As an author and a fangirl, I know full well that it’s possible for heroes to fall. But I never anticipated that the series I recently praised for having some of the sharpest writing on television would give me not only a piss-poor final season, but the singlehandedly worst series finale I’ve had the displeasure of watching in my twenty-six years of being alive. Yes. It’s that bad.
You might be wondering why I’m writing this blog post over a week since Justified’s series finale premiered. That’s because it took me this long to calm down enough to do something other than scream into my pillow (which I did twice during that abysmal finale) or smash my keyboard in incoherent rage. I’ve finally gotten enough distance between its airing and now that I can properly explain why Justified’s series finale is a cautionary tale in every sense of the term.
You don’t need to rush to Amazon Prime and binge-watch the series to understand what I’m about to explain. The show made one of the most common mistakes of long-running series, which is going one season past where it should have ended. It is so very apparent that the writers ran out of material, because every single plot point and character beat in season six is predictable, nonsensical, and forced. No longer is our wonderful cast of characters acting on their own. There is an invisible hand shoving each one of them across the chessboard, making the most illogical moves in a vain attempt to get to the other side. If you’re patient enough to stay with me, then let me warn you that I will have to spoil the entire series in order to explain why this season and its finale were a holocaust of wrong.
For example, we have our main lead, Marshal Raylan Givens, completely giving up any sense of being a proper lawman by pursuing Boyd Crowder for the sake of murdering him, not bringing him to justice like the marshal service is supposed to do. In season six, Raylan and his ex-wife Winona just had a precious baby girl named Willa, and Winona asked Raylan to consider moving back in with her to raise the baby. This is where the inconsistencies with Raylan start. We’ve seen him talk to Winona and the baby via Skype and he is clearly enamored with the precious little girl, and then we finally get an episode where Winona and Willa visit, and Raylan takes her along with him and spends time with them both. Then, out of nowhere, that entire plot point vanishes and Raylan becomes obsessed with nailing Boyd, to the point where he flat out leaves his badge behind and starts illegally pressuring Harlan country residents to locate him. Raylan has always treaded the line between marshal and vigilante, but it’s always been clear that he wants to see these bastards in jail, not in the ground. The only exception was Nicky Augustine, and that was because Augustine held the pregnant Winona at gun point last season in an attempt to get to Raylan, and Raylan turned the other way while a separate party took care of him. Was it the right thing to do? Hell no. Was it in character and believable? Yes. So Raylan going off the deep end obsessed with killing Boyd makes zero sense when just a few episodes ago we saw him seriously contemplating moving in with his wife—whom he still loves dearly, by the way—and raising his daughter with her, and he wouldn’t be able to do that if he murdered Boyd and landed himself in jail.
Next, we have Raylan’s cowboy attitude not only screwing up his chances of actually getting to raise his daughter, but he also manages to screw over one of my favorite characters: Rachel Brooks. Rachel is a fellow marshal and she’s sharp as a whip, so much so that after Deputy Chief Marshal Art Mullen, Raylan’s boss, gets badly injured in a gun fight in the previous season, he promotes her to his position. Rachel is put in charge of launching a full investigation against Boyd Crowder, who up until this point in the series has managed to cover his tracks well enough not to land in jail for more than brief periods of time. Rachel uses the leverage of Ava Crowder, Boyd’s fiancée, to become an informant to give them something solid to put Boyd away for good instead of a mere slap on the wrist. At one point, Rachel gets the feeling that Raylan is soft on Ava (they slept together in the first season) and she is faced with a choice: taking Raylan off the case because he’s been compromised, or letting it slide because he’s still a good marshal who can get things done. She sucks it up and lets it slide, only for Raylan to literally choke at the last second when Ava shoots Boyd in the shoulder and runs off with the ten million dollars he stole from local criminal Avery Markem. Rachel is now faced with a career-ending debacle after Raylan seriously just stands there and watches Ava drive off with the money instead of shooting out her tires or shooting her in the arm or the other ten thousand things he could have done to prevent her from taking that money. And you would think Raylan would deeply regret putting his friend and colleague—a woman he once told, “I think the world of you and I trust you with my life”—in such an unbelievably bad position, but does he? Nope. He just waltzes off into the dark saying he’ll catch Boyd and Ava and not once apologizes to Rachel for having faith in him for nothing and letting her get steamrolled by the higher ups for HIS screw up. Awesome.
