In the eight episodes of Justified: City Primeval, FX’s limited series that revitalizes their classic Peak TV crime-drama Justified, a vivid web of relationships and personal history emerges, weaving the common thread of Clement Mansell’s chaotic, brutal crimes.
Every relationship – aging lawyer Raylan Givens and young criminal in his prime Clem; Clem and his regretful girlfriend Sandy Stanton; Clem and his former accomplice Sweety Sweeton; Sweety and his beloved surrogate daughter Carolyn Wilder; Brilliant attorneys Carolyn and Raylan shed light on different facets of the characters while infusing the series with an air of dramatic, often tragic, inevitability.
(Warning: Spoilers ahead of Justified: City Primeval.)
Of course, Raylan has to kill Clem; Of course, Clem is obsessed with reminding Carolyn (Aunjanue Ellis) that he is both her client and a sociopath who can reach out to her at work or at home; Of course, he’s the one who kills Carolyn’s father figure Sweety (Vondie Curtis Hall). As showrunner Michael Dinner puts it in an interview with The Daily Beast’s Obsessed, “These characters are on a collision course and there’s a sense that greater forces are at work. Wherever Elmore Leonard’s stories take place, the characters face a larger backdrop, an existential crisis.”
In an in-depth chat, Dinner shared his insight into the series’ characters and how their relationships develop as Raylan (Timothy Olyphant) and Clem (Boyd Holbrook) approach their final confrontation. And, of course, he also addressed the adorable elephant in the room: the tantalizing potential for a longer-term return for Walton Goggins as Raylan’s nemesis/spiritual brother, Boyd Crowder. There’s no guarantee viewers will hear her again about digging coal together, but we dare to dream.
Timothy Olyphant as Raylan Givens
Chuck Hodes/FX
Retired Raylan Givens?
While Justified: City Primeval’s Raylan Givens are still cool as a cucumber (for the most part), he’s also past his prime and far more aware of his own mortality than he was in the original Justified series. His victim in the eight-episode cat-and-mouse game, Clement Mansell, is smart enough to recognize and exploit Raylan’s aging veteran status at the end of the second episode, taunting him about how easy it is to pass on to Raylan’s daughter Willa to get close, but Clem can’t maintain the focus he needs to pull off his many, varied scams.
Dinner is philosophical about Clem’s summary execution in Carolyn’s kitchen during the season finale, noting, “We threaded the needle a little bit – in a way it’s a mistake, he reached for the demo tape that meant so much to him, but it. ‘ was a fitting ending to our goal.’ It’s not surprising that Raylan is so decisive; At this point in his career, he wouldn’t want to prolong a confrontation with an unpredictable connoisseur of violence. The likelihood of something going wrong increases with every moment he doesn’t shoot Clem. Also, he can’t take the fact that Carolyn is in danger, and in the back of his mind, Raylan has the reality that “this guy “Thanks to Carolyn’s skills as a lawyer, he’s already gotten away with it once and caused even more chaos in the process.”
Seemingly content with retirement—we see Raylan repainting his little seaside house and fishing with Willa in the closing moments of the finale—Raylan is still Raylan in the end. The moral compass that was tested and even occasionally wavered in the original series of Justified and Justified: City Primeval still points to its true north. He could have ended his experience with Mansell a little more simply and cleanly had he left him alone and in the dark in the storage unit where the Albanian mob had left him to die, but “he couldn’t live with Mansell being locked up. ‘ on this wall. The mafia boss says someone will open it years from now after wondering where he’s gone, but that’s not the way someone ends up according to Raylan’s code. His drive to face Clem fair and square , prepares for their final, far riskier confrontation.
A tragic opera set in Motown
The richest and most harrowing set of relationships in Justified: City Primeval is the triad, made up of the happily violent Clement Mansell, his no-nonsense attorney Carolyn Wilder, and her father figure, the talented and caring Marcus “Sweety” Sweeton.
Winter is particularly proud of the way viewers gradually learn how deep the bonds and history are between these three characters, pointing out that the depth of Carolyn and Sweety’s relationship is evident from their first interaction is obvious on the screen. “We don’t invite it in advance,” he says. “We’re in the seventh episode when we see this flashback of who Sweety was and how he cared for this girl” who needed a loving and reliable adult in his life.
The irony of Carolyn becoming such an impressive and talented lawyer in adulthood is that Sweety’s far less wholesome partnership with Clem results in her no longer being able to represent the Oklahoma Wildman in order to protect Sweety. The relationship between Clem and Sweety is a funny mirror of the relationship between Carolyn and Sweety: Clem craves the approval and encouragement that Sweety gives Carolyn as easily as breathing, but the way Clem enjoys murder makes it real Fatherhood impossible. And in the pitch-black comedy of Elmore Leonard’s “Detroit,” Clem’s inept musical ambitions are almost as bad as the unconscionable trail of despair and grief he leaves behind.
