‘Justified’ season 4, episode 3 review: Snake in the grass
Sometimes in the real world, and in the fictional and funny world of “Justified,” people get bit. And sometimes, people are also very, very stupid.
There are times when we find Raylan to be a genius in the same was as that crazy guy in your high school calculus class who knows pi to a hundred places, but cannot figure out how to tie his own shoes. The guy was so infatuated with rolling around in the sheets with Lindsey that he never bothered to sit back and think that it’s possible that he could be a mark a potentially robbery. After all, the girl is married. Why does she want to be with you?
Thankfully, Raylan was slightly better this week in putting together some of the pieces behind Drew Thompson faking his own death, though not before the FBI got involved and he had to meet his widow, a psychic that almost immediately threw him off of his game. The culmination of all of this was learning that the Detroit mob is somehow tied into this … and then this translates into Wynn Duffy, which in turn translates into Boyd.
The story for Walton Goggins’ character was interesting in its own way in that it showed us a brand of naivety far different than believing the woman you are sleeping with does not want to ransack your place: Billy genuinely believed that he was impervious to snakes, only when they were really being milked dry of their venom beforehand. You take that away, and what do you got? Big trouble. Boyd never wanted anything to happen other than trying to expose Billy and the church for what they are, and this story is personally hysterical to us to begin with. Why? It’s a man going after an immoral church for an equally immoral reason.
So both Raylan and Billy are going to be starting out next week in a pickle so big you can’t jar it up. Both are in some ways victims, in other ways aggressors, both brilliant and clueless at the same time. This was a great episode that accentuated the series’ strengths, and continues to prove that this show is better when it is more serialized than episodic.
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Photo: FX