Spoiler alert! If you haven’t watched the March 10 episode of Justified — “Dark as a Dungeon,” written by Chris Provenzano and VJ Boyd and directed by Gwyneth Horder-Payton — 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 next.

Let’s start with Arlo’s dungeon and the notion that Raylan had always been afraid of what was inside it. We saw him talk to a vision of Arlo, which is something the show hasn’t done before. How did that scene come about?

Coming off of [episode] seven, we knew that we wanted Raylan to really show that he was going to wrap things up in Harlan. He had made this 51/49 commitment to Winona, they’re obviously in love, they’ve got the kid — it’s time to ignore all the other stuff that has been keeping him from leaving and go.

The idea of the “dungeon,” as it were… maybe it came up in the room. We were sort of debating it, not entirely landing on it, and as is the usual on this show, we have to just keep going.… So Chris and VJ finished the script and sent it to [executive producers Fred Golan and Dave Andron] and me, and we didn’t know that Arlo Givens was going to reappear in the story. Chris hadn’t asked us. He hadn’t mentioned it. He just did it, and we were all frankly blown away, first of all by the audacity of him not even running this by us [laughs], but then more than that, it was, as Fred said, “I don’t know that I would’ve done that, and I’m really glad that you did.”

Related: Graham Yost on Winona’s Return, Ava’s Camping Trip



It was a real swing for the fences, and there is that sense in our final year that we’re going to do things that we haven’t done before because what the hell — they’re not going to cancel the show, and we think it’s right. So like last week, to have an episode that was primarily about the relationships of Boyd and Ava and Raylan and Winona, we can do that. We can show Raylan with the baby. And this week, to have that scene in the dungeon with Arlo and just have Raylan’s realization that so much of Arlo is a creature that he created himself in his mind. And [earlier in the episode] seeing Arlo’s box full of stuff is just stuff — it’s just someone’s life. Raylan being Raylan has zero sentimentality, specifically because it’s Arlo, but I also think in general he’s just not a sentimental guy. He just burns it but keeps that key [that eventually opens the dungeon].

So Arlo was a surprise to us, and then Gwyneth Horder-Payton just shot the hell out of it. We went back and forth in the editing as to how much we would see of Arlo and in what way, and we really kind of went for the whole notion of not ever explaining it or addressing it and just letting it be. It’s not a ghost. It’s a figment of his imagination. But it’s just something that we did and hope people respond.

The takeaway that I got from it was that Raylan realized Arlo wasn’t the Big Bad that he thought he was, so Arlo and his childhood are things that Raylan can recover from and move past.

Yes. This was the closest that we could come to Raylan putting that monster to bed and being free of Arlo, just realizing there’s nothing there. You got to let it go.

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And we saw that with his decision with the graves.

At the end of the episode, Raylan says, “I changed my mind. I’m going to let [Frances and Arlo] be where they are,” but he digs up his own tombstone. The guy says, “Where do you want to put it?” And he says, “Your guess is as good as mine.” The past is a statement. The future is a question mark. It’s about him moving forward. It’s not about him wrestling with the past any further.