The Whipping Boyd

Good Morning! Here's Your Hot Cup Of Lead!

Ava is sitting down to her wholesome breakfast of cereal and brown liquor when she hears a commotion in the barn. It's Boyd. He's "looking for paint." Normal stuff. But after she kicks him out and he's on his way, she has a question.

A Joyce Forever

Peacockblocked

Who called the meeting? Ty Walker.

What's it about? Buying these old farmers' property.

How'd it go? Superficially pleasant; subtextually menacing. This is evidently not the first time Ty's been by to make overtures, and these old bastards are getting sick of it; his sweetening his offer by 20% doesn't help. "We'll have the Givens property soon enough," says Ty, "and yours too. "How that comes to pass depends entirely on you." "Now, I'm going to tell you something, and I want you to listen," the old man begins. Ty leans in and theatrically cocks an ear. "There ain't no version of this story that ends with us selling this house to some peacock!" Ty is offended, which he shows by wiping his nose on the clean sheet the old lady just hung up to dry, and takes off in high dudgeon. That insult really stung!

Boyd vs. Bigger Fish

Boyd's returned to Katherine's hotel suite to show her and Wynn, his current partners in crime (a phrase I can use literally, for once), the papers he recovered from his robbery. Katherine is pissed that Boyd didn't find any of the cash they apparently expected to, so maybe she should pop by Boyd's bar later because there are a couple of thugs there who would agree. Katherine insinuates that maybe Boyd actually did find the cash and kept it -- a suspicion Wynn evidently shares -- to which Boyd hotly replies that if he had, he'd be "halfway to Mexico by now." (Oh, Boyd. With $3 million? Dream bigger! I hear good things on Jane The Virgin about Croatia!) After some classic Justified bickering about coffee -- Katherine tells Boyd he can get it himself, to which Boyd sniffs, "So much for Southern hospitality" -- Katherine asks after Ava. Boyd very firmly instructs her not to talk about Ava, and Katherine's like, what, I just think it's so crazy how she got out prison the way she did! She presses the point so hard that finally Wynn tells her to drop it, and after Boyd has stomped off, Wynn quietly tells her they can't gang up on Boyd: "I know how to handle the hillbilly." Oooooh, I feel like this statement probably puts Wynn in the company of lots of unhappy people who learned the hard way how wrong they were about that -- if, that is, they lived to regret it, which many of them probably didn't!

Winner: Draw.

Clear Eyes, Full Pockets, Can't Lose

"...Not To Mention The Biggest Ella Fitzgerald Ever"

Raylan and Tim have just left Calhoun's office and are discussing the fact that they could use another car in order to split up their interview duties for the day when Raylan points out that they have a new problem.

Come On, Ride The Train

Name:	"Choo-Choo."
Age:	Late 20s.
Occupation:	Enforcer.
Goal:	To tail Raylan and Tim on behalf of Ty Walker and make sure they're not up to anything, and somehow to do so in the tiniest car that ever there was... ...which Raylan just ends up commandeering anyway.
Sample Dialogue:	"Get out of the road, cockholster!"

A Couple Of Finely-Aged Wines Knocking...Um...Bottles?

Boyd may seem like Katherine's main man at the moment, but she's got one on the side, too: this is our first chance to meet Avery Markham, with whom she's apparently been carrying on, in some form or another, since she was with Grady, her late husband. Sometime between then and now, Avery left Kentucky, and though he must have missed her terribly, she notes that he's done pretty well for himself, what with his Rolls Royce and $500 boots and all (sure, all he's missing is a MOUSTACHE), and as they smoke weed and toast with champagne, she mentions that she's a grandmother now. "Does that make you happy?" he asks. "Not really," she says, with the kind of honesty you probably never hear from any actual grandmothers, at least some of whom you KNOW have to be over it. After some talk about the Filipina nanny who's raising these kids, he asks if something else is wrong ("I get high, I get very 'tuned in,'" he says), and she talks about a "gardener" that she's pretty sure is stealing from her; she can't fire him because he's in the middle of a big "landscaping project." Avery comments that he keeps his employees loyal by paying them a lot, and when she says that must make it harder for him to turn a profit, he shrugs that there's plenty to go around. Katherine asks what Avery would do if one of his employees turned out to have been disloyal: "Cut off a finger the way Grady used to?" "If cutting fingers were enough, Grady'd still be alive, wouldn't he?" Anyway, Avery's not ALL carrot, as Katherine asks what he'd do if money didn't get the job done -- take out an eye? "An eye, I don't know. One eye, a guy can still see. Still get a driver's license, even. Both eyes, maybe. That'd be a good start." I mean, it sends a message?

