Starz seems to have settled on explicit sex and violence as the keys to its brand precisely at the moment when the flagrant use of both of those elements in television drama has ceased to be a novel advantage cable held over the networks and started getting embarrassing, and not a little dull. And even though Spartacus, the franchise that perhaps made the best use of those elements in service of genuine ideas, has just finished its run on Starz, the network appears to be doubling down with Black Sails, a pirate show that’s being advertised as an opportunity for Michael Bay to move on up from showing Megan Fox arching her back to depicting actual lesbian sex and for Toby Stephens to get another crack at the American market after playing Fergus Wolfe in Possession didn’t exactly set his career on fire:

There’s a good show to be done about piracy. But it’s one that requires the showrunners to know as much about Caribbean governance, and economics—some privateering contracts guaranteed fair, consistent monthly wages and advance pay—social dynamics that gave pirates a certain amount of social capital in polite society as well as in island enclaves, slavery, and cooperative organizing as about how to make a lady look fetching in a corset.

It’s notable that this season of Game of Thrones has—with the exception of this weekend’s scene in Littlefinger’s brothel—dramatically scaled down its use of nudity and scaled up its discussion of policy issues, from the ethics and efficacy of purchasing a slave army to the impact on Westeros of the particular people who have helped the country run up a sizable national debt. There was a sense in some of the commentary on the show last year that the prodigious use of nudity in both non-consensual scenes and situations involving prostitution was cheesy, a sop to less sophisticated viewers who might not otherwise be inclined to keep track of the show’s enormous roster of characters or engage with its big ideas about the morality of war. In other words, a clear distinction was emerging between adult drama and “adult” content. And in the show’s third season, characters have talked more about sexual assault and sexual experiences than we’ve actually seen on screen. How characters like Brienne of Tarth and Jaime Lannister respond to a threat of sexual assault, or how Tyrion Lannister interrogates Podrick Payne about his first sexual experience matters much more than watching their bodies in motion.
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This post discusses plot points from the fourth season of Justified.

I’ve been frustrated at times by the intrusion of Detroit into the hollers of Harlan during the last two seasons of Justified. But the finale of the fourth season of FX’s Western was a lovely hour of television that simultaneously seems to have cleared out the interlopers and showed us what happens when the things that make Harlan so indelibly itself snatch at Ryalan and Boyd. And it was a reminder of just how different Justified is from much of the rest of what’s on television, despite its relationship to anti-hero dramas, and how much it gets out of those differences. Here are five things that other television shows—and networks that are considering what to develop next—could stand to recognize as valuable from last night’s finale:

1. Location, Location, Location: I’ve written before about how dull it is for television shows to rely heavily on New York, Los Angeles, and Miami as settings without considering what it means for the stories they’re telling to be set there. Justified both is refreshing for being set elsewhere, and considering it setting in every decisions its characters make. The development of coal mining, an industry very different from politics, policing, media, or advertising, as a major theme has both provided short-hand for how well certain characters know each other—”I dug coal with him” is a phrase that’s endowed with devastating meaning—and a repeated image of a descent into hell that provided a perfect sense of dread as Boyd’s carefully-made plans to extract himself and Ava from Harlan came unraveled. From Noble’s Holler to Clover Hill, Justified has given us a geography that it’s endowed with rich meaning, so the green vista of a backyard or patched drywall can speak more than any dialogue. And when Brad Paisley sings “You will never leave Harlan alive” as Raylan contemplates Arlo’s grave, we have a sense of what it means for Raylan to have left town, and what it means for him to have been pulled back to it, for Boyd to have dreamed of cleansing his name, and to be left breaking into the dream he once thought was within reach through the front door.

