Spoiler alert! If you haven't watched this week's episode of Justified — "Sounding," written by Dave Andron and Leonard Chang and directed by Jon Avnet — stop reading now. As he'll do throughout the season, showrunner Graham Yost takes Yahoo TV inside the writers' room to break down the big moments and tease what's to come.

View photos Mikey (Jonathan Kowalsky) gets out the cattle prod More

You've joked many times about how much you resent actors who go on to become successful writers. So how much did you enjoy Wynn and Mikey using a cattle prod on Albert (Danny Strong) to see if he'd break and tell them Ava got released from jail because she cut a deal?

I'll say it again for the record. Danny was a successful actor who decided, "Ooh, I'm gonna write." So then he writes Recount, Game Change, The Butler... Now he's got a hit show [Empire] on Fox. Well, of course we used a cattle prod. He loved it. He got to have a scene with Jere [Burns] and Jonathan [Kowalsky] and scream and wail. And then he had Erica [Tazel] and Jacob [Pitts] come in. It was a fun day. I was there for a bit of it, just to see him tortured.



View photos A different kind of butting heads More

We'll talk about the return of Limehouse (Mykelti Williamson) and Constable Bob (Patton Oswalt), but let's skip right to the kiss Ava and Raylan shared at the end. What was going through Raylan's mind: Does he suspect that Ava (whose plan to leave Harlan was foiled) is playing him and he's playing along? Or is he a lonely man and she's a beautiful woman with whom he has history?

I think, honestly, all of the above. He's a human being and she's a beautiful woman, and they have this history. He has great affection for her, and he plays such a hard line with her, but how does he really feel about her being with Boyd these past few years? He knows he's responsible for her going back to Harlan 'cause he hooked up with his ex-wife. So it's all very conflicted. But I think he does know that she could be playing him, and he would understand that, not have any great acrimony about it, because he knows that she's in an awful position and she's just trying to stay alive. But he can also be the hard-line Raylan and sort of think, "Well you put yourself in this position, so don't come crying to me about it."



Related: 'Justified' Postmortem: Inside 'The Trash and the Snake'

Does he stick around?

The next episode picks up not long after where [Episode 5] ends.

