4.12 Justified "Peace of Mind"

[AntiArbitrator]

[AntiArbitrator]

Boyd Crowder continued his suave dialogue with Mr. Augustine.

Mr. Augustine to Boyd: I'm gonna need Google translate on my phone if I'm gonna keep talking to you.

Limehouse is a character with an interesting and unorthodox moral code. He seems to have sympathy for ladies in distress.

Colton!

The police seem confused why Drew is helping Ellen Mae. Why can't they accept that he cares about her?

Raylan had the right idea when he told Art to suspend him closer to the baby's due date and tack some days onto it. Mr. Augustine's plan to threaten Raylan's family will probably backfire. Those folks in Harlan county get riled up when anyone messes with their family.

I enjoyed this episode and I am looking forward to the next one.

[Mistermoonlight]

Another wonderful episode. I think all of us would be lucky to have a boss like Art Mullen. The fact that he's just two steps away from retirement gives him a laissez faire attitude towards dealing with Raylan, whom he loves like a son, but halfway expects to get shot in the line of duty.

“Suspendees don’t get to choose when they’re suspended, because that’s called a vacation."
--Art to Raylan

I found a great discussion of the episode on Slate. Here's the url for the whole thing: www.slate.com/articles/arts/tv_club/features/2013/justfied_season_4/week_12/justified_peace_of_mind_recap_who_will_get_to_ellen_may_first.html


"Todd VanDerWerff: I liked it a lot. In particular, I liked that it slowed down a bit from the last handful of episodes. Yes, there's a lot of incident packed into it, but it's not especially busy all the same. It's often a quiet episode, often a mournful episode, and its most significant death happens very quickly and is treated as fundamentally tragic, something I wasn't sure the episode would earn but was pleased to see it did. It also returns to the series' religious roots, grounding everything in the Christianity that informs so much of what the characters do (or don't do).

Larimore: I was glad that Ava had her moment of truth with Ellen May—and that it turned out the way it did—and that we got to see the inevitable showdown between Tim and Colton Rhodes. I wouldn't have predicted that they would have been tied together like that, or that it would have happened at the remains of the Last Chance Holiness Church, but it worked well. Ava had a choice and made the right one. Tim didn't have a choice—Colton having decided on suicide by cop—but you could see how it tore him up, however jaded you might expect a war veteran and law-enforcement officer to be. I had conflicted feelings about Colton all season, but it was, as you say, mournful to watch him go out like that. Speaking of faith, when Ava confronted Ellen May at the church, she says “It wasn’t God that let you out of that room up in Noble’s, or pulled you out of Colt’s car, or put this gun in my hand. That was people making choices all down the line.” And later, when Ava is chalking up their recent bad turn to fate, Boyd says, “I don’t believe in fate, I can’t believe in fate, not anymore. I believe you dictate your river of fate through your own actions.” An interesting take on fate vs. faith, which Ava seems to think are two different things but which Boyd treats as one and the same.

VanDerWerff: Justified is maybe the great drama the most influenced by Christianity since The Sopranos (which occasionally seemed to be the weirdest recruitment pamphlet for the Catholic Church ever conceived of). I like that it's also deeply skeptical of that Christianity. It's able to talk in terms of things like forgiveness and redemption and sin quite seriously, and it's able to understand why someone like Ellen May would find such an idea reassuring and, indeed, beautiful. But it's also smart enough to understand that those things have the most appeal for someone who sees them as their only way out. Ava's view of the situation is much closer to my own, but by even taking these ideas seriously, Justified gives itself a sort of spiritual earthiness. What happens in the church feels like fate. The question is whether that's God drawing people together, or simply inevitable because these people are predictable beasts, who will make certain choices 99 times out of 100. The show ultimately sides more with Ava, I think, but by even granting Ellen May a voice, it digs deep into a theme that this season has built all along: It doesn't have to be this way. There's always another choice. (And, also, Ellen May most likely saves her life by making Ava waver just long enough.)