Note: Spoilers for last week’s Justified: Season 6 premiere follow.

Justified kicked off its sixth and final season this past week, as the story of Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant) draws to a close with him finally looking to take down Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins).

Timothy Olyphant as Raylan Givens in Justified.

Walton Goggins as Boyd Crowder in Justified.

Joelle Carter as Ava Crowder in Justified.

Mary Steenburgen as Katherine Hale in Justified.

I spoke to Justified’s executive producer and showrunner, Graham Yost, about the decision to wrap up the series, why Dewey Crowe (Damon Herriman) finally met his end in the season premiere, the crucial role Ava (Joelle Carter) plays in the final season and more.I think after about Season 2 or so, when we got picked up for Season 3, or Season 3 being picked up for Season 4, we knew we had a shot at choosing our own ending. So that was around the time that we started to talk about it in earnest. So that said, I can’t help it... I was probably thinking about it on the pilot, “How would a series end?”, you know? But we started thinking about it more at that point. In terms of when we made that decision, it was in the latter part of Season 4. Sony and FX asked if we wanted to do an extended Season 5 and extended Season 6 and out of that cobble together an additional season - and do what is often done in cable these days. We thought about it and it was a lot of conversation between me and Tim and the feeling was, for this chapter of Raylan’s life, which could be the last chapter in his life -- we’ll figure that out -- there’s only so long we can extend the Raylan and Boyd story. We’d be trying the audience’s patience and our own.Yeah. “Why doesn’t he just kill him?” We had to come up with a lot of reasons why Raylan doesn’t just pull his gun and shoot him. It’s exactly that and if we’re doing that too much the audience is going to figure out, “Well, nothing is going to happen here, because it’s Raylan and Boyd.” While we get into the final season, yeah, if it’s the second episode, it’s probably not going to go off then, but as you had towards the finish line, you don’t know what could happen.It was a bunch of things. One was, we really felt there was no better way to dramatize Ava’s dilemma. That if Boyd was willing to kill this hapless thug out of just a suspicion, what’s he going to do if and when he finds out that she’s snitching on him? So it was that and because, honestly, we thought that we might have seen the last of Dewey after last year. I even wrote it in the scene, where after he’s confessed to killing Wade Messer and he’s stolen the drugs and he runs outside and he gets caught, I had him say to Raylan, “Man, I don’t understand you,” which was a line from the pilot. So I thought if this is it, then we’ve given a fitting end to Dewey Crowe. He’s headed back to jail, Raylan got him, “Man I don’t understand you,” and away we go. Then we were just thinking there’s no better way to dramatize Ava’s dilemma… Let’s bring him back for one more thing. There were three deaths on the show that have been really hard to come to. One was Mags, one was Arlo and one was Dewey. And Damon [Herriman] is just a delight.Yeah, and if we wanted to make this last season about Raylan and Boyd, there was no better person to be at the fulcrum than Ava. She’s kind of this bridge between the two worlds. In this case, she’s not just a bridge. She’s actually being tugged, violently, in both directions. We just thought that was inherently dramatic.Only if the story really calls for it. There are a few people who pop up. Our fear would be people saying, “They’re just checking off the box. This is the final appearance,” which I think makes sense on a comedy; less so on this show in our hybrid of comedy, drama, violence, whatever we are. So we had to be wary of that and at the same time, there is some fun for us as writers, which is, “Hey, what if we bring back so and so to do this?” But we’re always looking to find something else we can get from it.They play off each other fantastically. They worked on a movie together several years ago and had a blast so it was fun for them to get back together. Last year we’d been thinking of Duffy having a mentor and it was [Justified writer] Leonard Chang who said, “What if it’s a woman?” and out of that came this whole story of her and her husband Grady Hale and what they were doing and everything. And then we were lucky about Mary, who was, by the way, the only person. Her name appeared on the list and we said, “What about her?” Because it was unexpected. She wasn’t familiar with the show but her husband and her son loved it. So they talked her into it. So then we started thinking this season, what is her motivation for doing this? She’s obviously done fairly well. She’s not a poor person. What happened? And that’s where we came into the whole story about Grady Hale and Markham, and that’s Sam Elliott’s character. Then Dave Andron and VJ Boyd were writing episode two and came up with the notion of introducing Markham, Sam’s character, not in a criminal context, but in a romantic context. Then we decided to dig into how can we show a little bit of his steel? That was the genesis of it.It wasn’t one more Deadwood! [Laughs] For me, one of the other touchstones for us has been Winter’s Bone and Garret was in Winter’s Bone. There’s a particular scene in that where he’s up against John Hawkes and they question, “Is this our time?” - are they going to kill each other now? Are the guns going to come out? So when Garret’s name came up, and we heard he was interested in doing the show… Tim knows him, of course. We actually called the character Dillahunt. So, “Dillahunt does this, Dillahunt does that.” Thank God we got him because otherwise it would have been very embarrassing for someone else to play a character named Dillahunt. And then we renamed him.

Eric Goldman is Executive Editor of IGN TV. You can follow him on Twitter at @EricIGN , IGN at ericgoldman-ign and Facebook at Facebook.com/TheEricGoldman