Because I was at SXSW last week, this open thread is a twofer, for which I’m sort of glad, if only because it gives me a chance to comprehensively discuss the political acumen of Mr. Boyd Crowder. This post contains spoilers through the March 20 episode of Justified.

Perhaps the biggest question in contemporary liberalism is whether it’s possible to forge a populism that brings together the white working class with people of color and immigrants. Boyd Crowder is probably not the person to answer that question, given the blowing up of churches and the white supremacy, but his behavior in these last two episodes suggests that in a world where we could run him against Rand Paul in Kentucky, we’d have one hell of an entertaining race on our hands.

His confrontation with Sheriff Napier at the debate is epic. After Napier tries to suggest that Boyd should be disregarded because his status as a felon means he can’t vote (a nice example of Justified drawing drama from real laws), Boyd calmly unloads on him. “”I didn’t come here to vote,” he explains. “You think Shelby’s the only man in this room been done by a coal mining company?…You talk down to me because I been in trouble with the law…[Starting with a picket line where] I know that you weren’t there Mr. Napier. There sure were a lot of men there who looked like you. Men standing on the company side. Laughing at all us hillbillies who were just trying to stand up for what we believed in.”

That summation of the balance of power gives way to some hilariously unorthodox electioneering. Ava’s decision to go contrary to Johnny’s wishes and the core of her and Boyd’s business, killing Delroy to save his girls may have been rather thrilling in the moment. But it doesn’t mean she’s exactly a feminist, just that she’s willing to run whores for a somewhat more innovative purpose than the vicious junkie she murdered. “The girls, they’re excited to practice their constitutional right to vote, and to give a free handjob for every vote cast for our friend Shelby,” she explains. “They’ve already given blowjobs to a couple of boys Napier was counting on to haul for him and convinced them to take the day off.” And Boyd is smart enough to realize that if shots, sex and populist appeal aren’t enough to pull off the election, that you can never go wrong knowing your electoral law as well as your voters.

Speaking of prostitution, we get a look inside the deeply troubled mind of Robert Quarles tonight in the wake of his defeat. When Wynn Duffy finds out his partner in crime has been popping Oxy, he asks “How long have you been taking those? Mr. Quarles, maybe it is time you leave Kentucky.” “I got nowhere else to go,” Quarles explains to him. And when a young man barges in on them with a gun, threatening to kill Quarles for torturing Brady Hughes, Quarles talks his way out of the standoff by exposing himself as a raw nerve end.

“My father was a heroin addict. He wasn’t necessarily an evil man. But he couldn’t kick his addiction, couldn’t keep a job either,” Quarles explains.Luckily for my father, he had a very pretty little boy. And plenty of men were willing to pay for my company. What is your name?…That’s what it was like for me, Donovan. For many years. And then one day a man named Theo realized what was happening. You see, Theo believed deeply in family…Theo ushered me in, where inside, on his knees, was my father. I was fourteen years old, and I understood what it meant to honestly be free…Hurt him. No, son, I never hurt him. I did everything I could to help him. And then I set him free.”

I’ve been debating with myself all season long whether I think the decision to make Quarles a sexual sadist adds to or detracts from his character. I tend to think the details, even these ones, are a bit formulaic. But I do think there’s something interesting about sending Raylan, in a moment when he’s a bit of a mess, up against someone who’s crazy. These are, in their own ways, two mythic figures facing each other at a moment when they’ve both been badly hurt. It’s Batman v. the Joker in Kentucky. In this land where hollers replace dark alleys, Raylan’s as close as you get to aristocracy, someone with a sense that peace is owed him and he’s going to take pleasure in wresting it from his rogue’s gallery.

This post contains spoilers through the March 6 episode of Justified.

One of the things I like about Justified that makes it somewhat different from a show like Sons of Anarchy is that it acknowledges how hard a good crime is to set up, pull off, and get away clean from. The trap that’s been sprung for Raylan tonight is a sophisticated one, and there’s no question he’s blindsided, failing to see some possible implications and events as early as one might wish he could. But it’s still one that he can pick apart even as it’s closing on him.

Still, as traps go, it’s a decent one. Whether Quarles knew that Gary had a hit out on Raylan and Winona, it was a decent move to pick a victim who could be easily linked to Raylan. There might have been better ways to do it—kill Boyd in a way that makes it look like a fight (which would strengthen the idea that Raylan was on Boyd’s payroll), or kill Winona and make it look like Raylan got jealous or angry at his abandonment. But the hit on Gary is clean, and relatively easy, and besides, they had to use that bullet that Raylan threw at Wynn somehow.

Justified’s always done a nice job of balancing between the competing ideas that Raylan’s a badass and Raylan’s badassery creates a lot of problems for him, and the bullet is a perfect example. “Deputy, that just might be the coolest thing I ever laid ears on,” Garritty gushes. Dempsey’s a bit more skeptical, wanting to know “Did you come up with that on your own?” Raylan’s a hep cat when he explains that he “Heard it on the Johnny Carson show once.” But no matter the coolness of the act itself, Raylan’s temper has handed his enemies a literal and figurative weapon against him. Raylan may be able to see Duffy’s weakness before he does, but when Duffy declares that “Between you and me, Raylan Given is a very angry man,” he’s seeing Raylan more clearly than he sees himself—and he knows how to use Raylan’s anger against him. Raylan’s colleagues, who are willing to play at a cooler temperature—when told not to play stupid, one replies “I’m not playing. I’m an idiot. Ask anybody.”—may be awful stressed a la Art, but they escape with considerably less trouble.

