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Justified: City Primeval Recap: Outfoxed, Again

Season 1 Episode 6 Editor’s Rating2 stars **

Photo: Chuck Hodes/FX/Photographer: Chuck Hodes It’s important to remember that Icarus also flew, but, man! “Adios” is a crash down to earth after the miniseries highlight of “You Good?,” isn’t it?

“You Good?” was the best episode of Justified: City Primeval so far, a showcase for Aunjanue Ellis and Timothy Olyphant’s chemistry; a smart, sexy hour that let them jab at each other’s outer shells; and a long-awaited explanation for why Sweety bothered continuing to spend time with Clement. “Adios” veers away from those elements, and I get it: Episodes of TV cannot be exactly alike. But this installment spent too much time with the series’ weakest characters (the Detroit Police Department) and lacked the sense of urgency I would assume we should be leaning into with only three episodes of this miniseries left.

I’ll be blunt: I simply do not understand anything about how the DPD functions, and I can’t figure out if how bad its employees seemingly are at their jobs is a flaw in the series’ writing or a purposeful persion from the DPD to keep Raylan off its trail. “Adios” certainly leans toward the latter with Clement apparently knowing more about the planned sting than he should and the guy who seemed like Raylan’s primary ally, Detective Wendell, basically telling our favorite deputy U.S. Marshal to shut up once Raylan starts hinting at malfeasance. And we do get confirmation that the DPD had entries in Judge Guy’s little book, having paid off the judge and other members of the city’s criminal-justice structure to keep its trigger-happy cops out of prison. I am grateful for the specifics that “Adios” lays out and for Judge Guy’s earlier threats to have had real weight behind them. But this episode is simultaneously too convoluted and too vague for its own good, what with Carolyn’s scheme, Lonny’s intrusion, Sweety’s change of heart, and whatever might be going down between Clement and a potential secret ally in the DPD.

And look — where are the Albanians? It’s been two days! How have they not tracked down Clement yet? I know I keep harping on this, but City Primeval suggested that the Albanians run Detroit’s criminal underworld and then they just evaporated off the map. Details like their absence and the DPD’s incompetence are increasingly taking me out of the series because I don’t think the larger world-building has been that effective, and we’ve seen so little of Detroit — pretty much just the insides of Sweety’s, Del’s penthouse, the casino where Sandy works, and the DPD station — that when an established place or character is removed from the rotation, it’s that much more noticeable. With that, RIP to Sweety, who should have turned in Clement and his gun and made a deal for his own protection when he could. “Sweety used to be something,” the man says with no small amount of regret when thinking about how connected and respected he used to be, and Vondie Curtis-Hall’s work building his character’s melancholy and ambition has been uniformly solid. His filmography is lengthy and great, and I’d encourage you to check out his prior work (in particular the groundbreaking Chicago Hope, the nightmarish horror film The Night House, and Shakespeare adaptations like Cymbeline and Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet) now that his time on City Primeval is over.

Sweety’s death and the explosion of his bar, both caused by Clement, are the last major events of this episode, so let’s explain how we got there. Raylan (in a tank top — we are blessed) wakes up to Carolyn at his hotel-room door, and the two of them dance a bit around the idea of trust. “Do you still aspire to see how Judge Guy’s book puts the pieces together?” she says and then tells Raylan about the 1963 lunch-counter sit-ins in the South and what happened to the racism-fighting activists who were arrested, beaten, and held without trial for weeks afterward. The sit-ins were illegal because of segregation laws, but they were just, Carolyn says, and she wants to use the book in a similar fashion. Later on, when Raylan proposes a sting operation to Maureen (who somehow immediately knows that he’s sleeping with Carolyn; I don’t buy that Maureen’s intuitive abilities are that strong, but sure), he’s acting on information Carolyn gave him. She did see her friend turned rival Diane’s name in Judge Guy’s book and knows that the pair took bribes from the DPD to cover up unwarranted killings of innocent people. And if bringing down Diane is a little bit of justice and helps eliminate the competition for Judge Guy’s seat, that’s a real two-birds, one-stone situation.

While the cops and prosecutor’s office are trying to put together one way to nab Clement, Burt Dickey works on another. The ex-con and art collector is pissed about Clement “misappropriating under very upsetting circumstances” his Stanley Garlick, and he hires an old employee, Lonny (Kevin Anderson), to get the artwork back by any means necessary. In other words, kill Clement if you have to —and when Lonny ends up at Sweety’s, the former Wrecking Crew member essentially says the same thing. Unaware that Diane’s call for a meeting to exchange $30,000 in cash for her page in Judge Guy’s book is part of the DPD’s intended sting to capture Sweety and Clement, Sweety tells Lonny to be at the park for the drop and persuades Clement to go alone. Everything seems to be set: Carolyn has revealed Diane’s dirtiness, Sweety is going to eliminate Clement and get out from under all his threats, and the DPD is going to finally nab who killed Judge Guy and Rose. And then, well, everything goes to shit. Clement doesn’t have a gun or the book on him, and there’s nothing to hold him on. Lonny escapes the sting but goes back to Sweety’s and gets himself shot in the head by Clement. And with the knowledge that Clement has once again gotten away scot-free, Raylan wonders if he’s being undermined or thwarted by the very task-force members with whom he’s supposed to be aligned.

