Contributor: Henry T.
Written by Taylor Elmore
Directed by Dean Parisot
Some of the pawns in this dangerous chess game try to make some big moves here. They don’t exactly work out the way anyone would have expected. Those pawns thought they could out-smart the people above them, suffer in their own different ways for it, and show why they’re never getting out from the bottom rung. When it’s in such a small place as Harlan County, everyone seems to have an idea as to what you’re doing. So it’s very difficult to surprise someone like Raylan, especially when he grew up in that area and is so connected to the people he’s interacting with now. That makes someone like the man from Detroit, a person who has no personal ties to anything or anyone in the area, much more dangerous because it feeds into his ruthless nature.
Poor Devil has felt like he’s been slighted while in Boyd’s gang from the beginning. Since the season premiere, he’s been itching to get a bigger piece of the pie and felt as if Boyd was coasting on his own reputation too long. The man from Detroit knows of this from one of his henchmen, and preys on it. He plants the seed in Devil’s mind that he could take down Boyd, but doesn’t elaborate on how. It’s the genius part of his plan. He’s been assigning various low-down characters to do his dirty work for him so that none of it is tangibly connected to himself.
Either they succeed and he is rid of a person who would make it difficult to build his empire in Harlan County, or they fail, at which point he’ll just dispatch someone else for the task. He wins with every outcome. Devil tries to pull something under Boyd’s nose, convincing cousin Johnny to join his little mutiny, but apparently cousin Johnny still values his blood ties to Boyd. Devil pays for it with his life at the hands (and pistol) of Boyd. There was never really any surprise to the outcome — because Devil is just that stupid with his plans — but it does give insight into how frayed loyalties are in the organizations within Harlan County. Boyd doesn’t particularly like having to kill one of his minions (and his killing of Devil almost felt like a mercy death by the end), but it’s just the cost of doing business. He couldn’t just let this little mutiny go unpunished, though. That would definitely have made him look weak.
Boyd and his gang are fueled by their greed in acquiring Mags’ hidden fortune, and we get insight into what that fortune is in this episode. Everyone makes a play for it. Dickie is forced to team up with guard Murphy in an extremely risky escape attempt from prison, with Dewey Crowe tagging along, and their play on the fortune ended with some fairly bad results. Dickie stalls Murphy at a motel while calling in some reinforcements from Limehouse, and Marshal Givens locates them easily when he presses Limehouse for information in their first meeting face-to-face. Raylan also got some help from Loretta, who seems to be doing okay in her new foster home.
I hope she returns in a future episode. It was good seeing her, even if for a brief moment. Anyway, Raylan and Murphy have their showdown with each other at the motel in the episode’s best sequence, with Raylan smartly running over Murphy twice with his car instead of drawing his gun. Raylan doesn’t really care about a corrupt prison guard so I found it a bit amusing that he’d basically give no help to Murphy as he laid there on the dirt road, dying.
All of this death, it turns out, is for a “fortune” of a little under $50,000 apparently according to Limehouse. Mags spent it trying to acquire huge swaths of land last season and that didn’t pan out so three million dollars is now whittled down to that amount. I have this small feeling that Limehouse may not be completely honest about the amount of money. I think he’s keeping a good amount of it some place else for himself and/or his organization. Dickie seems to be on that same train of thought. He’s not going to stop trying to get what he feels is rightfully his by blood.
If $50,000 is really all that’s left, I’d like to see how Boyd reacts to that bit of news. Will he move on to other ventures? Will everyone quickly realize that the man from Detroit is the far bigger threat, what with turning Kentucky into another drug-running operation arm for the Dixie Mafia? Sooner or later, all of the pawns will go off the board, and that means the big pieces will have at it in the battle for supremacy. Then the fireworks really begin.
Grade: 8/10
