Raylan comes face-to-face with the third season antagonist in FX’s Justified
Now that was a badass episode of Justified. The problem with the first season of Justified was that the writers didn’t seem to know how to balance the stand-alone episodes and the serialized episodes that were part of a larger arc but “Harlan Roulette” is proof that they have got the formula all figured out now. This was a thrilling episode of television: both as a standalone episode and as a smaller piece of the puzzle.
“Harlan Roulette” brings back Wade (the guy who helped Dickie capture Raylan last season) and introduces Fogel, a local pawnshop owner and a player in the Dixie Mafia. Fogel likes to solve his problems with a game of Harlan roulette, a version of Russian roulette which involves the player being forced into pulling the trigger multiple times just to get something they want (in this case, a bottle of pills). After Raylan tracks Wade to Fogel, Fogel is forced to dispose of Raylan (on Wynn Duffy’s orders, nonetheless) but doesn’t get a chance to play a game of Harlan roulette with him. Instead, he is killed by one of his disgruntled employees, who is also killed by Fogel at the same time. Raylan survives just to clean up another mess.
While all of this is going on, Ava arranges a meeting between Boyd and Limehouse to discuss Mags’ money, which results in Limehouse taking all of the weed off Boyd’s hands and Boyd receiving none of Mags’ money. And it turns out he isn’t the only one who wants it: the prison guard who helped Boyd get to Dickie is going to use Dickie to get to the money first.
The highlight of the episode was Raylan tracking Wynn Duffy down and finally coming face-to-face with this season’s antagonist (who is apparently called Carpetbagger in the scripts so let’s go with that). Carpetbagger has big plans for Harlan and organized crime and actually revealed a little bit about why he is the way he is: his dad made him watch “Taxi Driver” when he was a kid. Raylan reminds Duffy of their previous conversation before punching him in the face and dropping a bullet on him: “next one’s coming faster.” Carpetbagger asks Raylan what he’s going to do about the bullets coming at him. Raylan reponds by taking a photo of the mysterious figure, who grins.
After last week focused on the lawful side of Harlan with Art, this episode switched back and focused more on the criminal side with Fogel and Wade. “Harlan Roulette” was a phenomenal episode and my favourite episode of the season so far. Now that Raylan is aware of Carpetbagger, all the pieces are in motion and the real game is about to begin.
Image credit: FX
Craig McQuinn
Craig McQuinn is a poor student currently living in Australia. He was born in New Zealand and had to kill many wild animals to survive. He enjoys almost all forms of pop culture and his interests include superhero comics, TV shows on ...
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