“I gave you what you always wanted, Raylan: Boyd Crowder bleeding out at your feet.”

This is getting good. As we move into the homestretch of Justified‘s brilliant final season, it’s becoming clear that love and alliances are coming secondary to survival instinct. Relationships are coming undone, trust is being broken, and people are splitting off in order to accomplish whatever goals they want to accomplish. No more do we see the idea of running off into the sunset with the person you love; now, it’s all about the nitty gritty, all about who’s left standing when the smoke clears.

It’s clear that in Harlan right now, different people are governed by different rules, and there’s a perfect example of this in the Mikey-Wynn relationship. The latter is willing to work with who he has to work with in order to keep a foot in the ring, but the former has a code that he abides by; over the last few episodes, we’ve seen him grapple with the reveal about his boss, and he finally acts upon that internal conflict in “Trust” when he upends whatever semblance of trust remains between the two. We normally wouldn’t expect a henchman like Mikey to go from being aplexed to selling out his boss, but it’s the kind of thing that happens in this pressure cooker of a county.

We also may not have expected Ava to play such a large role in the Boyd-Raylan conflict, but here she is at the end, shooting Boyd and running off with $10 million. It’s a shocking moment for sure, and it’s one act that completely shifts the balance of power in the county. In an episode in which Boyd seems to finally embrace his individual criminal tendencies– over, say, trying to figure out what’s best for him and Ava–it’s a gut punch to have that all ripped away from him from someone he thought he could trust. It’s an hour all about Boyd regaining that confidence and swagger, and he sticks it to Carl, Earl, Katherine, and Avery all at once…only to get shot by Ava, the woman who shot Bowman way back at the beginning of it all. That outlaw mindset is now snaking its way through pretty much every character in the show.

With Avery, it’s intriguing to see the position he’s in right now. At the beginning of the season, we saw him as an all-powerful, mustache-lacking, land-gobbling criminal mastermind, but it’s starting to become evident that he’s not as powerful as he appears. He hasn’t made any progress in obtaining land–as we see in this episode, people see right through him–his relationship with Katherine is pretty much in ruins, and he’s out $10 million. He’s attempting to plant his roots, but when so many other people are digging up their own and running, he’s pretty much stuck in the dirt. It remains to be seen who else is actually going to be able to get out, but one thing’s for sure: it’s going to be a hell of a ride to find out. Justified, you have my undivided attention.

GRADE: B+

OTHER THOUGHTS:

-It looks like Boon is going to have a fairly important role in these final few episodes. It’s interesting how he’s being set up in relation to Raylan: although one of them has a badge and the other doesn’t, Boon sees himself as one of the last members of the old guard, just like the Marshal. There’s a theory floating around that Boon’s going to wind up killing Raylan.

-We’re running out of time for Tim and Rachel. They better get some more stuff to do soon, or else a spinoff will become mandatory. A little moment in “Trust” that I really loved: Tim and Raylan talking about Boyd either going out in a blaze of glory or going quietly.

-Only three more episodes left of this show. This is so sad, yet exciting at the same time.

Photo credit: Justified, FX