hello, kait

SUCK IT, HATERS. WINONA ISN’T GOING ANYWHERE.

I will be seriously upset if Winona isn’t in the next season of Justified. I thoroughly enjoy her, even if a lot of fans don’t. I think she’s one of the few females on TV that I admire. She’s feisty and intelligent and she doesn’t put up with anyone’s crap - not even Raylan’s. She makes her own choices and she stands by her convictions.

Even if she and Raylan aren’t together (and I don’t think they will be until he’s officially out of the field), I think the show benefits from having her around, even if it is in a limited capacity. She keeps Raylan grounded, she keeps him from completely falling into the insanity that envelopes Harlan county and its inhabitants. So come on writers, Natalie, let’s figure out a way to keep Winona part of the show.

I have a lot of feelings regarding FX’s ‘Justified.’ Granted, most of the time they’re about Walton Goggins’ hair or where I can buy the clothes the show’s wardrobe designers dress Winona in, but every once in awhile I let a serious thought pop in to this crazy head of mine.

But unlike the serious thoughts that plague me when I’m watching, say, ‘Breaking Bad’, the thoughts about ‘Justified’ are often more along the lines of, “I can’t believe I only just started watching this show last October.” Because this show has it all: humor, anger, people hitting other people in the face with frying pans – which sounds cartoonish and funny on paper, but was actually a pretty bad ass moment for a beloved character – and characters you love, even if you’re not supposed to.

Last night’s episode, titled “Loose Ends,” didn’t do much in the way of tying up any ends. And it shouldn’t; the episode is only the ninth of a 13-episode season. The finale won’t air until April 10. The loose ends which the title is referring to can be several different characters.

The most obvious loose end is Ellen May (Abby Miller), who after dumping the body of her friend and fellow whore, Crystal, into a slurry pond (which according to series creator Graham Yost is polluted with chemicals from coal mining), watches as Delroy, her pimp, shoots her other accomplice in order to tie up the loose ends their knowledge of the situation makes them. Ellen May flees and finds refuge in the arms of her future madam, Ava Crowder.

The other loose end, the one I think the title truly refers to, is Tanner Dodd (Brendan McCarthy), the man who attacked Raylan in the mobile clinic and who Raylan now believes is his best connection to Quarles. Upon finding out that Raylan has been sniffing around Dodd’s mother’s place looking for Dodd, Limehouse’s (Mykelti Williamson) lackey Errol (Demetrius Grosse) reports that Dodd is thinking about running. Limehouse asks Errol if Dodd has any unfinished business that could, pardon my ‘Sons of Anarchy’ jargon, blow back on them and Noble’s Hollow. He does, of course, have unfinished business with Limehouse, as he’d just agreed last week or so to spy on Quarles’ camp for Limehouse. He’s the only outside person with information linking Quarles to Limehouse, and he knows quite a bit of information should he end up handcuffed and interrogated by Raylan or some other form of law enforcement officer.

By episode’s end Dodd is dead though, having messed with the wrong arms dealer and thus ended up standing on a stool armed with a modified Bouncing Betty land mine. Errol, upon seeing Dodd accidentally arm the landmine, raises his gun to him, planning on taking out his loose end, but in the end chooses instead to take the money Dodd was looking for in the first place and give it to Dodd’s mother. After Errol leaves Dodd calls the police for help.

Hoping to get some information out of Dodd while he is trapped and unable to move for fear of blowing himself up, Raylan tries to get information about Quarles while an ATF agent works to diffuse the land mine. But Tanner’s been standing on that stool an awful long time and he’s nervous and is hands are sweaty. Having already been told that any minor weight change could detonate the land mine, Tanner is afraid to move, and thus his sweaty palms cause him to drop the gun and detonate the land mind. Raylan and the ATF agent escape just in time, but Limehouse’s loose end is now taken care of, and Raylan once again has no way of getting to Quarles.

Or so he thinks. Raylan, proving that he really is a great guy despite his penchant for killing people he deems deserving, went back to Dodd’s mother’s house to set up her new TV so she could watch her stories. While there he witnesses Errol dropping off the money as Dodd had requested. This tips Raylan off to a connection between Limehouse and Quarles, but when he confronts Limehouse, it’s clear the man is not ready to sever ties with the carpet-bagger and gives up nothing.

Meanwhile, back in Harlan, Boyd is released from prison with Raylan’s unwitting help, something Boyd seems to get a lot simply by pointing out where his and Raylan’s interests overlap (he’s the one who tips Raylan off about Dodd). He shows up to the sheriffs debate and gives a disrupting mirror performance of the speech Mags Bennett gave at the Black Pike meeting last season, and he ultimately wins Shelby the debate. This is not a surprise, however, as we have seen Boyd sermonizing like this before. Remember his religious arc in the first season? Boyd seems to be a born orator and he has the ability to use his rhetoric to sway public opinion – a talent which he could put to good use if he wasn’t selfish and a professional miscreant.