2. True Love: If Homeland had really wanted to tell an epic love story about Carrie and Brody, they might have done well to take a page from Justified, which is simultaneously one of the most romantic shows on television, and one of the most realistic about the limits of romance when dashed up against the rocks of law and circumstance. “You know that you and the baby are safe, right?” Raylan asks Winona after he takes care of the Tonins and gets his family, such as it is, off the mob’s hit list. “I know,” Winona tells him. “That’s why I love you.” I’m sure she does, but it’s an illustration of the inadequacy of love when the mobsters who held Winona hostage have thought in more detail about what it means to be up nights with a baby than Raylan has. And it’s a reminder that the idea that a man can provide safety to his family is a minimal requirement for a modern, equitable relationship. Boyd’s storyline is a reminder of how hard crushingly hard that obligation, often equated with masculinity, can be to fulfill. He refers to Ava repeatedly as “my woman” in this episode, but he can’t protect her. Raylan won’t let Boyd kiss her goodbye. And when Paxton double-crosses him and gets Ava arrested, Boyd goes beserk at the sight of her on the way to jail, agonized by the sight of her in danger, and by his own failure. “I’m going to get a lawyer, the best money can buy, and I’m going to have you out of here in 24 hours,” Boyd promises her. But Ava sadly, and realistically, tells him, “We both know that ain’t going to happen.” Raylan may be skeptical that that Boyd truly loves Ava, asking him if he loves her “Like how you loved the Lord? Or that lovely white skin? Or Arlo? I know he meant a lot to you.” But Boyd’s been more present for Ava than Raylan has for Winona, dreamed for more of them together, and it makes the pain of his disappointment all the sharper. Justified knows better than any other show how making even the basics of a good life can be an epic challenge.
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This post discusses plot points from the fourth season of Justified. Read at your own caution if you aren’t caught up.

As I’ve watched Justified over the past several weeks, I’ve been struck by a sense of how crowded the show has become. It sometimes seems as if everyone is descending on Harlan County, which is simultaneously sprouting new layers of law enforcement, a Native American community, and teenage miscreants. But last night it struck me why I haven’t loved this season of the show, even as I’ve loved the evolution of Boyd and Ava’s relationship this year. Much of what makes Justified special is its attention to its setting, and everything the show’s been adding lately has made Harlan more obscure and less specific.

The story of Drew Thompson was supposed to be a story about the arrival of the serious hard drug trade in Harlan. But instead, it’s ended up being about people in Harlan responding to, and in Boyd’s case, manipulating, Theo Tonin, the Detroit crime boss who was pulled into the show last season by the presence of Robert Quarles. The problem with the Tonin storyline though is that it doesn’t actually tell us all that much about Harlan or the people who live there. Theo, at least so far, comes across as a fairly generic mercurial gangster who indulges his son and has a henchman who wanted his fatherly approval. He doesn’t represent Detroit in nearly the same way Boyd or Yorkie-owning, Dixie Mafia-running Wynn Duffy tell us about Harlan by letting us see a very particular vision of crime in Harlan.

And the time spent on Thompson this season has ended up taking away from any number of other, more local, and more interesting subplots. I was terribly disappointed to see the initial plot by Harlan’s elite to hire Boyd to blow a hole in a slurry pond so they could claim EPA clean-up funds to address the resulting disaster turn into a cheap assassination plot. That’s a fascinatingly diabolical idea rooted in real dangers—coal slurry threatened the Tuscaloosa water supply in 2011—and it would have provided both fascinating commentary on a long-running American industry and a throughline to Boyd’s experiences as a coal miner, first as a teenager with Raylan, and in season two.

The slurry plot could have made physically manifest the ways in which coal mining has had a morally poisonous influence on Harlan. Coal has helped economically stratify the county, something that became very clear when Boyd and Ava went house-hunting in Clover Hill, the neighborhood where Ava’s mother worked as a cleaning lady when Ava was a child—”They locked up their jewelry whenever she came over,” Ava says, a little sadly. “Are you sure I can’t show you something a little further down the hill? There are some lovely starter homes down there. Beautiful views. Quaint,” their realtor told them, trying to shoo the couple out of the neighborhood that might by polluted by the implications of their all-cash purchase and unpolished diction. “You and your fiancee might want to think about the commute..I ask because the banks are getting very stringent with applications.” It’s not that no show or movie has ever focused on poor or unwanted people moving into a rich—or white—neighborhood before. But Harlan’s class dynamics are specific, and, just as Boyd and Ava have discussed, the role of Crowders in Harlan is specific, persisting as they suspect from one generation into the next, requiring radical action, or at least a Dairy Queen franchise, to change.
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This post discusses plot points from the February 12 episode of Justified.