Sammy sees the same short fuse in Quarles, it seems. Quarles may hate Sammy as the son by blood who held onto the place that Quarles believes he should have had, but at least this time around, the goofy runt is proving his mettle. It’s only by the skin of his teeth that Quarles gets out of that house before Dempsey discovers the room he tortured a prostitute in (Duffy hasn’t had time to redecorate), and once he does, it appears Detroit’s had enough. Sammy tells Quarles he’s cut loose, and when Quarles pulls a gun on him, Sammy coolly talks him down. And then, on the way out the door, tells Quarles of his unique little gun, “That’s awesome. It ever jam on you?” Whether it does or it doesn’t, Quarles ends up popping pills and shotgunning sermons instead of pulling the trigger. Awesome, it seems, can be overrated.

In the wake of Whitney Houston’s death, unfortunate references to her past crack use—even though it appears her death was related to prescription drug use—were rampant. Take, for example, John Kobylt, the co-host of Clear Channel’s The John and Ken Show, who delivered this gem, from the theoretical perspective of Houston’s friend: “It’s like, ‘ah Jesus, here comes the crack ho again. What’s she gonna do? Oh, look at that, she’s doing handstands next to the pool. Very good, crack ho. nice.’ After a while, everybody’s exhausted. And then you find out she’s dead.” The remarks landed them a suspension and an agreement that they, as well as channel staff, would attend sensitivity training.

There was no such punishment for Fox commentator Eric Bolling, who decided it was clever to respond to comments by Rep. Maxine Waters by declaring “What is going on in California? How’s this? Congresswoman, you saw what happened to Whitney Houston. Step away from the crack pipe, step away from the Xanax, step away from the Lorazepam because it’s going to get you in trouble. How else do you explain those comments?” He was wise enough to roll back the comments immediately, but not to have refrained from making them in the first place.

It’s amazing that, given how racialized references to crack use are, and how ugly they can be when combined with implications about an accused female user’s sexual behavior, that people with any pretense to respectability, like Bolling, are still bringing it up. Kobylt’s remarks were ugly and insensitive, not only to Houston, but to the people in her life who cared abut her and who were affected by her addiction. Bolling’s are nonsensical—they have literally no point or relevance but to reach for a spurious stereotype about black women. It’s one thing to refer to crack cocaine use if someone is actually consuming crack cocaine. But it would be delightful if we could stop using it as a sloppy, ugly attempt to signal something meaningful.

This post contains spoilers through the February 28 episode of Justified.

First, the question of whether Arlo was faking memory loss with Raylan last week, or whether it’s real appears to have been answered. In a beautifully-shot moonlit sequence, we—and Limehouse’s lackeys—”Got some old white fool down the road shouting for Mr. Limehouse.” It turns out Arlo’s charged Noble’s Holler because he believes his wife’s gone missing and “I’m not leaving ’til you send one of those lap dogs up in the maze and bring back my Frances.” But his wife is dead, and Arlo ends up with a splitting headache in the care of Boyd Crowder, with his son telling the outlaw who’s caring for his old man that “It just sounds like he’s off his meds, and I wish you luck with that.” There’s a real sadness to the tale of old hoods in their twilight years, their bodies unable to stand up for the interests of their fading minds.

Raylan isn’t doing too well himself, it turns out. After Winona’s abrupt departure, he’s living above a bar where, in exchange for mild bouncing duties, he gets free DirecTV, the first drink of the night on the house, and regular encounters with girls who say things like “We’ve seen you in here the last couple nights, and we want to know if you were born before disco or after.” Quarles, who attempts to bribe Raylan on the mistaken assumption that his choice of residence is due to Boyd underpaying him rather than Raylan’s essential self-loathing and love for $3 martinis. It’s that assumption that annoys Raylan the most, even more than the fact that Quarles thought “That I was working for you. Taking orders. Doing your bidding. And on the cheap no less.” And having given offense, Raylan’s desire to crush Quarles has become a rather more serious matter.

I’m still trying to figure out how I feel about Quarles. Setting him up a serial abuser of rentboys and resenter of his boss’s son by blood gives him a personality detail other than Joker-like cheerfulness. And it’s kind of fun to see Sammy as a sort of weak-chinned second-generation dilution of a mob dynasty who buys two horses for his daughter rather than one, who answers Raylan’s “What is that, gabardine?” with “Sharkskin. $3,000,” not getting that he’s the butt of a joke. But something about Quarles as sexual psychopath doesn’t quite sit right with me: it’s a rather flip treatment of the serious issue of domestic abuse within the gay community, and we haven’t seen any great brilliance in Quarles yet that would lead the Detroit mob to keep him around in spite of the rather considerable baggage he carries with him.

That said, his attempt to bribe the Harlan sheriff, telling him, “Make a couple of bandaid repairs on those mountaintops everyone’s always bitching about, courtesy of the sheriff’s office,” has set up a great clash. I love the idea of him running one candidate and Boyd another. Quarles may talk a good game about the low prospects of Detroit ending up with “a shitkicker rebellion on our hands.” But one is coming for him anyway.

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.