Next, we have Boyd Crowder, who aside from Raylan is the most flushed out character in the series and serves as a foil for him on most occasions. Boyd has been hired to steal ten million dollars from a local weed crime boss who keeps it all in a vault below his pizza parlor. Boyd, for some God-forsaken reason, is still in love with Ava and doesn’t know she’s now an informant, though he clearly has a notion that she’s being secretive about something. Boyd Crowder is ruthless, pragmatic, and intelligent, and that is why he has managed to murder people left and right, sell drugs, and steal huge amounts of cash and get away with it. However, when it comes to Ava, Boyd is, for lack of a better term, a baby back bitch. He constantly waxes on and on about his “lady” and how they’re gonna run away together with the money and how much he luuuuuuuuuuuuvs her. Naturally, because he isn’t a complete moron, he finds out Ava is an informant. And what does he do? Nothing. I’m not kidding. Absolutely nothing. He doesn’t hit her, he doesn’t shoot her, he doesn’t do anything but reaffirm his luuuuuuurve for her, despite the fact that every single criminal who has turned on Boyd Crowder in the past—including his own cousin, Johnny, whom Boyd shot in the head in cold blood—is summarily executed. The season has been building up to what might happen if Boyd found out Ava turned on him, and it’s nothing but a gigantic anticlimax. Are you starting to see why I had to take a week off to calm down?
Speaking of anti-climaxes, Boyd and Raylan have been building up to a final confrontation literally since the pilot episode. They grew up together, but ended up taking separate paths: one to law enforcement, the other to a life of crime. They have a yin-and-yang sort of relationship going, and that was one of the show’s strongest points. So after six seasons of buildup, how do things end between them?
Boyd gives up.
Yep.
The character notorious for being all-or-nothing and being one of the fastest guns in Harlan county won’t pull on Raylan and just lets the authorities take him to jail.
Wow. Just…wow.
Wave goodbye to six whole seasons of tension. Wave! Bye bye, excellently foreshadowed final showdown! Nice knowing you!
Last, we come to the real reason why this season and its finale are the worst thing to air on television. Ava Crowder. This will sound incredibly rude, but I’m going to say it anyway: I am convinced that Joelle Carter, the actress playing her, is married to one of the writers. That is the only explanation for why Ava Crowder got the ending she got in this series. Because it makes absolutely no sense.
Let me paint you the picture of Ava Crowder. Ava used to be a cheerleader, so she was popular in high school, and she married a jock named Bowman Crowder, who was apparently an abusive asshole. So after literally decades of putting up with it instead of just leaving him, Ava makes him dinner and then promptly shoots him to death with a shotgun. Ava is acquitted of premeditated murder because…reasons…and then she takes up with Boyd, Bowman’s brother because…reasons…and they start their absolutely nauseating love affair from season two and onward. Now that she’s banging Boyd, Ava has become number two in his criminal organization—not because she’s smart or skilled or has a background in criminal activity, but seriously just because she doesn’t want to get a damn job and do any legitimate work. Instead she just struts around as his arm candy and reaps the benefits of his work, doing pretty much nothing other than overseeing the whorehouse or keeping an eye on potentially disloyal henchmen.
