Justified: Bus Boy

Can a guy just have a quiet drink by himself?

That’s what Boyd Crowder was undoubtedly asking himself throughout last night’s episode. After a bus full of criminals and drugs — mostly Oxycodone — was hijacked by another couple of crooks, Boyd was everyone’s #1 suspect. (The bus hijacking only featured a straight-up, brutal murder. The colorful capers we’ve seen from Boyd tend to involve an explosion, so this heist was actually low key by comparison.)

Whether it was the hapless Dewey Crowe stopping by to ask Boyd about the hijacking — Dewey was part of the original group of crooks who got hijacked — or whether it was Raylan sniffing around Ava’s house so he could interrogate Boyd (and, it turns out, Ava), Walton Goggins’ reformed(?) bad man was front and center last night.

And I haven’t even mentioned the president of the Boyd Crowder Fan Club, who hounded his idol so much that he ended up going for a very unpleasant, hot-footed ride at the end of the episode.

Did I see a smile creep across Boyd’s face at the end of the episode? Was it regret? I can’t tell, and that’s the great thing about Goggins’ performance last night. I can’t exactly tell how he felt about finally getting back in touch with his inner badass.

The rest of the time, Goggins’ work was impressive in its blank-faced economy. Last season, when no one believed that Boyd was reformed, it turned out that he kind of was. Based on that, I should’ve believed him when he said that he had nothing to do with the bus hijacking, and I mostly did. However, there was a small nagging part of me that wouldn’t have been surprised if Boyd HAD orchestrateD the whole thing. That’s due, in no small part, to the edge Goggins brings to this role, even when he’s being good or he’s not saying very much.

This week, we learned a lot more about why he’s living at Ava’s place. He’s helping her out financially (and doing an honest night’s work), while she provides him a place to stay (as long as he doesn’t look at her funny). They’re both the only kin the other person has left, so it’s mutually beneficial in a really depressing way.

Despite what he may say, Raylan was being at least a little arrogant when he insisted that Ava was only shacking up with Boyd to get back at him. When Ava asked him to go inside the house to talk about it, I actually thought for more than a moment that Raylan was going to cave in, especially after his less than delightful dinner with the still-married Winona at the start of the episode. Even though Timothy Olyphant’s Raylan is a thoroughly decent guy, I can see him slipping up and hooking up with Ava again.

What I could never see is him slapping on his signature hat, and ripping off a couple of hijackers. Yet this is exactly what Dewey Crowe’s brilliant plan came down to when he dressed up as Raylan, stole back the drugs from the hijackers, and made sure those two guys knew that it was “Raylan Givens” who had ripped him off.

The episode’s funniest scene was probably the one that came immediately after that with Doyle Bennett clumsily feeling out the real Raylan — who he believed to be a criminal — as a potential future partner-in-crime. We know that Raylan knows that the Bennett family isn’t to be trusted, but it was fun to see him be totally put off by Doyle’s overtures and making the guy squirm. (Raylan was so annoyed, in fact, that he was actually kind of rude to the female criminal informant who cleared his name by repeatedly closing that car door in her face.)

Of course, the hijackers didn’t know that the real Raylan Givens would never steal drugs, so they came looking for him and they found him with faux Raylan Givens (aka Dewey), who was using his Oxy money to enjoy the company of some lady friends. As far as the shootouts on this show go, this one ranks pretty low.

Doyle is partly to blame for that because when he found out that the two hijackers were hired by Doyle’s brother Dickie, he shot them dead. (Can’t have them getting caught and blabbing to the police.) I was under the impression that Dickie was the criminal mastermind among the three brothers (and that may still be the case), but last night it was Doyle who gave his two brothers a stern talking to. Of course, when Doyle threatened to tell their mom and Dickie started wavering, we were reminded of who’s REALLY in charge.

So what’d you think of this episode? Is Marshal Tim more than “a little off”? (The way he was staring at Raylan and Winona on their date was at least a little creepy.)Will Winona divorce Gary? Have we heard the last of this Oxy bus business, or will it pop up again the way the Miami cartel storyline occasionally reared its head last season? Finally, has Boyd gone back to the dark side?