5.9 Wrong Roads I am not going to say I’m disappointed in the show, but I will say that it is time for the endgame to be accelerated. In regard to this week’s episode, Raylan instead of going to Florida to visit his family, decides to take a trip to Memphis to track down Hot Rod Dunham. It’s here that Raylan finds out that Hot Rod’s henchmen Roscoe and Jay have turned on him thanks to Boyd’s late cousin Johnny. As such they have Hot Rod held hostage and are trying to get him to turn on Boyd so that they can retrieve the money and drugs stolen from them. Hot Rod gives up Boyd’s location and Raylan, with the help of a Memphis DEA agent, follows the henchmen back to Kentucky where they’re caught in the midst of trying to rob Boyd and his crew. Naturally, Raylan arrives just in time and the henchmen are apprehended while Boyd and company are able to go free. Canyou explain to me how the leadership of a growing criminal empire who are discussing all sorts of illegal activities in the presence of a US Marshall and a DEA agent are able to walk away from this mess without any sort of repurcussions? As I said, the usually high level of narrative storytelling is starting to diminish. Ava this weeks asks Boyd to kill a man for her so that she can cement her relationship with the prison nurse who will help her smuggle drugs into the prison so that she can keep herself alive. The tension between her and Boyd continues to rise and the deterioration of their relationship also continues to be dragged out at an incredibly slow pace. As poor Ava’s bad luck never seems to end, after Boyd does this favour for her, naturally the prison nurse is not satisfied and wants something else. She wants Ava to kill Judith for her and gives no explanation as to why except that perhaps this red herring of a plot device is simply there to get us into next season. I do not want to be overly critical of the show but the writing appears to be on the wall that the show’s best days are behind it. That said, the scene between Wynn, Boyd, Picker and Daryl was interesting and possibly trying to call attention to the fact that in capitalistic ventures the independent businessman is always at a disadvantage when dealing with larger corporate entities. Essentially, Daryl offers the men a more or less fair deal for the services he’s going to provide and Wynn and Picker are not only unimpressed, but Wynn, as only he can, explains to Daryl that his price immediately brings down his own profit margin as well as those of his de-facto shareholders. Picker immediately suggests ten percent to be a fair price to pay for Daryl’s services. Greed drives all of the men at this table. It seems that Daryl is planning on killing the men he’s negotiating with, so perhaps their petty squabbles over percentage points ultimately means nothing. On the other hand, as I mentioned in a previous review, if these men actually put aside their differences and work together they would all get rich. This was the promise that could have been fulfilled if Daryl and Boyd continued with their partnership. Cooperation could be a far more powerful weapon then competition and arguably this tension between individualism, cooperation, and competition has always been part of the American struggle. A struggle that almost all of the classic western movies have dealt with on either a conscious or subconscious level and as Justified is a modern-day western it makes perfect sense that this theme is present. Read Matthew’s review of the previous episode, Whistle Past The Graveyard, here. Follow our Twitter feed for faster news and bad jokes right here. And be our Facebook chum here.