At one point, Ava murders someone and one of the whores, Ellen May, witnesses it. So Ava tries to summon the balls to kill her, but can’t seem to do it so she asks Boyd to do it, but thankfully Ellen May has someone on her side who helps her go into hiding, and eventually Ava gets caught trying to move the body and gets sent to prison. Boyd tries to find a way to get her out, but since he can’t do it instantaneously, Ava breaks up with him to find her own way to survive in prison. Except Ava is stupid and a coward and a hypocrite, so that doesn’t exactly work. For example, apparently this particular prison is a drug ring. The girls get protection and product in through the guards by sleeping with them. Ava finds this out and despite being in charge of a whorehouse, finds the idea of having sex for power to be utterly appalling and unacceptable, so she instead tries to take out the head of the drug ring named Judith just so she doesn’t have to be like all the other girls who either don’t participate at all or sleep with guards to get what they want. Judith is a sixty-something old woman. She proceeds to beat Ava’s ass, but eventually Ava gets the upper hand and kills her, which pisses off Judith’s band of followers, who set their sights on framing Ava for the murder of her bunk mate. Ava is pretty much screwed, and by her own hand, but guess what? The marshals coincidentally Deus Ex Machina her out of prison to become a C.I. while they take down Boyd.
So, fine, maybe Ava will finally wise up and be a proper informant to put Boyd away for good, right? No. She’s useless. She doesn’t find any incriminating evidence aside from a necklace that used to belong to one of Boyd’s henchmen, whom he murdered but of course he disposed of the body, and so the marshals are all but ready to throw her back in jail. Ava proceeds to bitch and moan at Raylan in every single possible moment about how hard it is to be a C.I. and how it’s so unfair that they’re going to put her back in prison for not doing her job as a C.I., and takes zero responsibility for the fact that she was sent to jail for murdering someone. And what’s worse is for some reason Raylan takes pity on this selfish cow and lets her get away with the money…twice.
What really tears it, what made me scream into my pillow twice during the finale, is not only does Raylan let her get away twice, but the second time she actually somehow manages to escape Harlan county and live under an assumed name for entire years before Raylan catches up with her. And then Raylan finds out Ava had a kid and so he doesn’t take her to jail.
Yes.
You read that correctly.
Ava gets away with all of it.
That is precisely what broke the series. Ava has NO redeeming qualities. She is not nice, she is not humble, she is not smart, she is not likable, she is not noble, and she is not a three dimensional character.
But you know what she is?
White, female and blonde.
And so that’s why she got away with all of it. I’m not one to go on at length about white privilege, but this is the most insulting example of white privilege in fiction that I have ever seen in my life. We have hard evidence that Ava Crowder is not only a terrible person but an actual murdering criminal, but just because she’s white, blonde, and allegedly “pretty”, Raylan sweeps all that under the rug and lets her go. She did not earn a happy ending. She absolutely did not deserve to live happily ever after with her bastard son because she has made countless people suffer and doesn’t even have the common decency to take responsibility for her own actions. If this were the case for other characters in this series, maybe it would be less infuriating, but that is NOT the case. Every single character in Justified has to deal with the consequences of their actions. Raylan, Tim, Boyd, Rachel, Art, Winona, all of them have made bad calls that affect them negatively and so they have to bust their asses to right the wrongs and make it out alive. Apparently those rules firmly established by the pilot episode of this series do not apply to Ava Crowder.
And that, if nothing else, is why the Justified’s series finale became the worst series finale in history.
Justified turned itself inside out. We had so many seasons of clever writing and excellent pay off, and yet its last run on television is packed to burst with trite, cliché, contradictory, half-assed writing that derails nearly every single character that it spent painstaking amounts of time getting us to love. I loved this series, guys. Loved it. I praised it constantly for its outside-the-box thinking and genuinely surprising turn of events. Hell, just last season it gave me what I considered to be the best and most satisfying villain death ever to air on television. I cannot express how betrayed I feel that this team of writers let this happen.
And so Justified is now the new cautionary tale about how not to end a long running series. Look, I don’t dispute that it is hard to end a series. My own series ends on Friday with The Holy Dark. But there is no reason for something so witty and groundbreaking to crash and burn like a downed satellite. I can’t even explain to you what could have possessed these writers to let this filth pass through onto the airwaves. I just can’t. I’m at a loss. Every single thing they set up for these characters fell flat on its face and then exploded. I’ve personally adopted a stance of denial that it ever happened. I maintain that season five ends with Boyd dying in a shootout, Ava gets murdered in prison, and Raylan moves to Florida with Winona to raise Willa.
