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Justified: City Primeval Recap: A Shooting Match

Season 1 Episode 7 Editor’s Rating3 stars ***

Photo: FX Aw, Raylan. This man cannot catch a break! Maureen, the person he trusted most in the Detroit Police Department and the one who welcomed Raylan and Willa into her home, betrays him. (I knew it!) Carolyn, the lover he’s gotten rapidly close to, sets him up to be involved in a situation that goes against his moral code. Clement is still a hair-triggered asshole and his body count is getting higher, and now the weapon Raylan knows Clement used for a bunch of murders has been thrown over a bridge. Raylan has a couple allies left — Bryl, unexpectedly; Sandy, begrudgingly — but “The Smoking Gun” effectively did what penultimate episodes should do, which is create a series of seemingly impossible obstacles for our protagonist to work through. How’s Raylan going to get out of this one? I’m actually curious to find out!

There are still many logic gaps in “The Smoking Gun,” as in preceding episode “Adios,” and overall, Justified: City Primeval has been really inconsistent in terms of what its characters prioritize, what they’re trying to protect, and what they want to achieve. I’ll elaborate on this in a later bullet point, but I’m thinking about the judge’s book and how important it was in earlier episodes compared to how incurious people seem to be about it now. Clement kills Sweety and holds onto it, but did he have other plans on who to blackmail from it? We don’t find out because Sandy takes it with her and eventually gives it to Raylan, but I guess Sandy never looked through it, because she doesn’t tell Raylan about any other names in it. Maureen plans on sending an innocent guy to jail with Clement’s gun, but shouldn’t she want to find the book, and therefore shouldn’t she want to find Clement? Last week, I wondered if the Detroit Police Department are purposely bad at their jobs, and now I’m wondering if Clement, Sandy, and even Sweety, to a certain extent, were bad criminals, too. They’re just not very good at this, and I feel as befuddled as Raylan in that DPD hallway when he realized Maureen double-crossed him. Raylan, if you brought me a bouquet of flowers, I would accept them! Two-tone cabbage roses are very nice, if you are considering your options!

Still, “The Smoking Gun” is a better episode than “Adios.” It’s a more tightly paced and comprehensively plotted installment that brings the Albanians back into the mix and faces Raylan and Clement off against each other in what is surely a dress rehearsal for a bigger showdown to come in next week’s finale. Before this episode’s third-act meeting at the Radisson’s surprisingly nice hotel bar, Raylan and Clement each spend most of “The Smoking Gun” dealing with the fallout of Clement murdering Sweety and torching his place. Let’s start with Raylan, who meets up with the devastated Carolyn and then visits Trennell, who hands over Clement’s gun — yes, he had moved it from behind the jukebox at Carolyn’s request, and yes, he still has it. Raylan, “sure” that he can use the gun to nail Clement, takes it to Maureen, who is still in charge of the investigation into Judge Guy and Rose’s murders (although Bryl is back, initially mean-mugging Raylan from his desk near Maureen’s). Maureen asks for a day to run the gun through ballistics, which gives Raylan time to visit Sandy and tell her about both Skender’s ruined leg and his possession of Clement’s gun (the one she was supposed to have gotten rid of). “I feel like I’m in big trouble” — yes, Sandy, that is correct.

Meanwhile, Clement is pissed about Sandy selling his painting and about her suggestion that they leave Detroit. But he evades Raylan, who is coming to visit Sandy at Del’s apartment, because for some reason this building still is not being surveilled, although it’s pretty damn clear who burned down Sweety’s place and who that man is dating and where they are living! I can understand that Maureen is dirty, but I don’t understand why Raylan couldn’t throw some of his U.S. marshal weight around to get some squad cars assigned to obvious places where Clement would go — like Carolyn’s house, which Raylan had been protecting, but now no one is because this show loves to make me irritated. Clement eats Carolyn’s food, threatens her, and chokes her after she tries to quit as his lawyer, and his composed “I can come back anytime I want” is a legitimately horrifying line read from Boyd Holbrook. Later, Clement’s childish glee when Sandy says she wants to hear him sing is a solid tonal swing; City Primeval never really builds Clement’s obsession with Jack White into more than a joke, but some of the character’s most revealing moments have been when the show indulges his music-related narcissism.

