Season 1, Episode 9: “Hatless”
“Little old to be fightin’, aren’t you?” says Winona to Raylan but she might as well be saying it to half the folks in this episode as “Hatless” has got fists flying like fight coordinators are going out of fashion. Says Raylan to Winona, “Certainly too old to be losin’,” and who knows about that, I mean are you ever too old to lose? At fighting, I suppose, but in general, I think not. I think in general you have your whole life to make mistakes and that is why you don’t want to go blowing your head off near the site of your proposed open air feng shui’d shopping mall plus horse stables for the kids. But I might be getting ahead of myself.
Let’s go on back and talk about these men who are fighting. The losers and the winners. Start first with Winona’s husband, and yes I did learn his name this time around but primarily so I could scribble a note to myself that reads “gary SUCKS.” Prior to this episode I had thought Gary was a little slimy, a little bad in the core, but now it turns out that Gary’s just a real estate dreamer who’s in too deep. And boy! Do we get sold a wishy-washy bill of goods with this guy, in particular thanks to William Ragsdale playing him so puppy-eyed and floppy-spined. Watching Gary stand in Crazy Wynn Duffy’s office, stammering away, I had as hard a time liking him as I imagine Raylan does. What the hell does Winona see in this guy, I started to wonder. And then she told me. She said it had mostly to do with those dreams. She said it had mostly to do with how excited Gary gets about things. And, most damning of all, she said, “I needed a little hope in my life.” Hope, how about that. Raylan, you ever hear of this thing called hope? Or are you too busy being consumed with actions begetting actions and nonsense like that. Uh-huh okay that’s what I thought. Did get your hat back, though.
(And before we veer off Winona, I will say, I’ve never wanted to know so much about her as I did in moment where she casually loaded a gun in Raylan’s car. Give that scene entirely to Natalie Zea, write her a thousand scripts just for that.)
Much of the episode’s fight card is crowded with has-beens: a football player with a bad knee, a boxer with a bad brain, and a criminal too crazy to run his own operation. Wynn Duffy is a good sort of character to have around, both unpredictable and violent (sewed a face on a soccer ball violent, or at least that’s the word from our friend Pinter) so’s the tension feels awfully high once you know he’s got it in his head that he might want to kidnap Winona. Jere Burns (who also kills it every time he shows up as an addiction support group leader on Breaking Bad) does some phenomenal things with a twitchy mouth and a long stare, in every scene giving off the impression that things like “logic” and “kindness” aren’t things he’s discarded so much as entirely foreign concepts. His hairpin turn on his boss, the bellow of “WHAT AM I A FARMER!?” once he learns that the payoff is coming in land, all of that will surely put him in contention for Sociopath of the Year.
And then we’ve got ourselves a federal marshall on a forced non-Tahitian vacation. Watching Raylan talk his way into an ass-kicking at the top of the epsode was a guilty pleasure for me; though every move he makes now seems self-corrosive I can’t help but be excited for the rock-bottom to come. Not so much because I like seeing a man get his ribs broken. But because I heard once that hitting bottom is an excellent way to quit a downward path, and, now that he’s found it, Raylan appears determined to stick that path. His edges are in fact getting so rough that this episode might be retitled “A Man Goes Looking for Trouble in Order to Keep Himself From Trouble.”
But, now, certainly. I am getting ahead of myself again. Raylan’s not a lost cause yet, and once again in this episode he demonstrates a keen ability to identify the emotional needs of a men in crisis. And to do so as unsentimentally as possible. In this case, Gary needs to be reminded of his hopes, and Raylan coaxes him, gamely and profanely, until Gary puts the gun away and talks about what he once envisioned. Raylan provides a similar, blunter, briefer service for the once-promising featherweight/now-active muscle Billy Mac: “Just because you can’t box and you’re stupid don’t mean you gotta end up dead.” Which is absolutely fair. I do wish Raylan’d take his own advice every once in awhile, but I suppose that’d upset that rock-bottom situation I was speaking of, and anyway Billy Mac doesn’t take the advice, either. And that is how he ends up shot. Little old to be fightin’, aren’t you. Everybody?
