Justified: Don't Tase Me Bro!

I’m a major multi-tasker.

I shave while I shower. I talk on the phone while I cook. (Note: I do NOT text and drive. Ever.)

I fold laundry while I watch “Justified”…well, not anymore after last night.

Because I was so distracted with folding my towels and underwear, I missed two of the best moments in last night’s episode. Actually, I’m not entirely sure I would’ve caught them even if the show had my undivided attention.

You had to have been paying really close attention to see Boyd use his cell phone to dial his own (well, Ava’s) house number so that he’d have an excuse to go in the other room and spy on his armored car heist cohorts. In fact, watching Walton Goggins’ face in this scene was practically a master class in understated acting. (You can understand why the other guys found his calm so infuriating.) If you watched closely enough, you could probably catch the moment where he decided he wasn’t going to go through with the job. (I’m guessing it was around the time he found out he’d have to kill security guard Shelby.)

The fake phone conversation allowed Boyd to hear that his accomplices intended to kill him and make off with the money. Fortunately for Boyd, he’s a criminal mastermind so he was able to devise a plan that would allow both he and Shelby to survive. I thought it was a little contrived that the writers made the success of the plan mostly contingent on Ava trusting him, but in the end it worked. Boyd found an ingenious way of making the morons blow themselves up by switching out the bag with the explosives during the tense heist.

And just in case you hadn’t gotten the whole Ava-trusting-Boyd point, their storyline ended with police sirens blaring toward them and Ava having to decide whether she was going to turn him in or not. I like to think that even if Boyd hadn’t handed her the $20,000 she needed to keep her house — which he snagged from the heist — that Ava wouldn’t have ratted him out because Boyd really does seem to be trying to do the right thing.

But she probably would have.

The other scene that I should’ve been paying closer attention to was when Raylan paid a visit to a gentleman he suspected of helping the Bennett boys cash deadman Walt McCready’s checks. In this instance (unlike the scene with Boyd) I probably could’ve seen him reaching for the taser — or whatever weapon was on him — but it was still a jolt (get it?!) to see Raylan get taken by surprise like that. Fortunately, Raylan was able to get a shot off on the guy’s foot, which allowed him to turn the taser on the guy’s nuts. The button on this tense, darkly-hilarious scene was watching both guys crumple to the ground in agony.

To be honest, I was a little disappointed that Raylan let someone who he believed to be a criminal get close enough to tase him. Then again, it once proves once again that, as awesome as he is, Raylan isn’t infallible. Even The Hillbilly Whisperer gets temporarily bested by one of his people every once in while.

Raylan was snooping around the missing Walt McCready’s cashed checks because he knows that the Bennetts are looking out for his daughter — young Loretta is literally minding the store for Mags — and he suspects that the Bennetts had something to do with Walt’s disappearance. (Of course, we know that Mags poisoned him, and her boys dumped the body.)

Thanks to sudden snitch Dewey Crowe (who just wants to get to a halfway house) Raylan knows that the Bennetts are planning something big. Meanwhile, Mags found out about two of her sons’ secret, dirty dealings for the second time. First it was the hijacking of the Oxy bus, now the cashing of Walt’s checks.

Both crimes caught Raylan’s attention — Raylan knows the Bennetts are cashing Walt McCready’s checks, and he’s pretty sure they killed him…he just can’t prove it — which SEVERELY upset Mama Bennett because it’s putting these big plans in serious jeopardy.

That final scene with Mags smashing Coover’s fingers with a hammer was absolutely brutal, and it goes to show you exactly why these bad boys are scared of their mom. She’s not a monster though…she took out his non-gun hand.

So what’d you think of this episode? Will Arlo pay back the $20,000 by the end of the season? (I hope he does it little by little so that we continue to see the great Raymond Barry every once in a while.) Finally, is Boyd destined to go back to a life of crime?