The last two episodes of Justified have been full of advancements in the search for Drew Thompson, the vanished man who holds the key to the arrival of cocaine in Harlan County. But I have to admit, I haven’t been particularly engaged by this season of the show’s central mystery. Instead, my favorite parts of Justified this season have involved an evolving juxtaposition between U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens (Tim Olyphant) and his oldest friend and enemy, Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins). The show’s always played with the marginal differences between the two men, contrasting Raylan’s competence with Boyd’s charisma. But now the show is playing with the sense of who’s the good man and who’s the bad one by contrasting their relationships with the women in their lives, Winona, who is pregnant with Raylan’s child, but determined that they can’t make a go of it as a couple, and Ava, who is newly-engaged to Boyd.

In last week’s episode, Raylan simultaneously tried to prove that he could be a responsible figure in Winona and their child’s life, while simultaneously undermining the impression that he was capable of living up to his obligations. When he found out Winona had found a job, Raylan insisted “You don’t have to do that. I’ve been picking up some extra money doing side jobs.” But the side jobs he was doing were under the table, rather than sanctioned by the Marshal Service, and based on events earlier in the season, it’s not exactly clear that Raylan’s going to be able to hold on the money he picks up working on the side, given the general lawlessness of Harlan. Trying to be cute, Raylan told the child “Hey little one, you got to lose the tail. Come out and read about your daddy in the paper.” Winona couldn’t resist pointing out that “this baby lost its tail a little while ago, just so you know.” Raylan tried to defend himself, insisting “I’m a little behind on my homework, but the point is, I’m going to be here for you and the baby.” But it was an idea he immediately proved he can’t live up to, heading off as soon as he got a call from the office, and leaving Winona to her appointment.

Much of what defines Raylan as a Marshal is his competence: he’s cool in a standoff, knows how to shoot out an airbag to distract a suspect, has a good sense of what pressure points to put on a teenage girl run wild. But knowing how to fire a gun and being possessed of the confidence to insist on the correctness of your decisions isn’t the same thing as being a partner or a father. Raylan’s pulled to a sphere where his knowledge is useful and his decision-making is central, where his partners largely defer to him, and he’s familiar with the processes that arbitrate his decisions that are judged to be bad. Parenthood and relationship-building offer him none of those consolations or escape hatches—they’re roles that require compromise, sitting around and listening, accepting that someone else’s experiences and interpretations of events take precedence over your own.
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This post discusses plot points through the January 29 episode of Justified.

Last night’s episode of Justified juxtaposed one of the series’ goofier scenes of violence, Marshal Raylan Givens’ duel with aspiring cockfight manager Randall, conducted with fists and a beanbag gun, with one of its most somber, veteran Colton Rhodes’ preparation to kill prostitute Ellen May, who Boyd Crowder had decided was no longer sufficiently loyal to be trusted with the secret of a murder. It was a particularly striking contrast if, like me, you watched the first four episodes of Justified‘s fourth season in a single sitting. The show has always had a complicated attitude towards violence, one embodied in its title, a reference to Raylan’s insistence in the pilot that a shooting in Miami was “justified”: it’s awfully fun to watch Raylan wreak controlled mayhem, but the line between his deployment of it and the violence of Boyd, his opposite number, is fine and constantly shifting. And this season of Justified, whether it’s intentional or no, has been an extended meditation on both the use and abuse of guns—and of all the other ways we can do awful harm to each other.

When we met Patton Oswalt’s Constable Bob in the first episode of this season, Justified presents an interesting contrast between him and Raylan. The two men have known each other since high school, when Constable Bob put one of their classmates, who bullied him, in a coma—which he’s still in. “They underestimate me at their peril,” Bob tells Raylan. “Just ask Ollie Kemp,” Raylan plays along. “If he could respond,” Bob adds, a little too lightly. On the road, Bob tells Raylan that he’s got an unnerving cache of weapons packed in a “go bag.” “This shit goes road warrior, I’m ready,” Bob declares.

