Season 1, Episode 3: “Fixer”
A bookie-informant named Pinter does his business in a bar with a Stoppard quote chalked up on a board. If it’s a joke, I laughed. If not, I still laughed. I had a familiar feeling partway through this one, and it took me a second but I placed it, thank you, it was that Elmore Leonard feeling. Where the bad guys are both irrevocably stupid and possessing of streaks of wild, haphazard inspiration that let you know just how they got as far as they have. I wish Curtis from Detroit (a/k/a U-Turn from Agrestic) had understood that, he might have lived a bit longer. He might have recognized that Travis Travers, underneath the ridiculous name and the unpruned trees and the TNT 6969 license plate, is capable of being momentarily smart. Is capable, as he says, of being whoever he needs to be.
Instead, our friend Curtis had a dream, a landscaping business kind of dream. This is another kind of Elmore Leonard thing, thugs with ambitions and how that makes them vulnerable. The way it is, is, guys with dreams need money to accomplish those dreams, so guys with dreams switch allegiances fast. Then they get shot. This is the reason, probably, that Pinter is a bookie and not a full on crime lord. He wants out of Kentucky, and that counts as a dream. He’s got a getaway fund that for the most part he knows not to talk about. So better to stay in the back of the restaurant, teach the bartender to make egg creams. It was all working out fine, until he went and mentioned it to his lady-friend waitress.
Is it time to talk about women, yet? We’re getting close. I think I need a minute, but we’re close. Women are trouble, women and money, but women always seem to mark the spot. You are not immune, no matter what kind of man you are. No matter if you’re a thug named Tiny who is literally tied down by a woman named Sherese and that’s how they find you, because you always come back to her, eventually. No matter if you’re a bookie-informant named Pinter telling his sorrowful scheming lady-friend waitress about his getaway fund. No matter if you’re a cowboy lawman giving in to number one lust number two the idea that maybe you are not just here for a stayover vacation. That you live here now, that you’re forming attachments. Did you go and do that because you got shot in the chest? Or did you go and do that because you got jealous of a bookie-informant’s ability to forgive the woman who plotted his kidnapping. Maybe it is time, Raylan, to move out of the motel.
Threaded underneath all this business were some fine tolling reminders of what has been and what is to come. I’m fond of the way that Raylan’s reputation is dogging him in Harlan County, how every thug he meets seems to have heard about how he “pulled a Wild Bill” on a man in Miami. That plus the way he dresses has got him noticed. Which he’s got to love, deep down, no reason to wear that hat unless you like what that hat makes people think of you. No reason to cheerfully enact a failed quick draw with a bad guy unless you like the bad guy knowing you actually can draw. I flat out laughed when Raylan explained why he was pursuing the TNT 6969 situation so hard, grabbing at his vest and sputtering about how he hates to have anyone putting one over on him. These little bursts of temper make me gleeful, every time, these glimpses of the Raylan underneath. Soon enough I suppose we’ll find out if the temper is inherited or if it’s something he had to develop on his own. Then I suppose we’ll further find out if it’s a strength or a liability. We know that thugs getting bold do not survive, but how about the law, how about the men who have tattooed their souls with complex moral codes?
All that plus a solid gun fight and that bowl of vanilla ice cream! So I’ll forgive you your mild flaws, “Fixer.” I’ll forgive you that awful checkered shirt Raylan was wearing, and I’ll also, for now, forgive the exhausting addition of a tongue-tied pretty-girl fake-nerd in the marshal’s office. I am like Ava, right now. I know that if we go play pool a few times, if I let you go on about your ex-wife a bit, you’ll come around to me. Until then it’s gonna be tense. But you’ll probably like that, too.
