TV #38 of 2021:

Justified, season 4

As usual, I am torn on how I feel about this show. On the one hand, the fourth season has a more relaxed tone that I personally think is a better fit for its particular strengths than the urgent plotting of previous years. The Drew Thompson case carries the majority of the forward momentum, but outside the finale it avoids the sort of deep existential danger that Raylan’s often found himself enmeshed in. The stakes are basically just that some outlaw types might get rich by killing another (potentially reformed) one, and although our protagonist and his fellow marshals aim to prevent that by finding and protecting their fugitive, the prospect of failure is not a threat with much bite to it. Perhaps paradoxically, that puncturing of tension ends up playing great to the drawling repartee that this series does so well, and leaves me pretty charitable to the less ambitious structure. I’ve complained before about Justified scenes that treat armed standoffs as a regular occurrence everyone can expect to survive, but here the weapons largely stay holstered — and so it means more when they do eventually come out.

Also, credit where credit’s due: the writers have finally decided to cut Boyd’s ties with his problematic past. We’re given almost no dialogue about his white supremacist days or shots of his Nazi tattoos, and his stint as a preacher isn’t even mentioned when he’s confronting the leader of a new revivalist church in town. When these topics do arise, they’re framed as mere poses he’s tried on, which is an idea that prior scripts have never been willing to wholly endorse. Severing this figure from his history to retcon him as merely one of Harlan’s conniving mobsters undercuts the immersiveness of the serialized drama and begs for deeper interrogation, but I’d say it’s the only real option for rehabilitating the character at this point. And it lets him be fun in a way that he really couldn’t with that baggage hanging over him, so since he appears to be sticking around as a warped reflection of the deputy lead — complete with his own veteran sidekick counterpoint to Tim for a while! — this is generally a development that I welcome.

And then… There’s the other hand. There’s the fact that until Limehouse and his crew turn back up near the end of this run, I can count just four black people besides the under-utilized Rachel, each killed gruesomely within an episode of their introduction. There’s the heavy — albeit lowered — casualty rate in general. There’s the fact that Givens and his posse are horribly abusive of their law enforcement power, ignoring all jurisdiction or need for a warrant and resorting to cruel violence to get suspects to talk. There’s the casual mention of rape and pedophilia as though those are punchlines and not bloodcurdling atrocities. In short, Justified still traffics in some truly awful themes and implications, which I object to not simply on principle, but as ongoing flaws that continue to undermine the effectiveness of the work.

(You could build an interesting story around the premise that the cops are just a gang with badges, fundamentally no different than the criminal forces they’re up against! But that’s not what’s happening. Instead Raylan is firmly positioned as hero and not antihero, with audiences encouraged to accept all the police brutality so long as it’s administered by a handsome devil with a ready quip.)

I honestly don’t know how to balance those elements, or whether this string of episodes deserves a 3-star ‘good’ rating or a 4-star ‘very good.’ I suppose I’ll lean towards the latter, since it’s such an improvement upon the past couple outings, but this program seems like it’s perpetually on the verge of losing me as an invested viewer.

★★★★☆

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