So who is at fault? Maureen is the one who planned the sting at the park, and she kept it to herself, Raylan, Wendell, Norbert, and a few uniformed cops. She’s also the one who ordered the advance on Clement and Diane, though Clement hadn’t yet physically shown the book to her; was that a deliberate choice? Carolyn acts surprised when Raylan tells her that the sting failed, but is there some world in which she felt a last gasp of responsibility to her client and called him to tell him about the setup? Or are we going to end up in a Departed-style scenario in which a cop whom we haven’t paid much attention to up until now ends up being in cahoots with Clement? I suppose all options are possible. But what feels more probable to me is that Carolyn will mourn Sweety — and then further break bad because of his death — and that Raylan and Clement will have that “little shoot-out” the Oklahoma Wildman is jonesing for. “He wants you to go after him. He gets off on it,” Maureen warns Raylan. What she doesn’t know that we do, though, is that the same description applies to Raylan, too.

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• Original-Justified-cast-member-cameo count: I’m so unhappy looking at this bullet point and telling you all that the answer here is still zero.

• Where is the DPD’s Norbert Bryl, the guy who mouthed off to Toma with Clement’s name? Last week, the DPD chief mentioned he’s “on ice” (I guess because of how badly the Judge Guy investigation is going and because that Albanian ended up dead at Tina’s apartment?), which is why Maureen is put in charge of the investigation. But Maureen mentions Bryl as a member of the sting team alongside herself, Wendell, and Raylan, so he did have the information about what was going down in the park and could have, maybe, leaked it to Clement in the ultimate twist? Something to consider.

• Once the TV industry decides on that award for Olyphant’s line reading of “So don’t tell everyone at school?” in “You Good?,” it should also give one to whoever is doing Raylan’s “I woke up like this” hair. That tousled salt-and-pepper look is nice.

• Did Clement steal “chicken fat” as an insult from Sweety, who gets in that final dig of “your honky, chicken-fat, cover-song bullshit” before being killed?

• Some real Elmore Leonard–style lines in this episode, in particular Sweety’s “Gonna have to engage in shit I ain’t usually inclined toward” and Raylan’s musing of “There was something fishy about this particular kerfuffle, and I’m struggling some, figuring out what it was … Some combination of this dead judge and this alleged book and this particular shit bird is maybe making people act in ways they otherwise wouldn’t.”

• Raylan wanting ice cream after the sting? Relatable. Our guy loves his sweets!

• Trennell moved Clement’s gun from Sweety’s jukebox, right? Carolyn had asked him to get his hands on it in “You Good?,” and everyone is keeping so much information from one another that I’m assuming Carolyn didn’t follow up with Trennell to tell him about her plan to capture Clement in that planned sting with Diane. No guarantee that Trennell, if he took the gun from the jukebox, would put it back, but its removal certainly put Sweety at a disadvantage in his final moments.

• How do we feel about the dynamic of Maureen and Raylan, two white cops, going after Diane and Judge Guy, two Black members of the legal system, for taking bribes from … other cops? I can appreciate that City Primeval has been trying to use the Detroit setting to make some points about race and criminal justice, and maybe the miniseries will end up going back to what Judge Guy said in the premiere about having to do all kinds of things to survive in a “racist-ass city in a racist-ass system.” In that scene between Maureen, Raylan, and Diane, though, the optics felt off.

• Is Sandy finally moving against Clement by trying to sell that damn painting? Good for you, ma’am! It took long enough.

• I’m going to assume that Clement’s mocking line to Raylan in the park — “Goddamn, Marshal, people are gonna think we’re in love” — was a nod to Avery Markham’s similar sneer in the season-six episode “Alive Day,” when he said of Raylan coming by his pizza place to question him again, “People will say we’re in love.” Markham’s line was so good because it kept up the original Justified theme of Raylan getting to know his enemies so intimately that their relationship became a kind of affection, and, of course, the best example of that was Raylan’s bond with the one and only Boyd Crowder. As Black Pike’s Carol Johnson said of how the two used to dig coal together in the season-two episode “Save My Love,” “My, sounds like a love story.” Be still, my heart, etc., etc.

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