This is it – Raylan (Timothy Olyphant) is going out like he came in, short-tempered and playing the long game.
The big series-ending question set up last night is not whether or not Raylan will get his man, but will he get his women. Winona (Natalie Zea) is waiting for him to keep his promise and make his way to her and their baby, Willa, but he’s inadvertently taken on what could be his career-making case, trying to take down Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins) once and for all. There’s no way to know if Raylan will make it out of Harlan alive, if he gets to ride off into the sunset, or if he even gets to choose which kind of sunset it will be.
The always-tense interplay between Raylan and Boyd is complicated by Ava (Joelle Carter), who is completely freaked out at the thought of spying on Boyd, but immobilised by the loss of her business and, until recently, her freedom. It’s not an accident that the brand of cigarettes she smokes is Escalus, the famously neutral prince in the war between the Montagues and Capulets, and Ava can’t really handle how firmly she’s between Raylan and Boyd. The dress she was wearing on the way back to working at the beauty shop didn’t show the gunshot scar Dickie Bennett gave her, but Boyd’s eerie presence around her house and insistence that they need to leave a swiftly dying Harlan is all the reminder she needs that her life revolves around Boyd’s particular brand of chaos. She’s desperate and tense; Raylan isn’t sure she can do the job, and neither is Ava. It will be interesting to see how much she’s able to help, and what will happen to her in the end.
When the episode opens in Mexico (showcasing the brutally typical Givens style of questioning), it’s clear that he’s hot on the trail of Johnny’s murderers. He explains to interim chief Rachel (who is so comfortably in charge you almost forget about Art for a second) that the key to the whole case is eyewitness Dewey Crowe, which is unfortunate since Raylan has to stay 1,000 feet away from him now that Dewey won his civil suit. He finds a way around that using a state police roadblock, his own hubris, and Dewey’s non-stop stupidity, breaking his jaw and using him to figure out that Boyd was about to rob a bank. You get the feeling right away that Raylan will suffer fools this season even less than he did in the past, as evidenced by the way he quickly and summarily dismissed Ty Walker – the man who wanted to buy Arlo’s house and land.
After Boyd marks a safety deposit box on his visit to the bank, he and his crew rob the place by using a truck to rip the cover right out of the wall and stealing some of the boxes. It’s not clear whether they got what they came for, but Dewey is pissed that he was used as a diversion. He didn’t find his turtle in the ashes of the trailers just to be dismissed! According to Raylan, Ava should have known about the bank heist, so he thinks she’s either lying or useless. When Raylan goes to visit Art, Art does a good job of reminding him that he never would have approved of using Ava to weed out Boyd, and that Raylan can either leave now or end up dead. It’s hard to tell whether or not this is prophetic, but a lot of things in this episode give you the feeling that Raylan isn’t long for this world.
Dewey spent his whole life trying to impress Boyd, and, as it turns out, he died that way, too. He’s tired of being a punching bag and is eager to go back to the “good old days” when he didn’t have to try so hard to make something of himself, but Boyd has run out of time and patience. After gently insisting that the good days are gone forever, Boyd asks Dewey to look at an old portrait of his family and then shoots him in the head, leaving Carl to clean up the mess.
Dewey’s untrustworthiness was his downfall, but with the way he hovers over her sleeping body it seems like Boyd isn’t sure he can trust Ava either. Does he know that she’s helping Raylan? Is he going to kill her, too?
