#mags bennett

[gunslingergivens]

JUSTIFIED 2X09 - Brother’s Keeper

[callmearcturus]

Justified S02E04 - For Blood or Money (AKA shot composition 101 and How To Not Get Killed By The Fae 301)

I almost want to call this a skippable episode because the A plot is very lackluster but the B plot continues to serve hard.

also hello what

He's learning to do magic from Youtube, y'all.

Genuinely relieved that the other marshals are getting their time in the spotline. Rachel's presence in the season opener was great but this plotline about her brother didn't grab me, except for being another surprisingly thorough proponent for rehabilitation over incarceration.

There is a lot of crunch to Rachel's sister being killed inadvertently by her husband in a vehicular collision bc he was speeding to get her help as she ODed. Like, yeah, I don't know how to grapple with that. I hope we come to back to that with more to do (esp since Rachel is the only black character in the main cast thus far). This works as setup for something deeper later. (And I know it might be unreasonable to ask this in The Show That Is Partially About Drug Addiction but would love to have black characters who aren't drug dealers.)

To move this one swiftly, I'm gonna touch on: Wtf is up with Raylan why is he like this, Mags Bennett scares me, and I Do Love The Ava And Boyd Show.

How Do You Solve A Problem Like Raylan?

I flat out skipped this before bc of time but in the last episode, Winona took Raylan out on a date to see some real music and it went so fucking badly.

One: Raylan points out that Winona seems to be unwilling to be seen in public with him, even though Husband Gary knows they're banging.

Two: Winona doesn't currently have plans to divorce Gary even though she's initiating (secretive) dates with Raylan and randomly drops by to pounce on him.

Three: When they notice Tim from the marshals office is also present, Raylan wants to invite him over and Winona says she's leaving with or without Raylan.

I swear to gd this reminds me of when Punct and I watched the opening of Jerry Maguire and were like "this feels like a Sarah McLaughlin ASPCA commercial but about heterosexual people instead of abandoned pets." LIKE???? WHAT ARE Y'ALL DOING? In what UNIVERSE is this a real relationship?

raylan givens i am begging you to respect yourself

anyway this time, and see if you can follow this.

Gary asks Winona to come by his office and makes it very clear he's never stopped loving her and intends to win her back.

However, they need to get a divorce.

Raylan is thrilled to hear this but Winona is not.

Per Winona, Gary is suggesting a divorce because they are upside down on their mortgage and he wants to take it in the divorce and take the financial hit on it.

Now Raylan is upset about the divorce because Gary, by bailing Winona out of this obligation, is.... winning?

And here I was thinking Ava and Boyd slowly growing closer with the whole "Ava killed Boyd's brother and then helped get him shot in the chest but now have kind of trauma-bonded and she's acting like his sponsor or parole officer" vibe was gonna be the Complicated romance but lmao nope! that shit is easy compared to what the fuck Raylan's got going on.

Mags Bennett What The Fuck

You would think the Bennetts are literally the fucking Fae with how gddamn careful Raylan is when dropping by on his day off. (Day off in his hat and with his badge, yanno.) They are having a whole-ass community dinner thing bc wow Mags does not fuck around when trying to show off how she's a magnanimous matriarch of her people.

Raylan shows up but brings gifts like he's trespassing on Hospitality Laws and feels the urgency to tacitly pay for his presence. He even brings an apple pie, which would hold the same weight as Mags' apple pie moonshine. Neat, even, unlikely to cause offense nor to be too great of a gift to invite retribution. Truly, he is the one who would survive the dark faerie tale.

Mags specifically asks for privacy with Raylan, even directs Doyle to go inside to watch the kids, but Coover, Doyle, and Dickie all refuse and make themselves very present for the discussion.

Which boils down to: Raylan does not have proof yet but he does have strong cause to believe the oxy bus from The Ballad Of Dewey Crowe was hit on Dickie Bennett's orders.

and oof

I knew Mags would be mad as all hell with her sons for this shit. Hell, Doyle literally shot and killed the only witnesses who could testify to Dickie's involvement, covering the family's ass. It's a huge problem.