What you can take away from this awful ordeal is that you have a responsibility as a storyteller to consider the gravity of your endings. You have to think of your characters as threads. Will these threads be snipped off or tied to other threads? How long is each thread? Where does it intertwine with other threads? Do the colors of the threads work well together? If they don’t, unravel them and start over. You absolutely cannot let this sort of thing happen to your work, because there is nothing worse than betraying your audience, than betraying people who took the time to invest in your world and your story when they could have easily chosen someone else. Don’t insult them. Write something that not only makes sense but that fits the tone and consistency of the narrative. Don’t pander to one demographic or let an outside force make you shove your characters into places where they don’t belong.
If nothing else, let that be Justified’s final legacy—teaching us what not to do with an ending.
Southern Social Commentary on FX’s Justified
Category: Inspiration
Tags:fx, justified, justified fx, raylan givens, social commentary, timothy olyphant
Like a lot of folks, being indoors more often due to the coronavirus sometimes leads one to rewatch TV shows to try and fill the hours. Instead of, you know, writing a novel or anything. *sweats nervously* So a couple weeks ago, I decided that I had a hankering for what used to be one of my favorite shows of all time, FX’s Justified (2010), starring the delicious Timothy Olyphant as the unforgettable US Deputy Marshal Raylan Givens.
Upon revisiting the show, and keep in mind, I hadn’t seen it since its disastrous final season in 2015 (which I in no way acknowledge except to tell you it doesn’t exist in my mind), I realized a whole bunch of very interesting things that I hadn’t noticed when the show was still premiering on TV. One of the biggest things I realized was that Justified is one of the only shows portraying Southern white men in such a way that it’s not buying into the very popular “oh, you poor Southern white man, your life is so hard, no one understands you but I do” that a lot of fiction has fallen prey to before. You would think that a show centered around conservative Southern white men would have lots and lots of problematic material, but in a fascinating twist, Justified doesn’t pander to that mentality. It’s shockingly amazing to be knee-deep in it, but yet it’s very clearly shown that the writers’ room does not sympathize with this demographic and in its own way, that’s pretty damn progressive.
ICYMI, Justified is about US Deputy Marshal Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant), who is the literal definition of a cowboy cop, all the way down to the snakeskin boots and an honest to God famous off-white cowboy hat. Raylan’s reckless ways reach a zenith when he confronts a mobster in Miami, whom he gave 24-hours to leave town or he would shoot him on sight. The mobster, Tommy Bucks, scoffs and doesn’t believe him when Raylan sits down at his table at a popular restaurant and tells him to either leave or die in his chair. The mobster pulls a gun on him and Raylan shoots him dead in front of everyone. Naturally, the shooting was justified (“Roll credits!”), but it lands him in so much trouble that his superior reassigns him to Kentucky, which is where Raylan is from. Raylan begrudgingly returns to Lexington, and subsequently, Harlan county, and continues kicking up an unholy amount of dust.
To give you the skinny, Justified only has three kinds of characters: lawmen, criminals, and victims. While this is a bit limiting, the show does an excellent job characterizing all three of these kinds of people over the course of the show. I bring it up because basically, any person who is not either a lawman or a victim in Harlan county is portrayed as a huge, steaming pile of racist crap.
But here’s where things get interesting.
For example, one thing that I never noticed when I used to watch this show is that every criminal we visit has a big fat honkin’ Confederate flag on the wall of his home or place of business. And I do mean every single one of them. There may be some blessed individual on the Internet who counted them up, but I kid you not, you see that wretched flag in every last episode of Justified. Therefore, you’d think that the show would pause to have one of those really frustrating conversations with conservative white Southerners that you see all the time, where the Southerner who owns the Confederate flag proceeds to explain why the Civil War wasn’t about slavery and it’s not racist to own it and it’s just them being proud of their heritage. (My sympathies to those of you, like me, who have sat through this explanation.)
