Spoiler alert! If you haven’t watched the March 3 episode of Justified — “The Hunt,” written by Taylor Elmore and Keith Schreier and directed by John Dahl — stop reading now. As he’ll do throughout the season, showrunner Graham Yost takes Yahoo TV inside the writers’ room to break down key scenes and tease what’s to come.

But first, a report on the cast’s wrap party last Friday: “There were some tears, but mostly celebration, and a lot of drinking, and some really bad karaoke,” Yost says. Pressed for details, he adds, “Listen, Kaitlyn Dever [who plays Loretta] did 'Ice Ice Baby,' and knew every word without looking at the screen. T.O.N.E-Z got up, who does our main theme, and we only use a snippet of the song, and there was Kaitlyn in the audience just bopping along and she knew every word, so that was fun. I got up with my assistant in the company and Jacob Pitts [who plays Gutterson] and did 'Sweet Home Alabama.' They didn’t have my song. My karaoke song is 'I'm Gonna Be ('500 Miles') by the Proclaimers because you can do a Scottish accent and hide the fact you can’t sing. Tim [Olyphant] said some words, and they were very heartfelt and appreciated, and I got up and rambled on a little too long, but set up the gag reel, and the gag reel was fantastic. It was a good evening.”



Now on to the episode…

Winona (Natalie Zea) made a trip to Kentucky with Willa and, in the end, told Raylan he can be with her and still be him. I loved the way she put it: Not knowing whether he’ll be coming home is better than living with the certainty of him not coming home.

We try to be a very fun Elmore Leonard show, and Elmore has these flashes of real grown-up reaction — the characters operate and discuss things in a very adult way — and we were shooting for that… The thing that we hit upon in the room is that, “You give us 50-50.” “Let’s make it 51-49.” They both understand their history. They’re not idiots. They’re not teenagers. They know that it’s not going to be easy because of who they are. But as Raylan basically says, “We’d be stupid not to give it a shot,” because they love each other. They’ll always love each other.

Related: Graham Yost on the Death (and Easter Egg) in ‘Alive Day’

What did you like about bringing Winona back in this episode specifically?

There’s the other thing that’s going on in this episode that we’ll get to, and we just felt it was the time for us to do something big about both relationships — Boyd and Ava and Raylan and Winona. We feel it’s kind of an episode unlike any other episode we’ve ever done in that it’s so focused on those two stories. But you get Tim and Natalie together working, playing these parts they’ve played for six years, and they’re just so good together, and we’re reminded why we fell in love with Natalie and just loved having her on the show. Having Raylan with a wife and playing that story all six years would have been difficult. So it’s been wonderful to have this sort of contentious, but very alluring relationship.

The scene where Winona is holding the screaming baby, and they’re having the conversation about Raylan not saying what kind of custody he wants — that baby was really screaming.

That baby was really screaming. I forget if it was two sets of triplets, or three sets of twins — there were a lot of babies. We had more babies than they did in American Sniper, and it paid off for us. I don’t know if you heard the story about American Sniper, but the baby fell ill on a particular day, and they had to use a doll. We used a lot of babies, and they were fantastic. Crying, smiling, everything.

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