Most of the time, when Mansell is alone, he plays a demo – at least on a cassette – in which he sings, very amateurishly, the White Stripes’ contemporary classic “Seven Nation Army.” The idea came from conversations between Dinner and showrunner Dave Andron about how “it would be cool to have something that ties these two characters together in addition to their criminal partnership.”
In Leonard’s novel, Sweety “was a minor character. Here he is, so to speak, the “face of Detroit” in the mold of “James Jamerson, the 1960s bassist who played all the Motown sessions” as a member of the label’s legendary house band, The Funk Brothers. After returning to Detroit, Mansell is “excited for Sweety to hear his demos,” but the moment of truth comes late in the game. Desperate to get Clem out of his life, Sweety tells him, “Stop playing this damn cover shit on me. “You’re not the real deal,’ which is the worst thing he could have said to Mansell.” Looking back on their arc, Dinner comments on the emotional intensity of this relationship and its end, where “this sociopath pulls the trigger on his surrogate father.” [is] Greek tragedy.”
As for what’s wrong with Clem’s cover of “Seven Nation Army,” Dinner reveals that the key to making this irresistibly pulsating song dull was to slow down the instrumental track ever so slightly so that “you can hear it with just one ear and with the head listens”. inclined and thought it wasn’t so terrible, but bad enough to be bad.” Mansell “has a lot of bravery, but he’s not very good.”
Ultimately, Clem’s fate as the business custodian of Raylan’s gun was preordained, but dragging Sweety into his crazy blackmail schemes, then murdering him, and then daring to endanger Carolyn by stalking her home sealed the ultimate fate.
Aunjanue Ellis and Timothy Olyphant
Chuck Hodes/FX
Carolyn Wilder, finally on her own terms
Carolyn’s home itself is almost a character in the series, a stand-in for her former husband Jamal (Amin Joseph), who is the epitome of the charming man that no self-respecting person should be with. Not unlike Karen Sisco, who played Jennifer Lopez so memorably in the objectively perfect film adaptation of Out of Sight, Carolyn was one of her story’s highly competent professional women with terrible taste in men. Dinner is quick to point out that since Carolyn and Jamal met so young, all the heartache he’s causing her isn’t the result of “a relationship that’s gone awry, but rather the result of the world being seen as.” “The whole thing is such a nightmare.” and Jamal’s failure to find his way around.
The moment she reveals to Raylan how much she despises her house and realizes that the only thing that’s really hers is the luxurious bathtub still blows Dinner away. “It was Jamal’s vision and it’s so cold! That sums up the relationship she had with him, and it’s a constant reminder of “that guy” and how much their relationship has cost her over the years. It takes a lot to take care of Jamal and Sweety, but by the end of the series, Carolyn has played the game more skillfully than Sweety could manage. She climbs onto the bench and feels so freed from the worries of the past that she can send Raylan a flirty message with a congratulatory bottle of top-shelf bourbon.
The surprising Sandy Stanton
As for Sandy, Justified: City Primeval’s other lead, if Clem had had just a little more impulse control, he might have escaped Death By Marshal and ended up on a Caribbean beach with her. Sandy’s diligent work before Clem’s return to Detroit – tracking down and securing a seemingly lucrative target, Skender, who was the nephew of the local Albanian mafia boss – brought her murderous friend a potentially huge sum, but he screwed up and gave in instead to the road rage and the senseless murder of Judge Alvin Guy and his clerk.
The morning after the robbery that wasn’t, Sandy must pick up the pieces, contact Raylan and Detroit homicide detective Robinson, and then grapple with the question of whether or not to dispose of Clem’s gun in the river. It’s not exactly the duo’s most promising debut, and it doesn’t get any better from there. As for why Sandy continues to be involved with Clem, the lady herself put it in a nutshell: “He’s fun.”
Reflecting on Sandy, Dinner remarked, “In some ways, she may be the greatest survivor of them all. [Unlike Sweety] She actually gets out of Dodge, and maybe it takes Raylan to give her the little push, but she’s not a shy violet. We always joked that we should end up seeing Sandy somewhere on the beach working on the next marker.”
Boyd Crowder (and beyond?)
After nearly eight full episodes full of “One Last Job” vibes and inevitability, the brief, tantalizing return of Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins) at the end of the series finale could have been a tired cliché. Instead, it’s a delicious, funny thrill ride that leaves the door ever so slightly open for a final act between Justified’s two great leads.
Dinner gives full credit to his showrunner and creative partner Dave Andron. “Dave always had an instinct to address the issue because it’s the elephant in the room. The viewers’ knee-jerk reaction would be to ask, ‘Where’s Boyd?’ He said if we had any guts, we would bring Boyd back, not in a cheap way at the beginning or bring him into the main story, but right at the end.”
After finding a logical and satisfying way for Boyd to stage a clever prison break coda in the finale, and subsequently learning that Goggins was available to film, they moved forward. “We knew from the start that we wanted to do this and we were very happy with it. And most importantly, we didn’t do it because we wanted to say, “Oh, we have to have another year of Justified.” We did it because we wanted to have a good time and see Boyd again.”
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