Well, guess what? There is no such conversation throughout the entire six seasons of the show.
Now that gets you curious, doesn’t it? Why would a show that features the Confederate flag in every single episode not have a discourse about it?
Because the show does not mince words about how it feels about these racist pricks.
Justified makes no bones about the fact that these are nasty, uneducated, pea-brained simpletons. What’s more is that it doesn’t just take shots at trailer trash, either. It comes after the Southern elite racists as well. There’s an episode that I still think deserves so much credit for one of the best takedowns of the Neo Nazi movement that I’ve ever seen. Raylan and his boss Art Mullen are working on seizing the assets of a rich criminal who collects Hitler’s paintings, and they run into a man who is interested in buying them, but it turns out that they are fakes. Raylan and Art are immediately disgusted by both of these men, but the buyer insists that after he helps them cooperate in solving the case that Raylan come to see his collection of Hitler paintings. Well, cue the twist. The buyer’s father turned out to be part of the Nazi party, going so far as to doing some of Hitler’s dirty work directly at times. The buyer has spent his entire life accumulating wealth so that he can buy Hitler’s hard-to-find paintings one by one…and burn them. He has jars and jars of ashes in his office of Hitler’s paintings and he intends to find them all wherever they are and burn every single one until they’re all off the face of the Earth.
I mean, wow. That’s fantastic writing, if you ask me.
Now think about this for a second. Who is the key demographic for a show like Justified? Typically, it’s people who like westerns, right? Whether it’s spaghetti westerns or modern westerns, that’s generally who you assume would be watching a show like Justified, and yet this show is very anti-Confederacy and it makes it quite clear it has zero patience for anyone sympathizing with racists. For instance, in that same episode, the wife of the mobster whose assets are being seized is quite pretty and blonde—which is sadly one of Raylan’s weaknesses—and she and Raylan are talking for a while, pleasantly, maybe even flirting a little. Then the wife makes an anti-Semitic comment. Raylan is instantly turned off and abruptly leaves her company, and he makes it so clear to her that she even comments on it, whining that she thought he was “a good ole boy.”
Consider how much that flies in the face of who you’d think would like this show, and the balls it takes to make it so apparent. Most of the famous westerns of the bygone eras do not have very nice things to say about people of color due to the time period when they were made. Often, they portray the South as brave rebels who didn’t like to be told what to do by the North. It would be very easy for the writers of Justified to make Raylan a good ole boy, as the racist wife said, and yet he is shown to be staunchly against even the slightest hint of racist behavior by the criminals he apprehends or anyone in his presence.
In particular, US Deputy Marshal Rachel Brooks (Erica Tazel), is a young, gorgeous black woman and easily the most competent member of the marshal service in their office. She’s often at Raylan’s side apprehending criminals in Harlan county, which puts her in the middle of the usual racist bullshit. She even asks Raylan to come along during an assignment to help smooth things over because the moment the residents of Harlan county find out she’s a marshal, she’s a “black bitch.” The show does a good job with showing that Rachel knows how to handle herself—and boy, does she prove it on a few occasions—but that it’s tiresome for her to come up against that kind of a wall doing her job. Raylan agrees to help with no qualms at all because he understands how tedious and painful it is for her to put up with that while she’s working. It’s a great angle of solidarity that Raylan is using his handsome looks and white Southern charm to reduce the amount of harassment aimed in her direction. There’s also a more subtle thing I enjoyed, which is if anyone does say something racist to Rachel, Raylan is entirely intolerant of it and often tries to make sure they get their comeuppance if they’re stupid enough to mess with her. It’s a great understanding of how he chooses to be an ally to her, when he very well could hang her out to dry. They build a significant amount of trust and even a bit of affection for each other over the course of the show. Rachel also isn’t afraid to call him out on his shit and occasionally smacks some sense into him when he’s being ridiculous, which he often is. Rachel does end up being underused overall, but when we do see her, it’s made clear that she is by far the smartest, most likable woman on the show, and I think that is also pretty interesting all things considered.