But when it comes to a standoff, Bob isn’t quite the badass he makes himself out to be. And Raylan’s most valuable weapon, in between everything else he uses to get the two of them out of a hostage situation, turns out to be his mouth. Where Raylan’s use of violence comes across as clever and precise—particularly when he shoots out the air bags in a fugitive’s car to break up a standoff without either man getting shot—Bob comes across like a bit of a poser, and one whose pretentions to heroism can actually be dangerous. Some of that is because we’ve been conditioned to think of Raylan as a cool drink of water, and we meet Constable Bob as a kind of dark comic relief. But it’s also true that, unlike Bob, Raylan actually knows what he’s doing with a gun, rather than thinking that possessing a gun confers upon him some sort of magical competence.

Bob isn’t the only person with that misconception, or whose access to guns is more dangerous than protective. Ellen May, who turns out to be keeping a gun for protection not just from clients, but from Ava Crowder, who is now pimping her, shoots and kills a client. “Arlo’s a furry. He usually dresses up in a bunny suit. But this was scary. Plus I was on drugs,” she explains to Ava of why the situation turned deadly (though she later confesses to not being high). When the Marshals go hunting for Waldo Truth, the mysterious man involved in the cocaine parachuting into Harlan County, they find his family smoking pot, telling stories—and pulling handguns. “You gave him a gun?” Mrs. Truth asks after her thirteen-year-old turns out to be packing. “We agreed it was time,” a male member of her family explains. The idea that a young teenager dumb enough to point a pistol at a federal marshal is ready for firearms ownership is a terrifying prospect. And Wynn Duffy’s pulling a pistol and casually shooting a member of the Dixie Mafia dumb enough to poach on Boyd’s territory is a cold illustration of what it means to normalize gun ownership, regular, threatening, gun use, and the escalation of disputes that have no reason to be fatal.
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I’ve joked at various points this year that 2012 is the year of Walton Goggins, the intense-eyed actor who made a name for himself on corrupt cop drama The Shield, and who’s found an equally juicy role as Kentucky white supremacist Boyd Crowder on FX’s U.S. Marshal show Justified. First, there was his year on that show, where his character found new depths caring for his bitter enemy’s father, and as a political advocate for the residents of Kentucky coal-mining country. Then there was his bravura cameo on Sons of Anarchy as a very funny, sexy transgender prostitute named Venus Van Dam that shook up the conception of what Goggins is capable of. And now he is the common human element of two very disparate movies about the South, racial violence, and the tensions that cracked our country in half, Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln and Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained. It’s not just that Goggins has had what could be a career-making year. He’s done so in roles that could have stereotyped him as a googly-eyed, slack-jawed redneck, but that instead work together to explore a common idea, the lingering ghosts of the Confederacy and the struggles of poorer white men to define their identities, 150 years after the Civil War.

In Primary Colors, Joe Klein’s main character, Henry Burton reflects on the rise of white Southern, Civil Rights-supportive Democratic public officials that “Those pale, bland Southern Democrats seemed a down payment on the family dream. It was a whisper of a revolution: there wasn’t much blood or lust to it, just the promise of Northern money—new factories, new branch offices—in return for the appearance of racial harmony.” Tony Horowitz put a different spin on that phenomenon, twenty years after the seventies, in his reported journey through the South he chronicled in Confederates In The Attic. “First, it was the loss of the War and antebellum wealth,” he wrote of the South’s construction of its identity around loss. “Later, as millions of Southerners migrated to cities, it was the loss of a close-knit agrarian society. Now, with the region’s new prosperity and clout, Southerners wondered if they were losing the dignity and distinctiveness they’d clung to through generations of poverty and isolation.”

Goggins tends to play characters who never had access to that antebellum wealth. On Justified, Boyd Crowder is the descendant of multiple generations of poor white criminals. His own father deals drugs. He worked as a coal miner as a teenager, and found a temporary escape from Harlan County through service in the Army. In Lincoln, he plays Clay Hutchins, a Congressman of modest means and power—when considering bribing him to vote for the Thirteenth Amendment, Secretary of State William Seward (David Strathairn) says of his asking price “A first-term Congressman who couldn’t earn reelection…I deemed it unseemly and bargained him down to Postmaster.” And in Django Unchained, he plays Billy Crash, a minor member of the entourage of Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), a sadistic plantation owner—his access to plantation prosperity comes from his role relatively low down on that economic ladder, rather than his position as the predator at the top of it.
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It’s been, if I’m to be perfectly honest, a disappointing season of fall television. Promising shows like The Mindy Project haven’t lived up to their potential. Sophomores like Homeland have given me heartburn, even if they still have credit to draw on. And even a new show I love, Nashville, hasn’t attracted viewers in numbers that would make me feel secure about its future. As with baseball, this is a wait until next year kind of game, which is why I was so excited to get my hands on Josef Adalian’s guide to the dramas in development for the 2013-2014 fall television. These are seven of the non-S.H.I.E.L.D. shows that have me feeling most excited, which doesn’t mean that they’ll actually make it to the air, or be good when they get there, or last. But hope springs eternal, and here are the things that will carry me through the upcoming hiatus and hopes of better when we return in midseason.