Mags: And yet you find it acceptable to come in here and bust in on my family dinner, asking if I've had a hand in robbing a bus full of shit from a bunch of Frankfort peckerwoods. Raylan, so so peacably: Mags, I never asked if you robbed that bus. Mags: No, no, no, you're just being all clever, insinuating without asking. Tryin' t'stir things up, is that it? Raylan: (audibly code-switching to Local Color) You tell me, Mags. Is it workin'? Mags: Let me ask you something, Raylan. Raylan: Fire away. Mags: Why do you care so much? Raylan: I'm sorry? Mags: C'mon now, child, gonna sit there on my lumber and tell me this has got nuthin' to do with the history between our families? With why my boy there hasn't walked right for the past 21 years?

yeah so I think Something Happened and Raylan was partially (wholly?) responsible for disabling Dickie, and that is too high a watermark to clear for him to make Mags believe him genuine, no matter how much he frames it with gentility and manners and obeying the unwritten Rules.

Raylan leaves, Mags tells her kids they can't work on their Big Plans with a marshal investigating them, and she storms off.

Then, proving Mags' point immediately:

Doyle: "we'd bring down if we killed a marshal? We're talking Black Hawk helicopter time."

I almost feel bad for Doyle, having to cover the asses of his absolutely dipshit brothers. And really, who is he saving them from? From Raylan, or from their mama's fury?

CBS's Elementary if it was about Moriarty getting a sponsor instead of Sherlock, also Moriarty is from Kentucky

jfc i am obsessed with the shot composition used in Ava's house and with Boyd

When he's not working, Boyd keeps distance from Ava very deliberately. We see him on the porch when she is not there, and now that she's presumably been out there relaxing, he is in his rented room with the door shut.

It all comes back to his big apology to her back at the end of S1, how he doesn't move in closer to her like other people do, he expands the distance and tends to it consciously and thoughtfully.

So she is the one to tell him to come out on the porch with her instead of holing himself up.

(Oh yeah and he's reading Of Human Bondage, magnus opus of British novelist/spy/noted glass closet gay man W Somerset Maugham. It's a fucking depressing read despite the almost conspicuously light tone about giving up on what you dream of becoming to settle for what your body and your society believe you ought to be. Struggling against your destiny drives you mad, starves you, gets you killed.

And if I'm right, he's listening to Drive-By Truckers, who I can only shorthand as... punk-protest-alt-country out of Athens, GA. Their politics ain't aligned with Boyd's past as a neo-nazi, another nod to how much that was manipulation on his part. Though when this show came out, their biggest, loudest protest songs hadn't been released yet. Regardless, they did perform back-up to multiple black musical artists. JUST SAYING, FASCINATING DELIBERATE CHOICES AND EASTER EGGS HERE.)

SHOT COMPOSITIONNNNNN, more delineation, more playing with distances. Boyd in his small space, made artificially smaller by the angles, the foreground of the 'bars' of the staircase. This is a cage he's made for himself, and it doesn't fit his size, look how close he is to knocking his head on the slanted roof, how all his stuff remains in bags and boxes.

And the way he tilts his head like an animal as she leaves.

DIRECTLY COMPARE TO:

The openness of the porch, the light, I can feel the temperature just by looking at this. There is still separation between Ava and Boyd, but there are no dividing lines segregating the space, no implicit walls or bars. Both of them keep their body language closed, though Ava's on her feet and has more control, can move away easily.

Boyd's default stance with his hands sheaved feels like deliberate posturing. Usually "posturing" implies making oneself bigger or more dominant in a space. He's folding tighter, always tucked away to keep his edges away from people around him.

wow her smile is a flashbang to the senses ain't it

When Boyd engages a bit with the hair talk and mentions his grandmother, he keeps facing forward, still not encroaching. Just lets Ava look at him without having to... deal with him.

raylan you fumbled both these baddies!!! you could be on this porch right now having a quiet moment instead of playing schrodinger's cuckhold with your weird ex-wife!!!!

This guy and his chucklefuck friends slouch in, and Boyd tells Ava to go inside and lock the door behind, then steps out deliberately to hold them off the porch, and apologizes for yanno uuuuh the thing where he dragged this guy alongside his speeding truck??? yeah that

But they aren't here about that. They want Boyd in on their heist. All while Ava listens and watches with rifle in hand.

We don't get the details until the final scene, which is our clip of the post!