Hello? ...Yes, This Is Dolt.

Ty's at Calhoun's office yelling down his phone at Choo-Choo for letting Raylan take his car (which...like, Choo-Choo has enough problems) when Calhoun gets a call from an unknown caller, which he ignores. Ty hangs up on Choo-Choo and starts smashing shit up in the office before turning his attention to the bank manager, asking Calhoun her name, since the cops might have told her if they have a suspect in the robbery. Poor fucking Calhoun: while he's in the middle of trying to dodge Ty's questions and keep this lady from getting murdered (or worse), he gets a text.

When Calhoun's phone rings again, of course it's Boyd, claiming to have found all of Calhoun's stuff at the side of the road and saying he expects a hefty reward for returning it.

By the time Calhoun hangs up with Boyd, he's sufficiently rattled that he "suddenly" remembers Joyce's name. Good luck, Joyce! Serves you right for...getting a job?

All About That Bass

Caprice Explains It All

Props to Caprice, who gets walked in on while giving a regular a blowjay and has the sense to help herself avoid hassle by spilling everything she knows about her john's schemes while he sits there, equal parts defeated and engorged. To wit: "He has been buying property for a group of guys who seemed innocent enough until he realized they're bad guys....So he started writing down everything he could remember of, like, account numbers and amounts, to protect himself....The blackmail ledger, which now he's being blackmailed for, but if the bad guys find out that it exists, they're going to kill him." When Raylan asks what the blackmailer wants, Calhoun reluctantly says he wants the cash the consortium is using to buy all the property.

Ava vs. Boyd

Ava comes home from her dispiriting meeting with Raylan to find Boyd sitting on her porch, and immediately locks in on a strategy: turn eeeeeeeverything around on him. Before Boyd can even try to lay a trap for her (or, that is, lay ANOTHER one), she goes on the offensive, screaming at him for lurking around her house when they'd already talked about his not showing up unannounced and about "that shit [he] stashed" on her property. When he carefully asks where it is, she tells him it's sitting right there in the front seat of her truck, but that she should have burned it. Appraisingly, he says he knows she didn't, and she orders him to take it off her property. It seems like he may find her rage convincing -- after all, it's not as if he doesn't know what it's like when she yells at him -- and as he stalks off, she goes inside to collect herself out of his eyeline.

Winner: Ava.

Clash Of The Titans

Who called the meeting? Raylan, I guess, in the sense that he was the one who knew it was going to happen.

What's it about? The papers Boyd's in the process of blackmailing Calhoun about.

How'd it go? Boyd remarks that he assumes Raylan's there about selling Arlo's place, Raylan confirms it, saying he's been transferred to Florida, which is the first Boyd has heard of it, but he rebounds quickly, offering to buy it himself with all the cash he expects to come into soon. "You're going to rob a bank, too?" says Raylan, smirking. He "catches Boyd up" on the robbery of Calhoun's safe deposit box and the blackmail scheme that has followed, and Boyd says he hadn't heard about the robbery, but that's so funny, he totally just FOUND all this stuff and came to return it to Calhoun!