1. LA Woman (NBC): Graham Yost, who runs Justified, on a network, with what sounds like a female main character, in a spy drama? Yes please. Maybe they can get Carla Gugino, who’s been spending a lot of time on television as a guest star of late, to star and make us all remember Karen Sisco.

2. Meridian Hills (The CW): I like feminism, Mila Kunis, and period pieces, so the idea of Mila Kunis producing a period piece about the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment that’s about feminism invading the country club, sort of like The Help but without all the condescending soft racism and stereotyping, sounds like something that would make me very happy. Also like the strangest thing to make it on air ever, if that actually comes to pass. But I’m glad to see Kunis’s Seth MacFarlane-assisted clout’s at least going to some interesting chance-taking.

3. Untitled Surgeon General show (NBC): As someone who interviewed not one but two surgeon generals when I was in high school, and who loves David Kessler’s A Question of Intent , I am naturally predisposed to be excited about the idea of this project. For the rest of you who aren’t similarly hilariously dorky? This show has the potential to do two different things: come up with a way to make a medical procedural that’s about health policy, and offer up a reminder that there are parts of the federal government that do things other than try to catch terrorists.

4. Untitled George Washington show from Tom Fontana and Barry Levinson (NBC) and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (Fox): My belief that we should have a lot more Revolutionary War and colonial America in our popular culture is a matter of public record. Washington isn’t necessarily the character I’d choose, but the Hudson River Valley is a fascinating place. And I’m glad to see some networks making the effort to tap a weirdly untapped part of our history and cultural memory.

5. Sex Diaries adaptation (ABC): Since I complained yesterday that our television has gotten more violent and more interested in violence without any corresponding interest in sex and sexuality, I’m curious to see what will come of this adaptation of one of New York Magazine’s most famous features. Also, just from a format perspective, I’m curious to see how ABC adapts the feature. Will we spend an episode on a character? Have the show follow a small bundle of characters whose sex lives are interacting with each other? Pass off from miniseries to miniseries?

6. Wired (The CW): With the exception of The Big Bang Theory, television spends a lot of time wedging geeks into stories as medical examiners, or quasi-hackers, or nerds at the edge of social circles. I like the idea of a show that recognizes that geekiness is also a big business, and tells an origin story about the rise of Silicon Valley. Think the Nolan Ross stuff that’s been the best part of Revenge this season, but with more room to breathe.

It’s the top-ten list time of year, and as I’m catching up on some shows and sifting through my list of favorites, I’ve been struck by how many fantastic performances we’ve seen in television this year. While some are obvious continuations of dominant streaks, like Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul’s turns on Breaking Bad, or Tina Fey’s embrace of happiness on 30 Rock, there are some truly astonishing turns going down on shows that almost no one is watching, or in shows that are so crowded with flashy performances that these are in danger of being overlooked. Here are five of the actors whose work hit me hardest this year:

1. Khandi Alexander, Treme: I ran a little behind Treme this season, but catching up on it this week, I regretted that. Much of that regret comes from how marvelous Alexander is as LaDonna Batiste-Williams. As a bar owner trying to keep her place alive, and determined to see through the prosecution of the men who robbed and sexually assaulted her, Alexander is by turns moody and joyful. Whether she’s feuding with her husband’s wealthy family, cooly cussing out a man demanding protection money from her, finally taking the stand in her much-delayed trial, or developing a tender friendship with Albert Lambreaux, Alexander’s been given the chance to be as complete a female character as I’ve seen on television in a long time. “Burnt me out for nothing,” she said in the season finale when her case ended in a heartbreaking mistrial. But it’s not nothing to those of us who have been watching at home.