/fans face

So Boyd's always used his ability to drown people in words to control situations. Since he moved in with Ava, he's been doing it even more acutely, always speaking in the same just-over-whisper tone that pretty much demands people shut up to even hear him, and using so many meandering sentences, it stalls and stalls and stalls. It's like all he does is read depressing literature, listening to alt country, and take a whetstone to this specific weapon of his, honing it to this absurd degree.

The way he wields his calm stillness to unsettle people and drive them off is so calculated, mwah, love it, delicious.

But when shitheel Kyle pitches this plan, Boyd's objections are so factual and precise. He's already considered how one might rob the mining company from this location and specifically for the cash payroll. He already knows off the dome how much money is kept on-hand. He knows the worst part of a job like this would be viable escape from the location.

Even as he struggles to just live his life and keep his head down, the gears keep ticking along, as much a part of his machine as his blood and lungs.

Also that final shot-- his eyes are so dull, especially compared to the first season. The pinprick of pilotlight is out, he's turned all the desires off. He's trying.

Trying.

[dailyjustified]

[jeremydaviesarchive]

some Dickie Bennett Moments™ from Justified 02x01: The Moonshine War

[freekicks]

t-shirts i saw in harlan, kentucky, and the "justified" characters i would buy them for: a list

boyd crowder:

raylan givens (ironically):

ava crowder:

helen givens:

arlo givens:

johnny crowder:

dewey crowe:

mags bennett:

[dimmadoome]

I was gonna say how ______ villain from Justified is the best, but trying to fill in that blank is actually becoming extremely difficult. Every single "outlaw" character was fantastic and unique and well worth the storyline and time invested in them. They were all...(even Michael rapaport 🤮) well written and well acted characters. How can I choose Boyd when Ava exists? How can I choose Ava when Dewey Crowes death almost made me cry. How can I choose Dewey Crowe when Loretta or Arlo or Mags or Winn Duffy? Ive realized that hell...I genuinely can't choose.

[acorrespondence]

I was just thinking about how much I love Boyd in your Boyd/Raylan kid fic, and sorry this is such a vague question lol but I'd love if you had any like bonus Boyd backstory or details that you'd want to talk about in that universe, or like just any info on how this version of Boyd and the like perfect imo characterization of how he would be as a dad and a partner came to you!

Oh no this is a great question! Well, great for me because I love to talk about this stuff, maybe not so great for you since this answer is about to be real long and rambly haha. Ultimately though I think it comes down to the fact that, at his core, Boyd is a lot less like his father or even Arlo, and a lot more like Mags Bennett. I think on the surface level, they’re actually quite different—Mags has her matronly, pillar-of-the-community persona, and her ruthless pragmatism is tucked away underneath that, but it bubbles up to the surface sometimes. Boyd, on the other hand, inhabits his personas much more fully, and cycles through a lot more of them. I think probably the biggest difference between them is that Boyd really doesn’t seem to believe in violence as a form of control, at least not for those in his employ. Killing Devil and Dewey isn’t a way to control them, it’s just a solution to the problem their presence presents. Even when he gets violent with Ava in the last season, he’s not using it to influence her behavior, it’s just more of a controlled version of a child’s tantrum—you hurt me, so now I’m gonna hurt you.

At their cores, however, Boyd and Mags are both motivated by the same thing: the idea of legacy. I think many people often mistake this in Boyd as a survival instinct, and I sort of agree, in the way that legacy and lasting impact past death are our way to blunt the innate human fear of mortality—death may be inevitable, but our works and stories can continue on. Except I think saying he’s “just trying to survive” throughout the show kind of neuters his character a bit. Because one of the things that makes him so interesting is that everyone else around him is just trying to survive, and he’s not. He wants more than that, and makes other people believe that he can get it, not just for himself but for them too. It’s why he can rally people around him so easily.

