JUSTIFIED SEASON 2 Blu-Ray Review

The last couple of months have been kind of an accidental effort to reassess some movies and TV shows that I might not have had time for in the past--either I encountered them at the wrong time in my life or they were just as terrible as I remembered, I kept coming back to some of these old things in an attempt to get at getting over myself and "discovering" something everyone else had already found.

For instance, the first season of the FX crime drama Justified did almost nothing for me with its initial batch of episodes. Looking back, it was around the fourth episode that I bailed on U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant) and his return to his home in Easter Kentucky mining country. The show was still trying to find its footing and as a result the overarching stories took a backseat to "quirky" criminals on the lam that Raylan was tasked to bring in and I never felt like the grim TV reality of the setting really meshed with a "crook of the week" format. It gave the show a sense of aimlessness, and I wondered why I should spend time watching another police drama when I'm not interested in the half-dozen others populating the airwaves.

I'm happy to have learned in this second season that I was wrong about Justified, or at least, what I experienced initially wasn't what the show was all about. First off, the structure of the series wasn't really married to the "crook of the week" format, instead kind of winding its way through multiple storylines mainly dealing with Raylan's fraying relationship with his Marshal's post, his reignited relationship with his ex-wife, Winona (Natalie Zea), tussling with a mountain country clan of pot dealers and murderers headed by the alternately sweet and ruthless Mags Bennett (Margo Martindale), and most importantly, his conflicted relationship with his lifelong friend turned criminal turned repentant sinner, Boyd Crowder (Walter Goggins).

You see, at the heart of the series, Justified in its second season is about its characters jumping back and forth across not only the lines of the law but across fundamental lines of morality. Raylan is half-convinced most of the time that he's no better that the wily Boyd (and why he's suspicious of that character's conversion) in part because he comes from stock no better than the Crowder dynasty of con men, thieves, and killers, and Raylan's tense encounters with his own father, make up some of the most watchable elements of the season.

The Bennett clan is pretty much everything that Raylan wants to escape, rooted to the community, known outlaws still beloved by the locals, and vicious killers meting out their own brand of "justice" as it suits them. Ms. Martindale's country accent isn't really fooling anyone (the way she rolls her vowels is a little stronger than anyone I've ever encountered) but damn if she isn't a menacing presence as Mags, who wants nothing more than to find a legitimate revenue stream for herself and her sons, even if it means butchering her way through the locals to do so. This pits her and her clan against the local mining company looking to snatch up leases with Raylan (and gradually Boyd) in the middle.

Another wonderful thing about the series which I didn't pick up on during my first foray was the way that many if not all of the characters' sharp edges grind up against one another: if there are two characters in a scene, chances are they have some kind of baggage and very little of it's good, and maybe the most functional relationship in the entire series is between Boyd and Ava (Joelle Carter), the woman who shot his abusive brother at the beginning of the first season. What this typically means is that nearly every scene is crackling with tension, every relationship bears watching because the writers have thoroughly loaded each with emotional dynamite.

So this was a case of being happy to re-explore something that held nothing for me the first time around. I'd even go so far as to say I'm looking forward to the third season. And based on the amount of damage and blood spilled by the end of this season, it's hard not to.

Justified Season 2 is available on DVD and Blu-ray now. Season 3 begins on FX January 17th.