2. Andra Fuller, The L.A. Complex: It is a source of considerable sadness to me that so few people found it in themselves to watch The L.A. Complex, an incredibly sharp ensemble show about what it actually takes to become successful in the entertainment industry. The cast is strong up and down the lineup, but if there was justice in the business, this should have been a breakout performance for Andra Fuller as closeted rapper Kaldrick King. King is one of the most sexual and emotional gay characters ever to appear on network television, and as he battered a young lover, made amends with him and reconnected with his father, and began a relationship with a handsome young lawyer who gave him the courage to come out, Fuller acted the hell out of every scene.

3. Eliza Coupe, Happy Endings: I spoke to Eliza Coupe earlier this season about her approach to physical comedy, playing uptight, and being half of one of only a few interracial couples on television. Since then, her performance as Jane Kerkovich-Williams has only gotten deeper and funnier. Whether she’s going overboard in enjoying being the breadwinner in her family, sneaking a perfectly-prepared turkey into her sister’s house to ensure that Thanksgiving isn’t a disaster, or revisiting the origin of her relationship with her husband Brad, Jane’s exploded the idea that being controlling means you have to be a humorless bitch, and I love her for it.

4. Charles Dance and Maisie Williams, Game of Thrones: Peter Dinklage probably has Game of Thrones‘ acting awards slot locked up as long as Tyrion Lannister lives. But that’s too bad, because Dance and Williams spent this year putting on the best cross-generational acting clinic on television as Tywin Lannister and Arya Stark. They’re people who should be mortal enemies, but, isolated from their families and in service to larger causes, find themselves understanding each other. I could watch the two of them dance around each other in Harrenhal’s great hall for ten hours a year.

5. Walton Goggins, Justified: Goggins, who’s been everywhere from Sons of Anarchy to Lincoln this year, probably has the best shot of anyone on this list of scoring an actual Emmy nomination. As Boyd Crowder, Goggins has taken an archetype, a racist redneck, and infused the role with an injection of coal-country rage, tenderness towards his surrogate father Arlo Givens, and a spiky relationship with Arlo’s son Raylan, who is his sometime-enemy, sometime-ally. I can’t wait to see where their rivalry heads next. Goggins was good on The Shield, but I think he’s even better on Justified.

This post contains spoilers through the third season of Justified.

“He didn’t know it was a state trooper. He just saw a man in a hat pointing a gun at Boyd.”

There’s a lot to discuss in the season finale of Justified, an outstandingly strong episode of television that significantly redeemed the overstretched season that came before it—Jere Burns Emmy-worthy performance as Wynn Duffy, the sociology of Noble’s Holler, the question of what Raylan’ll be like as a mostly-absent parent. But for me, the third season of Justified comes down to precisely this shattering question: what happens when parents and children fail to fulfill their obligations to each other and replace the unsatisfying partner with a more compelling one? It’s one that takes on bitter connotations in Harlan, but that, for an anti-hero melodrama, has surprising resonance for a country only beginning to come to terms with a rising dementia epidemic.

There’s no question that Arlo hates his son, and Raylan doesn’t have much use for his father, even if Arlo took a moment to apologize to Raylan at the moment of his transition from free man to soon-to-be convict. Even that admission comes less out of charity and repentance than Arlo’s desire to quiet his own raging mind. “Not an easy thing for me to say,” he admits to his son, before explaining the delusion that lead him to it. “But she insisted. I know she always was your favorite…But you don’t know how she can nag.” But Raylan hates his father, too, telling Limehouse after the latter man addresses him as Mr. Givens that he’s “Deputy Marshal. I’m not my father and I don’t care to be confused with him.”

Much of this episode is an illustration of how Raylan’s abrogated any duties he might have been expected to carry out as a son. Raylan hasn’t had much idea where his father is, much less that it’s Boyd Crowder keeping track of whether his father takes his medications. “I been trying,” Arlo tells Boyd fretfully when called to account for whether he’s sticking to the schedule. “But she hides ‘em where I can’t find ‘em…Thinks it’s funny watching an old man chase around his pills.” And even when it’s suggested that Arlo, in his dementia, might have let one of Boyd’s crimes slip, Boyd behaves more like a caretaker than a man bent on vengeance. “I want you to take one of these pills in front of me. Go on,” he tells Arlo, a father and a child switching places, two criminals reduced to vulnerable patient and patient caretaker.

