Spoilers: Let's Talk About the Ending to 'Justified: City Primeval'

By Dustin Rowles | TV | August 30, 2023 |

By Dustin Rowles | TV | August 30, 2023 |

Spoilers for all of Justified: City Primeval.

The reception to the Justified reboot has been largely mixed, and even the episodes themselves have been hit or miss. The jarring Detroit setting has taken some getting used to, but ultimately the season works for me because Raylan is still Raylan, Timothy Olyphant is still Timothy Olyphant, and Boyd Holbrook’s Clement Mansell has been a formidably evil villain (and I will be forever grateful to spend more time with Rectify’s Adelaide Clemens).

Granted, Mansell’s character has been paper-thin, and his motivations vague, but his erratic nature and the possibility that this could be the last we ever see of Raylan Givens kept me on edge for much of the series’ run. I don’t want to spoil any other series here, but it wouldn’t be the first reboot in recent years to kill off its lead. We couldn’t rule out Raylan’s death, and while I didn’t believe that Mansell would escape the episode alive, there was the very real possibility that both could die in a shootout.

Fortunately, Raylan not only survived the finale, but the season-ender also set up a possible second season and a reunion between Raylan and our old pal, Boyd Crowder.

But first, let’s get back to Clement Mansell. In the opening minutes, he is left to die, locked in Skender’s soundproof panic room by Toma, the Albanians, and Carolyn, who came to an agreement with Toma on how to handle Clement. Raylan even pushes the button that locks him in. While Mansell is left to languish, Raylan takes care to ensure that crooked cop Maureen Downey (Marin Ireland) is exposed. After another romantic night with Carolyn, however, Raylan can’t ignore his unreliable moral compass and returns to the panic room where Mansell had been locked away. “Goddamn it, Raylan,” Carolyn says as Raylan leaves. She speaks for all of us.

Mansell, however, had managed to escape. Skender, intent on proving his manhood, is determined to kill Mansell and gets to his panic room first. It does not go well for him. Mansell beats Skender to death and takes out the rest of the Albanians, Toma included, before heading to his lawyer’s house to kill Carolyn. Raylan is waiting for him in the kitchen. There, when Mansell — the “Jack White-wannabe asshole” — reaches for a cassette tape to give to Raylan, the marshal thinks he is going for a gun and shoots him dead.

“What’d you kill me for?” Mansell asks as Raylan looks on wearily. He genuinely thought Mansell was reaching for a gun, but would it have mattered? Did Mansell at any point think that he’d escape Carolyn’s house without a shootout? Did he believe that Raylan cared enough to listen to his music? That the two would have a beer, jam out, and go their separate ways? I appreciated all the White Stripes callbacks this season, but Chekhov’s cassette felt underwhelming.

All the same, with Mansell dead, Carolyn fills Judge Guy’s vacancy, and Raylan — tired of the grind, missing his daughter, and possibly unhappy with the person that he had become — decides to retire. We get to see Winona (Natalie Zea) again when she returns to drop off their daughter and lament the fact that Raylan retired for Willa but not for her. It’s a nice cameo. Willa and Raylan, meanwhile, plan to spend some lazy days on Raylan’s new boat.

It doesn’t last long, however, because Raylan gets a call. There’s only one person who could lure Raylan off his boat and out of retirement, and he just escaped from prison with a guard he romanced inside. Boyd Crowder is back and on the run, and FX would be insane not to renew the series for another season to see how it all unfolds. It’s an exciting setup for a future installment, even if it does have a way of rendering this season an appetizer for the feast that is to come.