Justified 6.07 “The Hunt”

Revised synopsis of Justified 6.07 “The Hunt” from the FX network’s Website:

A visit from Winona pulls Raylan away from the hunt for a dangerous fugitive while Boyd takes Ava on a hunting trip to Bulletville.

As you can tell from the synopsis, the title of this episode, “The Hunt” (6.07), has at least two meanings within the context of the story:

• The hunt for Ty Walker, who is on the run from both law enforcement and Avery Markham following the previous episode’s gunfight that ultimately left Choo Choo dead in his tracks—literally dead on the choo-choo tracks.

• The trip Boyd and Ava take to Boyd’s hunting cabin near “Bulletville”—the same place Boyd’s father took Ava when he kidnapped her, tied her up, and used her as “Raylan bait” in the season one finale five years ago.* Of course, he intended to kill her, too, but she survived thanks to Raylan and Boyd working together to bring down Boyd’s father.

Additionally, Raylan’s ex-wife, Winona, shows up with their infant daughter, Willa—ostensibly to get a second-opinion about the baby’s heart murmur from a Lexington, Kentucky pediatrician she trusts more than she trusts the Miami, Florida pediatrician who first diagnosed the murmur.

However, the real reason Winona is back in town is she is also doing some hunting—for an answer regarding the nature and status of her and Raylan’s relationship. Raylan is a crafty critter, though, and he avoids getting trapped in an answer until she eventually confesses she loves him and she wants them to spend the rest of their lives together even if it means she must move back to Kentucky and allow him to continue working as a US Marshal in the Lexington office.

She gives them a 50-50 shot of making it work, but Raylan says it’s more of a 51-49—though he won’t say which way.

Wow! That was a bit of a bombshell Winona dropped. It means Raylan won’t have to move to Miami after he guns down Boyd in the series finale in six more episodes—or it means we now have a reason for Winona to be in Kentucky for the finale scenarios I predicted in my review of “Fate’s Right Hand” (6.01):

Finally, the series could end with Raylan and Boyd killing each other during their final showdown—as their respective women-folk watch in agonized horror, of course.

Speaking of Raylan and Boyd’s respective women-folk, let’s get back to Ava and her relaxing hunting vacation in Bulletville.

While Boyd does take Ava hunting (and kills a wild hog for their lunch), he’s actually “hunting” for the truth from Ava after learning from Ellstin Limehouse that Ava tried to go into hiding during the day that was covered in “Sounding” (6.05)—which, naturally, causes Boyd to assume she is working as a confidential informant for Raylan, as well as reinforcing his suspicion that she and Raylan are having sex.

After dancing around those topics with discussions about loyalty, commitment, obligation, et cetera, Ava finally admits she is Raylan’s snitch and that she had to become an informant to get out of prison because Boyd had abandoned her there—telling him he would have done the same thing if he had been in her position. However, she also tells him she has absolutely not been having sex with Raylan.

In a reaction that seems to now be a melodrama cliché, Boyd takes out his pistol and hands it to Ava—telling her to put a bullet in his forehead. At that point I’m thinking: He handed her an empty gun. If she pulls the trigger, Boyd will know he can’t trust her and he will have to kill her.

Ava does not pull the trigger. Instead, she thrusts the gun back at Boyd while telling him she loves him, and he should take the gun and do what he has to do. He then apologizes for having abandoned her in prison, and tells her that he loves her, too. They then embrace and promise to trust each other so they can work their way out of this mess together.

It all seems too sweet and convenient, and I expect there are levels of duplicity on both sides:

1. It’s very likely Ava lied about not having sex with Raylan between “Sounding” and “Alive Day” (6.06)—and that sexual liaison is likely to come back as a problem for both Ava and Raylan with their respective “soulmates.”

2. Ava has been around firearms since she was six years old, so she should have been able to tell by the weight of the gun that the magazine was empty—which means she knew what would have happened if she had tried to shoot Boyd in the head.

