New Show Recap: “Justified,” Episode 4.07, “Money Trap”

During this episode, Raylan spends the evening chasing – and being chased – by an old nemesis and Boyd finds a Harlan County swingers party to be revealing in more ways than one. Ready? Let’s jump in!

Some TV shows may play fast and loose with time by jumping forward an entire year in the span of a week (*cough*DowntonAbbey*cough*) but here in the south, y’all, time moves a bit slower and thus we find out that a mere six days have passed since the first episode of this season of Justified. And how do we know that? Well first of all there’s this helpful little scrawl at the bottom of the screen that says “6 days ago” and then we watch as Raylan passes Jody, the bail jumper he locked in the trunk of his car, off to Sharon, the sexy bounty hunter who called up Raylan asking for help. Jody is not quite out of options, though. It turns out that a blown-out tire on Sharon’s van was the work of a friend of Jody’s and before you can say, “this looks suspicious,” Jody has kicked the doors of the van open, killed Sharon’s partner, stolen that guy’s weapon and gunned down Sharon herself before she can get her pants zipped back up after taking a pee in the woods.

Jumping back over those six days to the present time, Raylan is unhappy with the FBI files that were turned over by the now absent (and dead) Agent Barkley. Art’s unhelpful advice is for Raylan to make a trip to prison and pay a visit to his father, Arlo. Although not happy about it, Raylan is on his way there when he gets a phone call from a sheriff’s deputy who lets him know that Sharon’s van, containing her body and that of her partner, has been found and that they’ve been dead about six days. Raylan tells the deputy about Jody and his girlfriend Katrina, but when he meets law enforcement personnel at Katrina’s home, they find her gone and a house sitter there instead, a pretty young woman named Jackie Nevada. When Raylan offers to drive her home, we hear her life story and the two of them trade witty one-liners until she goes inside her apartment alone and finds Jody waiting for her. Driving away, Raylan notices a personalized license plate he saw outside Katrina’s house (because the car belongs to Jody’s friend Kenneth, who helped him get away from Sharon the bounty hunter), busts into Jackie’s apartment and, after Jody jumps out of a second-story window and lands on Kenneth’s car, rescues her. For reasons I still don’t understand (except that she and Raylan have good chemistry and the one-liners are funny), Raylan takes Jackie under his protective wing and she ends up riding shotgun with him for the rest of the night.

Jody’s story, predictably, does not have a happy ending. Raylan remembers that he’d told Sharon about the bar where he lived within Jody’s hearing and when he stops by there, sure enough, the criminal is waiting for him. Since Jody is in bad shape already from being shot and getting injured from his two-story hard landing on the roof of a car, the ensuing quick draw is all Raylan. No more Jody.

Raylan finally gets Jackie to the hotel where she’s being put up for the night, where he tells her that he knows she’s got Jody’s stolen money in the bag she’s been carrying around and that he can either take it from her and turn it in as the illegal funds it is or she can give it to Katrina and her children, where it will actually do some good. Raylan finally calls Art to check in and is told again to go to the prison to see Arlo. Raylan promises to do so the next morning, and says he’ll be spending the night on the couch in the hotel room. Since Jackie is getting undressed for the shower right in front of him, I have my doubts about the couch and/or the sleeping part of that statement but hey, I guess it could happen. (No, it couldn’t.)

He does finally make it to prison, though, where he and Arlo have another of their tender father-son chats that ends with Arlo refusing to say much more than “Eat shit.” And seriously, has there been another character since The Wire‘s Clay Davis who can make music out of that word the way Arlo can? I don’t think so.

Boyd and Ava, meanwhile, are finding out that more than just (hopefully protected) group sex happens at swingers parties. Napier isn’t happy to see either one of them but a few of the power brokers of the county pull Boyd aside for a confab while Napier’s wife makes a show of giving Ava a tour of the house and blathering on about women having all the power and “no means no.” Since Ava is assaulted a short while later by one of the party’s guests, I’m not sure I’d listen to anything Mrs. Napier has to say, but that’s just me. Boyd takes Ava home and returns for a private chat with Harlan County’s finest citizens, where he’s told they allowed him to be invited so they could ask him to kill a local mine owner who isn’t cooperating with their plan to create environmental havoc and then rake in money by the millions from the federal government for the clean up. When Boyd doesn’t jump at the chance to commit murder for hire, they slap him down in his proper place: everything he has, they tell him, he has because they allow it. The implication, and the unstated threat, is that they could squash him like a bug anytime they want. Boyd has more than a touch of pride and I’m going to guess those gentlemen will come to regret their poor choice of words.

Boyd is going to have a problem closer to home to sort out first, though. Johnny finds out from Teri that it was Colton who beat her up, not the poor schmuck she sent them after. She also tells him that Colton was asking about Ellen May before he started hitting her, which makes Johnny immediately suspicious since she’s supposed to be dead. Are there odds in Vegas on who kills Johnny? One thing is clear, whether it’s Colton or Boyd, Johnny is digging his own grave.

And I quote, “There he is, looking like ten pounds of shit in a five pound bag.”