Clement appears to get the upper hand when Maureen throws Raylan under the bus, arresting Afghan vet Darryl Woods for Judge Guy and Rose’s murders and claiming that the murder weapon (which we know to be Clement’s gun) was found in Darryl’s things. I wonder if the show will do something else with Maureen recurrently letting Clement slide (remember that she let him walk after the failed sting in the park with the prosecutor Diane). Could they actually be in cahoots? But aside from Maureen, who Raylan intuits must be in Judge Guy’s book, the entire DPD doesn’t seem corrupt. Kudos to Wendell, for looking a little shocked at Maureen’s antics in the interrogation room with Darryl, and Bryl, who we know can be morally shaky but who draws the line at sending an entirely innocent person to prison. “I never sent some poor devil up the river I know didn’t do it just to get a win,” Bryl says as he goes against Maureen to return Clement’s gun to Raylan, and I won’t take back every critical thing I said about this character, but this was a good moment.

In our final minutes, Raylan and Clement’s story lines converge. Del comes home, Clement calls Sandy and says he’s going to torture Del, Sandy gets scared and calls Raylan. Raylan gets Sandy to set up a meeting with Clement, who then kills Del; Raylan tells Carolyn about the meeting, but he doesn’t know that she’s turned to Albanian gangster Toma, Skender’s relative, for help. (I’m assuming Carolyn’s “Okay” to Toma after she got off the phone with Raylan was not under duress.) At the Radisson, Raylan tries to trick Clement into putting his fingerprints on his gun, Clement denies the murders and avoids taking Raylan up on his offer of a vintage Justified shoot-out, and Toma interrupts them both and forcibly takes them on a ride. When Toma says, “Sometimes the old ways are the only ways,” that’s some vigilante shit; when he drops Clement’s gun into the water, that’s the possibility of prosecuting Clement within the rules of law and order getting buried in sand and silt. Raylan looks weird in the backseat of a car, doesn’t he? I sure hope Carolyn knows what she’s doing!

Cat Videos, Mostly

• Original Justified cast-member cameo count: Let me just share how I’m feeling. 😭😭😭😭

• I’m assuming the flashback scene to the origins of Sweety’s bar in 1988 was our last moment with Vondie Curtis-Hall, and it was good. We see that this man was actually once a talented musician, unlike Clement; we see that he actually cared for another person in young Carolyn, unlike Clement. Justified loves a principled criminal, and I do think Sweety was one — at least before he got caught up with the Oklahoma Wildman’s specific brand of roughneck shit.

• “Any guy that works a straight job is a chump” is basically a description of Elmore Leonard’s whole deal, so thank you to Sweety’s random musician friend for that succinctness. Although: Was Sweety a chump, as Carolyn says? I don’t think so, at least not for owning his own bar. He should have taken that deal to snitch on Clement, though, and I think that misstep is what’s making Carolyn so regretful.

• Do I feel a little good about guessing that Maureen was a villain? Yeah! But I don’t exactly track why she didn’t just use Clement’s gun to, you know, actually arrest Clement, instead of framing Darryl, who found Rose’s body in the park. I guess it was easier to round up Darryl than to track down Clement, but doesn’t Clement being out there with the judge’s little book serve as a threat to Maureen that she would want to eliminate? There’s something about her scheming here that I didn’t entirely grasp.

• Speaking of Woods — did we all know that actor was Corey Hendrix, who also plays Gary on The Bear? I did not realize until this episode, and I wish he had more to do! (On both this show and The Bear, actually.)

• “Can I at least delete some pictures first?” Why didn’t Sandy run off with her new cash as soon as she sold that painting instead of coming back home to Clement?! Another “I don’t get it” development for me, but I finally realized that this character, in her most beleaguered, “men suck but they run the world” moments, reminds me of Justified’s Ellen May. Ellen May also drove me up a wall with her decision-making but really burrowed her way into my heart by the end, and while I’m not fully there with Sandy, this episode made me understand her the most.

• Skender playing along with Sandy’s flirting and her attempt to use him as an exit strategy from Clement and Raylan, before dead-ass telling her that she’s “a dead woman,” was great self-care. Good for him.

• “Can you explain what Twitter is?” What a nightmarish question. Rest in peace, Del, your kimono was nice.

• This thing where Clement keeps bringing up different stories about his mother and how she may or may not have died in a tornado or at his hand is clearly meant to be like Heath Ledger’s Joker talking about his scars in The Dark Knight and Anton Chigurh offering his victims a coin toss in No Country for Old Men. However, I might have found Clement’s shifty storytelling a more effective glimpse into his self-mythologizing if we had seen him do it more often. The only other time I can think of was in “Backstabbers,” when Clement spun that tale of being Sandy’s older brother to Skender and the black-and-white flashback felt like something out of Fargo. Same vibe this time around, and I’m not sure we really need a backstory of that kind for the Oklahoma Wildman. If he’s supposed to be this irrepressible force of malevolent id, letting him feel like an orphan of the universe would have been fine.

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