3. As Boyd walked off to collect firewood, he replaced the empty magazine with a loaded magazine, and the look on his face (specifically in his eyes) seemed to indicate he is still planning to kill Ava, but he needs to use her first.

Of course, these “reversals of expectations” are also something I actually did expect, so the scene is not fresh either way. However, it is a nice bit of melodramatic duplicity that was well acted (if not well conceived). It also caused me to wonder if Ava actually will be in attendance when Boyd and Raylan have their High Noon shootout in the final episode or if she might end up with a bullet in her forehead before the finale.

Finally, Art has more screen time in this episode than he has had in the previous six episodes combined—but he isn’t hunting for anything. Instead, he seems to be fishing—at least that’s what Avery Markham believes Art is doing. While he has not returned to active duty as Raylan’s boss (Rachel is still filling in as the Interim boss), Art is hanging out at the office because he has grown tired of sitting around the house while he recuperates from the gunshot wounds he suffered near the end of season five.

As it so happens, Avery Markham is also there for questioning since it is his pizza restaurant employee, Ty Walker, who is being hunted by the marshals and state troopers. Seeing Markham, Art walks into the conference room (not an interrogation room) and strikes up a conversation that seems very much as if he’s fishing for information. However, by the end of their chat, it’s clear that Art wasn’t fishing as much as he was planting—sowing the seeds of doubt and distrust in Markham’s mind regarding Katherine Hale, to whom Markham proposed marriage in “Alive Day” (6.06).

Oh, I can’t end this review without commenting on Ty Walker beyond the fact that the marshals and state troopers are hunting him. There are actually two reasons why I must quickly discuss Walker:

• The managing editor of Psycho Drive-In, Paul McCoy, recently stated that he recently caught up on this season’s episodes of Justified and that Garret Dillahunt’s character is the only character he cares about, so I need to comment on Walker for Paul’s sake.

• While I don’t care about Walker as much as Paul, I must admit that he had the two best scenes in the episode—so I need to comment on them even though they don’t really fit into the context of the rest of my review.

First, Dillahunt has a great scene in the restroom of a gas station where he stops to remove the bullet in his shoulder that he received in the gunfight he had with Raylan and Gutterson in “Alive Day.” The bullet entered his right shoulder from the back, but there was no exit wound on the front of the shoulder. However, it must have lodged close to the surface in the front because Walker then proves what a badass he is by cutting into his shoulder with a hunting knife and squeezing the bullet out as if he was popping a pimple.

He then literally pours salt into his wounds back and front—at least it looked like he was rubbing salt in his wounds. Is that supposed to be some sort of coagulant or way of sanitizing an open wound? I thought it was just a way to torture someone.

Then, as he finishes dressing his wounds, some smartass college kid and his drunk-ass buddy start banging on the restroom door. Once Walker opens the door, the smartass kid says a lot of dumbass shit and nearly gets his head split open by Walker who only has one good arm now. However, the kid backs down from Walker’s intimidating presence, and ends up being given $300 and two credit cards to use as he wants (so that law enforcement will follow the money trail of credit card payments away from where Walker will actually be).

As cool as that scene was, there wasn’t any action in it, so I will leave you with these three action pics of Walker engaged in his own “hunting trip”:

Happy hunting everyone!

* There doesn’t seem to be an actual community in Kentucky called “Bulletville”—at least not that I’ve been able to find. However, there is community called Bullittsville near the Kentucky-Ohio border in an area that would essentially make it a suburb of Cincinnati. It would be a completely stupid location for the Crowder family to have a hunting cabin—which is probably why its cool-sounding name was changed to Bulletville (without the “s” in the middle to make it clear that it’s not Bullitsville).

Obviously, a show that involves as much gunfire as Justified has in it should have a town named “Bulletville” as one of its settings. On the other hand, while the real-life Bullitsville would make absolutely no sense as a location for Boyd’s hunting cabin, it is appropriately located in the county that is named for Daniel Boone—which is cool. It just wouldn’t work, though, because Boone County is just about as far from Harlan County as you can get while still being in the state of Kentucky.