and you’re a six if I’m feeling generous, but I figured you’d be good for a grand or so!” “It’s 10 o’clock in the morning,” one of the girls points out. Dewey reminds me of the characters on Raising Hope, to a certain extent: he’s not very smart, and he does some bad things, but he’s not unworthy of our affection, or Raylan’s. I thought the single line by the cop that “He’s your fugitive. Knock yourself out,” was a lovely summation of the reasons Raylan is both successful and entangled here in Harlan.

And speaking of entanglements, gosh do we have a lot of them coming at us. First, it’s clear that Limehouse kept Mags’ money—and it’s less clear that he can keep his people on lockdown. “The only way I can see him finding out from this end is if someone were to tell him,” he declares of Dickie Bennett. “I’ll stop him. Besides, I heard they fixing to send him back to Trambell.” Then, Quarles first attempt at forging an alliance with Boyd gets him a lecture about Carpetbaggers’ history in Harlan, which is not uniformly positive. But it’s hard to imagine he’ll leave satisfied with a bourbon.

This post contains spoilers through the January 17 episode of Justified.

Before plunging into what looks to be a tremendously exciting season of Justified, a thought: why is it that our great prestige television about cities that aren’t New York, Los Angeles, or Washington, DC has to be about the drug trade? Baltimore is defined by the drug trade in The Wire. We see Albuquerque largely through the lens of people who participate in the meth trade, or who are trying to shut it down in Breaking Bad — the city’s geography is bounded by the houses of the participants, Los Pollos Hermanos, the laundry, and Hank’s office. And Justified gives us a Kentucky populated by a colorful variety of narcotics wranglers. The Sopranos is a notable potential exception, though drugs are certainly part of the mix, and there’s an extent to which the show is about New Jersey’s relationship to New York.

I understand why we tell stories about criminal enterprises in general and drugs in particular. Cops and robbers, chase and race are both classic storytelling models. And the networks and problems of production, trade, and distribution make for fascinating character and power relationships between criminals and present substantial challenges for law enforcement officers. But are drugs really so psychically important to our country that they deserve this level of attention? I know I’m not alone in considering the War on Drugs both an over-investment and a failed strategy. And while I appreciate living in a neighborhood that isn’t blighted by drug-linked crime, I’m also not exceptionally concerned about Marlo Stanfield or Walter White showing up and upsetting that balance. So is this pattern just a result of the structural rewards of telling drug stories? Or do we see something rotten at the heart of America, a blight worse than the troubles we identify in our great cities?

I wanted to start on that note because I appreciate the way the show used Quarles’ arrival in town to set up a running conversation about real estate, and by extension, territory and a sense of home. When he first showed up, I actually assumed he was talking about the city of Detroit, rather than the criminal enterprise based there that he happens to represent. It quickly becomes clear that it’s not, but I like the idea of Detroit as a criminal conspiracy, the city’s profound troubles providing opportunities for men like Quarles to rise. “You picked a shitty time to get into commercial real estate, and now you’re under water. Detroit did not make an investment. It made a loan,” he warns. “Things are getting tough all over. So if you can’t have the money here by tomorrow, I trust you tell me right now.” He makes good on the threat by the end of the episode, but he’s set a theme that persists for the rest of the episode. There’s Boyd and Raylan fighting over Raylan’s broken promise, with Raylan spitting, “You think we’re in the holler? I’m a deputy U.S. Marshal.” Geography will reach out to pull you back, if you let it. And Raylan and Winona, they lie in bed after making love for the first time since Raylan was shot, property and geography become a proxy for talking about commitment. “Maybe we need more room,” Raylan proposes, baby planning. “After all the time I’ve spent redecorating?” Winona asks, a prickliness that’ll come up again when Raylan tentatively proposes naming their baby Felix, like the cat. “It’s sweet. It’s sweet that you think you have a say in the name,” she tells him.

Those twitchy power dynamics are all over the episode, and make for some of its best moments. “Didn’t wear your suit,” Raylan observes as he meets Boyd in the conference room. “Why do you say that as if I’ve only got one suit and not the whole closetful?” Boyd complains. And they poke at each other over the question of asset forfeiture. “How sizeable, Raylan?” Boyd asks.”Well over 10 dollars,” Raylan tells him. “If I had that kind of money, I’d be in Mexico by now,” Boyd tells him. One of the reasons things get so nasty is because the stakes are smaller than they are in Albuquerque, but the people involved need the money and the assertions of power more. When Ava clocks Devil with the frying pan and is told she didn’t have to, she forcefully asserts that it is, “Otherwise I wouldn’t have done it.” Duffy slaps back at Raylan by treating him like a low priority, saying, “I would love to be of more help but I’ve got to get back to watching women’s tennis.” And Fletcher Nix, who on another show would be a great season-long villain, projects his air of menace in Raylan’s house in part by playing naive. “I look like I know anything about watches?” he asks Raylan. “I could take those off your hands. Give you $20 a piece for them,” Raylan plays along, a little bit classy and a little bit cheap. But he beats him by playing very, very cool. It’s going to be a terrific season.

By Tyler Lewis

Over at my own blog, I review the fifth season premiere of The Game, which aired last night on BET:

“If Mara Brock Akil and BET want to make a black nighttime telenovela where the cast never interacts with one another, where the relationships established in the first three seasons are thrown out in favor of separate, unconnected, over-the-top storylines for each of the five leads, then it should decide on what kind of show that is and settle on a consistent tone.

Because I do think the ship has sailed on any hope that The Game will be the show that folks wanted to be brought back. I think the audience has accepted it (and, likely, moved on). The producers should commit to it.”

It just seems odd to me that fans resurrected a show – a black show – only to have the producers of that show gut everything about the show that made fans want it back in the first place. And by “odd,” I mean “wrong.”

The Game was a sitcom with real heart and humanity in its first three seasons. It was a show that was incredibly funny, but also managed to create six characters that struggled and matured in believable ways over the course of those seasons. The plotting always flowed from the characters.

But on BET, the show is shallow and tonally inconsistent, and most of the characters have been flattened. It uses a drug-addicted model to ineffectively humanize and save Malik Wright, but doesn’t even bother to make her a three-dimensional character that the audience can care about. It reduces one of its most intriguing and sympathetic characters, Tasha Mack, to the very thing – ghetto fabulous loudmouth – she was initially created to subvert, even as it finds new and intriguing ways of deepening self-hating, cheap Jason Pitts (providing Coby Bell with the opportunity to prove yet again that he’s the show’s greatest, most versatile, asset). And it forgets almost entirely that the male characters are football players since we never see them at practice or in the locker room anymore.

I don’t know if BET knows that its version of The Game plays like everyone involved has contempt for the audience that saved it, but…well, it does now. This is not the show that fans wanted back and worse, in its new incarnation, it doesn’t even work on its own terms.