Boyd attempts to get away by saying he'll come back to see Calhoun about his stuff the next day, and Raylan cheerfully says Boyd can save himself a trip and just give it to Raylan now. Boyd decides to live to fight another day and comply, saying as he goes, "I'd say I'll see you around, but it sounds like you won't be for very long." He asks, with what seems like genuine curiosity, "Does it change you?...Having a child. They say it changes a man. You think that's true?" "I guess we'll see, won't we?" Raylan drawls in reply.

It's so great to see these two together for the first time all season that I almost feel like, if they were going to make us wait this long, they should have closed the episode. It's still early enough in Raylan's investigation that he has to fake dumb and Boyd has to fake buy it, but they're so evenly matched, still, that the tension of what COULD happen is exquisite. Scenes like this are the reason this show exists.

Good old Joyce is just trying to get groceries out of her car when she's startled by a sudden Ty! Hey, he was just wondering, nbd, but did the cops tell her anything about who might have robbed her bank? After all, he's a "fully licensed operative" of Tiger Hawk Security Systems, and there's no law that says she can't tell him what the cops told her! Joyce bravely stands her ground...until Ty takes a couple of her grocery bags from her, peeks at what's inside, and offers to join her inside and make her an omelet! That's when Joyce suddenly remembers that she heard something about a Boyd Crowder...? How about that!

Boyd is drinking (bitterly) while one of his henchmen, sweeping up, finds Dewey's shark tooth necklace! After trying it on, he decides it looks better on the taxidermied critter on the bar! Maybe that's not the greatest place for it if Boyd is trying to keep up the fiction that Dewey is still alive by, for instance, having asked Ava earlier if she'd seen him!

Speaking of Ava, it's Ava!

And she means business!

When Sweepy Jones tells Boyd a lady's there to see him, Boyd gets courtly: "My fiancée does not need to be announced"! Alone together, Ava comments that it's the first time Boyd's referred to her that way since she got out of prison! It still applies, as far as he knows! She doesn't like the way they left things when they fought earlier! He thinks she was perfectly clear! She says, actually, she wasn't, but she's going to be now: "I don't care that you left that stuff in my shed, Boyd. You can hide gold bricks from Fort Knox under my bed for all I care. Either we're together, or we're not. Either I'm a part of what you're doing, or I'm not. Whatever you got going on, I can handle it." He tries to slough off her declaration, but she emphatically says she can't help him if he keeps her in the dark! She knows Boyd robbed the bank, and she looked at the deeds: but did he notice that one of them wasn't like the others? "One of those deeds was to Pizza Portal. The restaurant downtown? You remember: that building used to be--" Boyd didn't, but boy howdy, Ava just proved her worth all over again, and Boyd is so overcome that he stands up and plants a giant kiss on her! Time to celebrate with "the good bourbon"!

Seabass and Ty, dressed in black, get out of a truck, unloading wetworks gear and agreeing that it still beats night recon in Fallujah! Hey, where are they? Ty: "...'PEACOCK.'" Ohhhhh. Got it!

Tim and Raylan roll into Ty's pizza joint/hideout, tossing Choo-Choo his keys! When Ty and Seabass return, right on cue, Raylan asks Ty, "Where'd you get all that cash?" "Why'd you turn it down?" Ty shoots back! Raylan can't figure out what this scam is in aid of! Ty protests that he just thinks Harlan has a bright future! Raylan doesn't bother saying that's absurd bullshit; instead, he says that if Ty wants to buy Raylan's land, then Raylan's going to have to meet Ty's boss! Choo-Choo asks how Raylan knows Ty's not "the HNIC"! Raylan: "Well, Choo-Choo, the way it works, whether you're in the military, law enforcement, or you sell vacuum cleaners, the boss-man don't go door-to-door. Besides, just look at him: he works for someone. My guess is, he don't want to talk about it." On his way out, he tells Tim, "I haven't been inside this building since I was a kid. Used to be a bank"! And now Harlan banks are serving pizza? Who says that's not progress?!