Season 1, Episode 8: “Blowback”
How many times have you been in this situation! You’re about to prepare for your meeting with the Assistant U.S. Attorney, right. And this is just a little meeting, just a sit-down to straighten out a simple misunderstanding about oh say how you shot this guy in Miami. Right? Then all of a sudden some four-consecutive-sentence lowlife goes and takes a couple hostages! Ugh! Hugely relatable, also fairly inexpensive to shoot. I mean film. But it’s all right, Justified, ‘cause I like a good hostage negotiation. Particularly when you book me a hostage-taker as fun to watch as W. Earl Brown, a man who knows how to put a twist on the psycho-with-a-brain-of-gold situation. His Cal Wallace is somehow both conniving and tender, a fully necessary dichotomy considering the leap of faith necessary to believe in the fried-chicken denouement. In which Cal Wallace is nothing but a man who wants to be taken seriously? Or treated properly? Or listened to. I’m going to go with listened to.
Because the last episode was about talking, didn’t we say? It was about trying to tell folks something. And “Blowback” is about listening, and who’s doing it, and who isn’t. Who’s able to improvise and who’s stuck tight on their own script. Raylan successfully negotiates with Wallace because he listens to him and picks up his cues. Now, of course, he’s got no other choice, because Wallace doesn’t have a list of demands, and also, Wallace has a weapon. Which doesn’t make him far off of the Crowder men, both of whom seem to speak between the lines and carry all sorts of concealed weapons (literal and non). So you wish, you absolutely wish, that Raylan could take this keen listening behavior over into the rest of his damn life. That he could hear, for instance, that Boyd is now free because of something Raylan did. Instead of hearing, as I suspect he did, that Boyd is free because everything sucks and no one ever does what Raylan wants them to do ever ever ever and it’s up to him and him alone to fix it goddamn it goddamn it.
So Raylan heads over to prison to meet his true love, Boyd. And he does it I guess to issue a threat and to let Boyd know that freedom ain’t free. Except doesn’t it seem like every time Raylan and Boyd talk, Boyd has the upper hand, and Raylan has really good posture? Does he even know that Boyd is beating him here? Goofy old racist Boyd, with his thrown-up hands and his fully hilarious run towards his pie-plate-licking father? He doesn’t. Not consciously, anyway, not in a way where looking at a lineup he could pick out the thing that upsets him most. Raylan doesn’t even know the name of his angst or else he wouldn’t be taking it out on Ava. Because although he’s a million zillion times ignored advice that told him to stay away from her, he’s picking now, with the Crowders free and Ava at her most vulnerable, to decline her calls. And I’m not saying, but I’m saying, where I come from, we call that a self-destructive move.
Of course Raylan’s not the only man stepping wrong, she said as she turned to the B story that may have been the C story. Though it wasn’t particularly well-embedded in the episode, the scene where Winona comes home to find a hugely creepy man in her kitchen was a nice escalation of a thead I’m looking forward to understanding. Her husband’s cagey inability to answer direct questions reminded me not a little of Raylan’s posturing. Both men using talking points and proven technique instead of doing a little hard truth-facing. So we can’t trust Winona’s husband, I can barely remember his name is how little I trust him. Whatever he’s into is bad and that’s fine and let’s see how it goes and I hope it brings back the super-creepy guy, because he was super-creepy.
Postgame honors go to Nick Searcy’s continuing excellence as Chief Deputy Art and Rick Gomez’s weasely hands-on-hipness as the Assistant U.S. Attorney. Both fellas turned in great work. I liked Art offhandedly instructing Raylan as to how to close the office blinds and I liked him in the background of every negotiating shot, poker-faced but fuming. I liked Gomez’s cool hostage negotiation attitude and how it turned right over to serious business at the end of the episode, as he spread a naked Raylan-and-Ava photo shoot across the desk. Art has been the real surprise for me; I was fully expecting big character things from Marshals Rachel and Tim, but episode after episode it’s Art with the words of wisdom, Art with the love and pain in his eyes. Which is not to say I didn’t appreciate Tim’s chicken run, or Rachel’s research, but I’m going to need more from them both if they hope to make the highlight reels.
So Bo is free, and Boyd is free, and those free streets of Kentucky are getting awfully full, and Ava’s getting ignored, and Winona’s being called a marshal’s wife, and the marshal himself is burying his feelings in deep dark holes. Hey, you know what grows well in holes? Smugness and rage, my friend. Keep your hand on your gun.