Meanwhile, Boyd’s better half is up to her own mischief, as she takes in the terrified-for-her-life Ellen May and gives her clean clothes and a place to sleep. After Johnny reminds Ava that Delroy pays them for protection, he tells her she has to turn Ellen May over to Delroy. Johnny basically accuses Ava of being a soft woman with a big heart. I think he’s forgetting that she shot his cousin Bowman in the chest with a shotgun as he was eating dinner, and that she also took a frying pan to Dewey Crowe’s face earlier this season. Ava calls Delroy and tells him to come get Ellen May, but when he shows up she hauls out her trusty shotgun and shoots Delroy much the same way she shot her husband, right in the chest. This is Ava’s first on screen kill, and she doesn’t seem to regret this one either, just takes the $2,000 Delroy brought as payment for her returning Ellen May. Throwing out her “no whores” condition, Ava decides it’s time she quit cutting hair and got a real job… as a madam. Which seems to make Boyd proud and also slightly amused. Because that’s the kind of man he is: he’s proud of his girlfriend for killing someone and making money from it.

While this recap might make it seem like a lot of stuff happened in this episode, nothing climactic actually happened. This was yet another episode in which Yost and his writers move the pieces around the chessboard to set up for what I’m sure is going to be an explosive season finale come April 10. Right now Limehouse doesn’t seem to have much to do other than play Chekov’s gun with that knife of his and brag about his bar-b-que-ing skills. I hope this changes soon, because I don’t think this season will be able to top the last if it doesn’t. And because it will be a huge let down if we don’t get to see Limehouse make good on some of his threats.

And the same could probably be said for Boyd and Ava. With two villains this season it’s been a little hard to give the power couple of Harlan adequate screen time (ditto Winona, but that obviously was solved when she decided to leave Raylan for the second time). I’m assuming Yost and Company have planned it this way on purpose and have meticulously planned out the final episodes to somehow bring Boyd in to the action, if only because Walton Goggins has a screen presence that just begs to be heard, and because the previews for the third season showed Raylan and Boyd working together, something we haven’t really seen yet this season.

(Source: kaitlinthomas.com)

deepertheroots replied to your post: Further discussions on the merits of Justified’s Winona Hawkins

I don’t blame Winona for leaving (& in fact have wished Tara did the same many times). Could she have done so in a better way? Probably. But not only did Raylan not leave his job 4 her, he couldn’t take 1 DAY off to look for a place to live w her!!!

I have also wished many times that Tara would have escaped Charming, leaving Jax to figure out his life and how to get out of the Club alive on his own, but I’ve also been very selfish when it comes to Tara and Jax because I so badly want them to be happy, and I don’t think them being apart from one another, no matter how short a period of time, would be beneficial to either of them.

I view them differently from Winona and Raylan in the sense that the latter two seem to have - I don’t want to call it brains, because Jax and Tara are both very intelligent characters - but, in some weird way I think Raylan and Winona exist in a more stable environment - if that makes any sense. I supported Winona leaving Raylan (even if it made me sad because I like them as a couple), because I understood her motivations. Regarding Sons of Anarchy, I was actually happy to see Tara stand by Jax at the end of this past season of SoA. It was a terrible decision in the sense that she has taken one step closer to becoming even more like Gemma, and she put her sons in danger by keeping them in Charming, but I think they can’t exist in separate cities without the other without harming themselves.

Now, that being said, SERIOUSLY, RAYLAN? At the time she wanted you to look at a house, you weren’t even really doing much. It would have taken an hour. Raylan took Winona for granted a lot, I think.

Several weeks ago, when the third season of ‘Justified’ premiered on FX, I wrote a piece defending the actions of Winona Hawkins, the ex-wife of protagonist Raylan Givens. I was tired of seeing the fandom attack her character for whatever crackpot reason they had made up that week. None of the attackers’ arguments had any merit and I simply couldn’t take it anymore.

A few weeks ago it was revealed Winona left Raylan for the second time after realizing he was not going to change his lifestyle for her or their unborn child. He’d had plenty of chances to do it, and he still chose to go running off after fugitives and creepy blue-eyed men from Detroit, despite saying he’d leave active duty in the Marshal service. As a fan of Winona I was a little upset about this development, but the more I thought about it, it made complete sense given her character history. So here I am, yet again, to defend Winona’s actions.

(Note: Keep in mind I’m writing this midway through the third season, and that I have no clue as to what may happen in the coming weeks as the season unfolds and really sets itself up for the sure to be climactic and amazing season finale. At the time of this post Winona is still out of Raylan’s immediate vicinity.)

In my first post I compared Winona to her counterpart on the show, Ava Crowder (Joelle Carter), and to the character of Tara Knowles on ‘Sons of Anarchy’ (Maggie Siff). And despite the character’s recent actions, I think the comparisons still hold. Winona is still not Ava, that much is clear. She has no desire to be involved in the lives and happenings of the people of Harlan, because she’s obviously the sanest of all the show’s characters, and because she recognizes the danger there. But most importantly it’s because she has no ties to the county, aside from her relationship with Raylan, that she has no problem letting the Crowders and the Bennetts do whatever they want. And as for Winona being Tara’s equal, the two characters are still very similar in terms of personal strength, despite the separate approaches the two women have taken in terms of the men they love (but that subject deserves its own post, and is one I’m currently working on as well).

