SPOILER ALERT: If you haven't watched this week's episode of Justified, "Cash Game" — written by Dave Andron and VJ Boyd and directed by Dean Parisot — stop reading now. As he'll do throughout the season, showrunner Graham Yost takes Yahoo TV inside the writers' room.

During our premiere postmortem, you said there was something the show's writers discovered on their pre-season trip to Harlan that you could tell us about after this second episode. Let's start there. What was it?

What happens at the end of the episode? They figure out something about the pizza place. There is a place in Harlan that is called the Portal, and when they were there on this research trip this summer, they went there. It didn't look quite as fancy as ours does, but it's got a big-ass vault in it. And the thing is with big vaults — you'll see there's something in the fourth episode related to the vault — they're too heavy to move and too expensive to dismantle because they're so solid and they're built to withstand people trying to break into them. So often with a building like that, they will just leave the vault in there.



So there is a place in Harlan called the Portal, which is a pizza restaurant with a big-ass bank vault in it. Combine that with when the locations team was looking around near Santa Clarita, where we shoot [Justified], for a place where they could have something that looks like a pizza restaurant that has a vault in it, they found a place that was a bank that was being turned into a pizza restaurant. Apparently, that is a trend that is sweeping America — old banks with vaults being turned into pizza restaurants. When we found out that there was this unused vault in the middle of Harlan we thought, "That's where they'll put the money." What they do in Colorado in the legal weed business is, there are vaults in warehouses and they've got 24-hour security — they can't put the money in banks, so they have to have private vaults. So that's where it all came from. Then the people in Harlan said we could use the name.

Related: 'Justified' Postmortem: Graham Yost Talks Premiere Shocker

We met a couple of new guys working with Ty Walker (Garret Dillahunt). What was the inspiration for Choo-Choo and casting Duke Davis Roberts, an accomplished MMA fighter? He's great.

We came up with the idea of just a really big guy who'd been damaged in the war. Then we got him, and it was just one of those things of reports coming back from the set, and you watch dailies, and look at a cut scene and go, "Oh, he's great. He's really doing something really interesting." He's very new to this business, but if you can do comedy — you get the timing, you get the joke — it's just huge. It was basically in the first scene between him and Raylan outside his car, when Raylan pulls him over. We just knew we had something.



The "I'm not following you" exchange, when Raylan couldn't tell if Choo-Choo was saying he hadn't been tailing him or that he didn't understand Raylan.

It became a little who's on first. His name, really, started as Mundo, and then Tim [Olyphant] got really tickled by the idea of people calling him Choo-Choo. It becomes a whole question as to why people call him that, and you'll see that over the course of the next few episodes.



We're also introduced to Seabass. He and Choo-Choo have history together in the military. Seabass seems to be the smart one.

Exactly: Walker is in charge, but Seabass is the smart one and Choo-Choo's the less smart one. We got Scott Grimes, who's an old Band of Brothers friend. He's just really funny and it's very believable — he knows how to carry a weapon and walk the walk.



The most anticipated debut this episode was, of course, Sam Elliott (who plays Avery Markham, the former business partner of Katherine Hale's dead husband and her current lover). He's back in Kentucky and clearly doesn't tolerate disloyalty. Sam's said he's been a fan of the show. How did his casting come about?

FX took us all out for lunch [last Thursday], which was very nice, and one of the guys said, "Is this the first time you thought of going after Sam? And how did this happen?" It's funny, just trying to peel back the history. We're pretty sure we went after him a few times but he just wasn't available. Then, I think, we found out that he liked the show, and so it was a Hail Mary-final season-let's see if we can get him. We had to talk through the part with him and tell him where we were going with it and what we wanted, and he was intrigued. Like Mary [Steenburgen], he was interested in playing a villain.