The other rather excellent commentary on the white supremacists is none other than the infamous Boyd Crowder. Boyd Crowder is the series-long arch nemesis and frenemy of Raylan Givens. The two dug coal together as teenagers and have had a very hateful but friendly relationship with Raylan being on the side of the law, always trying to nail Crowder for his infinite list of crimes, and Crowder doing his absolute best to thwart Raylan’s attempts to land him in jail for good.
To be honest, if anyone made a list of the best written villains in the last 20 years, I’d happily throw Boyd Crowder on it. What’s great about Boyd Crowder as a villain is his progression from a loud, greedy Neo Nazi psycho into an insanely smart crime boss for Harlan county. Boyd starts out as one of those utterly perplexing Neo Nazis who uses Bible verses to insist the Bible wants the Jews dead and that people of color are all animals and the white man is supposed to rule them all. In truth, it’s just a smoke screen. Boyd is aware of the fact that the white supremacists LOVE to use the Bible as an excuse to be horrible pieces of shit, so they happily do his bidding because he parrots the things they want to hear. However, Boyd has a brush with death, finds religion again, but then loses his faith and decides to simply embrace his evil and crawl his way on top of the rogues gallery of Harlan county.
Boyd Crowder is certainly a cool villain, but while the show takes the time to flesh him out as a character, it never glorifies him or his lifestyle. Boyd is the perfect foil for Raylan, as he is a selfish, heartless bastard who will use anyone and anything to get what he wants. The show certainly shows off his skills and Walt Goggins utterly slays the performance itself, but at no point is there a Tyler Durden problem. For those who are unfamiliar, a lot of stupid men walked away from Fight Club completely missing the point, which is that while it’s not great to be controlled by society and suppress your Id, it’s also an incredibly stupid and reckless idea to give into your Id completely and let it control you. If you ever meet a guy who idolizes Tyler Durden, run in the opposite direction until you’re safely elsewhere.
Boyd is a monster. He’s a cool monster, but a monster nonetheless. Justified does not ever try to turn him into a Woobie or insist that you should like him as a person or want to be anything like him over the course of the show. One of my favorite moments is in the first season where Boyd tries to use an ambiguous Bible verse to insist that it’s about the Jews being “mud-people” and Raylan just stares at him like he’s an idiot and calmly tells him he’s just using the Bible to justify doing whatever the hell he wants regardless of what it means, which is a callout of epic proportions. My other favorite moment is that when confronted with someone who insists that times were best when Boyd used to run his Nazi “commandos” out of the church, Boyd confesses that he’s never even met a single Jew and was just regurgitating things his racist father and the people around him had instilled in him in order to get approval and procure the things he wanted. I mean, wow. Seldom do you see someone self-aware enough to admit they’re hating an unseen “enemy” just to fit in and get people to do what he wanted them to do.
In the end, what I’m getting to is the fact that Justified had some of the most unconventional writing in regards to white Southern culture. It actively called these people out on their shit and didn’t attempt to sympathize with them just so it could get better ratings or have appeal to that demographic. Most of the time you will see shows like Atlanta breaking down the fallacy of the Southern Confederate sympathizer, yet here, a show that knew its key demographic would likely be white men, they went for the jugular. I have to say that while Justified had a lot of problems before it ended, this was one of the best aspects of the show that I noted during the rewatch and I think it’s pretty commendable that the writing team decided to go against the urge to pander. To be honest, it’s one of the reasons that I like FX in general. They are very willing to go out on a limb and try something different or risky in the pursuit of a great story.
If you’re ever in the mood for cowboy shenanigans, I can give my highest recommendations for the first three seasons of Justified. Sadly, it begins to steadily decline in seasons four and five, and I personally tell people not to watch the final season unless they want to hate the show and the writers. I wish it ended better, but I believe it deserves credit where credit is due. In this day and age, there are a lot of writers rooms not willing to confront the unhealthy aspects of white Southern culture, and as a black woman who grew up in Georgia, I have to say that Justified’s writing in this regard was a breath of fresh air.