And what Raylan ultimately doesn’t get, ruminating on the rotten apple and the barrel later (Boyd’s “Well, Raylan, I think even in a little town like Harlan, the apple barrel is obsolete,” and Raylan’s weary “But the expression ain’t, because of the truth contained therein” is one of many great poetic moments in this season, one of the few of television that could without question qualify for literary awards.) is that Arlo’s evil is ultimately less consequential than the opportunity he afforded Boyd. “I’ve connected to Arlo in ways I was never given a chance to do with my own family,” Boyd explains. Whether he’s a coot, a criminal, or simply a sick old man, Arlo afforded Boyd the opportunity for tenderness and for mercy. And Boyd could see what Raylan, who believes that “Arlo’s a criminal, never been anything else,” could not: a man who responded to care and to be treating as if he had something of value left to offer.

That Arlo responded to Boyd’s care, and that ultimately he would have killed for him, is ultimately less proof of his hatred of Raylan than of Raylan’s demotion to mere mortal status in the eyes of the man who bore him. It’s not that Arlo had a clear choice between Boyd and Raylan and chose Raylan. It’s that he chose Boyd as his son against all other men. In that moment, Raylan was indistinguishable from the mass of men. And whether you’re a deputy marshal or an ordinary person caring for an aging parent, that’s the ultimate nightmare of watching a person you love vanish into dementia.

This post contains spoilers through the April 3 episode of Justified.

There’s a lot of ridiculously fine writing going on in this episode of Justified, whether it’s Boyd telling Arlo “Arlo, I’m not saying you’re a lion in winter, but your roar ain’t what it used to be,” or Wynn asking Quarles indignantly “Are you smoking Oxycontin in my motorcoach?” But for all the wealth of language and character that’s present in this episode, it’s also proof to me of the signal failure of this season of Justified: there’s far too much plot, and not enough sense of what the emotionally richest strains of it are.

In fact, I think the show’s devoted time in inverse proportion to the strength of the characters and the themes. Quarles’ dissolution isn’t unpowerful, but he’s a monster more than he is a man, a disappointed gangster who tortures rentboys and has discovered Oxy, reducing him to snorting crushed pills in a trailer and carrying on conversations that operate at the level of “You ever seen Platoon?” “That movie with the old people who go to outer space?” It’s a fine performance, but the character’s contrived to the point of grotesque. And while there’s a marvelously operatic sense of Theo Tonen’s power—as Wynn puts it, “Does he sound like the kind of man to which would you like to say, ‘I’m sorry, but he escaped from a diseased whore factory up in inbred holler?’ But it feels wasted on a character who, I assume, is here one season, gone the next.

I feel that way particularly strongly given how rich Noble’s Holler, with its internal power struggles, its relationship to abused women, and its role as an informal financial center is as a setting. Ellstin Limehouse is a marvelous character, and if we’re not going to get a show that’s told through his eyes (which are quite sharp at assessing Harlan, as in his explanation of Boyd’s modus operandi: “Blow up something on one end of town, and when all eyes are there, hit the bank.”), I still wish he’d been the titan this season.

But the two people who have gotten the shortest shrift at the expense of the show’s core emotional development are Ava and Arlo. Ava’s emergence as a kingpin in her own right is a fascinating development, in terms of the balance of power in her relationship with Boyd, the role for a prominent criminal woman left open by Mags Bennett’s death, and what it means to have a woman running hugely vulnerable hookers in a region where sex work is easily blunted by powerful drugs. Similarly, Arlo’s decline could have been the story that bound all the character’s together. Whether it’s his and Limehouse’s history, the brokenness of his relationship with Raylan and Boyd’s decision to step in as his surrogate son, and his own titanic sense of pride in the meager field of knocking over Harlan banks, he could have been the central thread of the season. It’s easier, and richer, and ultimately more important and touching to chronicle the ravages of dementia than to invent a flamboyant, out-of-town gangster. It’s unfortunate to see Justified go for flash, instead of for the gut.