Winona’s actions are representative of a woman who knows what she wants, knows her limits, and sticks to her convictions. She told Raylan in the second season finale, “You go to Harlan, but I can’t promise you I’m gonna be here when you get back.” And Raylan took off without thinking twice about the consequences. Yes, we know how it played out, we know that he saved the day, but he almost died in the process. And although she ran directly to Art and begged him to help Raylan, the viewers were left wondering for seven long months whether or not Winona was going to stay true to her word and leave our favorite Marshal.

In the third season premiere, “The Gunfighter,” Winona is pulled over while driving to an unknown destination and told of Raylan’s condition. Savvy viewers would infer that she had stayed true to her word and was on her way out of Lexington, and out of Raylan’s life, when she was pulled over. But because she’s human, and because she’s in love with Raylan - and carrying his child - she immediately drives to the hospital to be by his side.

Flash forward three weeks and we see them together, seemingly happy. There are a few scenes in the premiere in which they discuss future baby names, discuss finding a home to live in, instead of Raylan’s sad excuse for a motel room, but that’s pretty much the last we really see of Winona so far this season. There’s the tense scene at the end of the premiere involving Ice Pick’s sadistic game, and the scene involving a Realtor showing the house Winona used to share with Gary, but was then sharing with Raylan while they searched for a home. There’s a short scene in another episode in which they briefly discuss some house they were going to look at, and we see her in the episode “Thick as Mud” offering Raylan a beer when he comes home in the middle of the night. But by episode’s end, Winona has packed up and moved out, leaving nothing but a Dear Raylan letter in the kitchen, her earlier declarations that everything was fine, obviously a lie that Raylan couldn’t - or maybe didn’t want to - see through.

Raylan spends an awful lot of time attempting to track Winona down in the following episode, “When the Guns Come Out,” eventually tracking her to Louisville where she is staying with her sister, who seemingly has a strong distaste for her former brother-in-law. After confronting Winona about why she left she told him, “If you wanted to change your life for me, Raylan, you would have done so by now.” And it’s true; Raylan has had time to make good on his earlier promises of leaving active duty in the Marshal service and going to Glynco to train future marshals. And while it’s true that he did put in the request to be transferred in the season premiere, that’s the last time we see Raylan actively try to keep his word to Winona. At the end of that episode, Art confirms what viewers already knew: that Winona had already left him weeks ago after he went to Harlan to save Loretta.

I don’t think anyone can fault Winona for her actions. In fact, I think most people with their heads on straight would likely do the same thing. She recognized the danger that Raylan constantly put her in, however indirect and unintended it may be, and she made an active decision to change that. Knowing Raylan could never really quit the world of Harlan, however much he might want to, Winona chose to remove herself, and her unborn child, from a poisonous situation.

Winona is a strong independent character in and of herself, and despite the fact that most people who spend their days posting on messages boards and commenting on reviews tend to think she’s a waste of human space and takes up the time that could be spent on Ava (who has also become a more peripheral character this season) and the other colorful people of Harlan, I think she’s a great character.

Winona is feisty and intelligent, and she has the ability to sense danger and run away from it. Raylan, the upstanding, by the law man that he is, deserves to have a woman like Winona in his life, a woman who is his equal, a woman who can think for herself, a woman who doesn’t need to rely on violence to be successful in the world. But therein lies the conflict - Winona is too good, too intelligent, and too independent to sit around wondering if her husband is going to come home or if he’s lying in a hospital bed with a bullet hole through his abdomen. Winona is funny, she is strong, and in theory she deserves every bit of man that Raylan is. Unfortunately, the two characters cannot exist in the same world together without one of them drastically changing who they are or altering their convictions. Both of them are too stubborn and set in their ways to adapt to the other’s wishes. And in a perfect world, neither one of them would have to, but in a perfect world this conflict would not exist in the first place. Until Raylan is out the field I don’t see a way for these two characters, no matter how passionate a love they share for each other, to be together in any sense of the word.

Do I think that Winona and Raylan will be apart at series end? Unless one of them dies (and I’m really hoping that isn’t the case, no matter what Natalie Zea’s casting in Kevin Williamson’s new pilot might suggest), I think they’ll end up together. They’ve got a strong chemistry and an intense love for one another, that much is clear. And with a child in the picture, I don’t think the two of them will ever be out of each other’s lives again. Winona said as much in “When the Guns Come Out,” and I don’t believe the writers would waste a character like Winona, or subject her to that fate. There has to be something that keeps Raylan from straying too far, something that keeps him grounded, and Winona and his child are just that - they are what keeps him from completely losing it, and himself, in the ongoing corruption in Harlan County.

(Source: kaitlinthomas.com)

And while those are expressive exclamations, they don’t really tell you much else.