In fact, he routinely does things that he does not *need* to do, that put his life directly in jeopardy, in favor of making a name for himself and trying to improve his position in life. And in so doing, he and Mags fall into the same trap: this idea that legacy is achieved only when you beat the game. All the suffering will be worth it when you reach that light at the end of the tunnel. Mags hurts her children over and over again, both directly and indirectly, all in the name of securing her legacy, *for them*, and in the end it takes Doyle dying and losing Loretta and getting the thing she thought she wanted for her to look back and realize: *that* was her legacy. Nothing good was ever going to come out of any of it. Every action she took in the name of securing her legacy was actually destroying it, was moving her further away from the thing she thought she was working toward. All that suffering in the name of legacy? That *is* her legacy. That’s what she’s leaving behind. Ava saw it clearly, even if none of the rest of them did: it’s all just people making choices, all down the line.

I honestly think characterizing Boyd as being motivated solely by survival throughout the series is a bit of a disservice to his character development as well, because I think his whole arc in the show is leading up to his realization, in the finale, that his life is actually more important to him than his symbolic life after death—whether that symbolic survival is secured by religious means, by his epic Bonnie and Clyde-style love story with Ava, or by his adherence to Raylan’s own personal mythos that places them in opposition on a time-tested scale. These are all just the natural replacements for his astronaut goals and later his goals in going off to war—the theater for his exploits grows smaller and smaller as he fails to make a name for himself outside Harlan. Ava even came right out and said it: in Lexington she’s anonymous, no one knows her name or marital status or anything about her. If anyone’s going to remember Boyd, it’s gonna be Harlan (though several times throughout the series he gets designs on something bigger, it never pans out). In the end, though—and in contrast to Mags, who couldn’t see past the crumbling of everything she’d thought she was building—Boyd makes the decision to put life over legacy.

On the surface, his situation in season 2 might *seem* like it should have done the job of disillusioning him about legacies already, but that was more of a symbolic suicide, Boyd resigning himself to the fact that he was doomed to have no legacy and thus making *no* choices. He didn’t deny his previous legacy; it was taken from him by his father. He doesn’t even get the legacy of having killed his father, or of having killed the woman who killed his father. And following that, other people make his choices for him: Kyle with the mine robbery, Ava with their relationship. But he’s *not actually dead,* and his commitment to not making choices is a choice in itself. He’s absolutely capable of fighting back against the desires and machinations of those around him, but he just—doesn’t. And in the end, both of these non-decision decisions in their own way present him with a new legacy, which he immediately latches onto as soon as that light comes back on at the far end of his tunnel. If he’d made the realization that his life is more important than his legacy, he wouldn’t have needed this symbolic revival, because *he was never dead.*

For the purposes of my fic, the inciting incident that caused the canon divergence had to be a latter such event, to my mind—Boyd losing his way—because otherwise he’s just going to stagnate in Harlan and stay in his neo-Nazi persona long enough to get calcified in it like Mags, or until something shakes up the game board, like Raylan’s arrival. But it wasn’t enough just to give him a kid, because all he’d care about was the legacy he’s securing for that kid. So I had to figure out how to make Bo do the equivalent of killing all his followers in the woods. So: the kid’s mama runs off, Ava leaves Bowman to try and make a life on her own in Corbin, Boyd’s really low on child care options and figures Bo’s a better bet than Bowman. Only it turns out that’s kind of a rock and a hard place situation (we know from season 6 where Bowman learned his wifebeating ways, and Bo definitely strikes me as the “small children and animals don’t understand any kind of discipline but physical” kind of guy, whereas Boyd as I’ve said doesn’t really believe in control through violence, likely because it never really worked on him).

Enter: Boyd going to Raylan hoping he’ll give him purpose, just like he did in canon after the equivalent event. Only this time, Raylan offers him more than just the potential for retribution against his father. He offers pretty much the same thing Ava did, for the low low price of papering over the past. So Boyd basically teaches himself architecture—few other legacies last longer than buildings, and if you make enough then at least a few of them are bound to stick around a while—and invests in a series of failed startups until he’s hit, quite suddenly, with a Mags Bennett-style reality check as detailed in chapter 5, forcing him to confront the legacy he’s already created and the fact that it’s absolute shit. Luckily for him, unlike Mags, it happened before anyone died, and he had a chance to course-correct. Fast-forward to now, where Boyd is *trying* to make choices that actually bear out his goals, but maybe still puts a little too much stock in legacy, since he hasn’t yet reached that final step of enlightenment that he hits in the finale when he refuses to pull on Raylan.

[msindrad]

I look at these, and I feel at home