Spoiler alert! If you haven’t watched the March 24 episode of Justified — “Trust,” written by Benjamin Cavell and directed by Adam Arkin — 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.

You said this episode would have surprises, and you were not joking: No one expected Ava to shoot Boyd and flee with the $10 million. Let’s just get this out of the way: Is Boyd dead?

Here’s one of my favorite things about this season: As word leaked out that Walton [Goggins] was doing the Tarantino film [The Hateful Eight]… You, last week, were doing the mental calculation: “Are they going to kill Boyd because he’s doing the Tarantino film?” No, Boyd is not dead.

The big idea was that we wanted to build a season that was about Raylan versus Boyd with Ava caught in the middle. To a degree, it was kind of a little bit like Boyd’s old thing of blowing up a car on the edge of town and distracting people while he’s actually going to go hit a bank. To a degree, we wanted to distract people with the Raylan versus Boyd and not have them realize that the story was really about Ava, and that she was going to do something that was going to confound them both. The story would then be about getting Ava and who’s going to get her first.

Related: Joelle Carter Talks About Ava’s Gunplay and Getaway

So was Boyd wearing a vest? He could have had one on for his meet with Markham, and Ava could have felt that when she hugged him.

No vest. But there is the semiotics of gunshot wounds in film and television, which of course we violated in the pilot because Raylan shot Boyd right in the heart and yet somehow Boyd lived… But if you see where he was hit this episode, it was not in the heart; it was in his sort of upper left [torso] and that’s the way he spun and went down.

How did you guys work around Walton shooting the Tarantino film in Colorado at the same time you were wrapping the series?

It was crazy. It was one of those things where we were terrified of it, and we were terrified mostly of Walton being stuck in Telluride and us being unable to get him. The solution was simply to have, in that case, a car and two drivers standing by to drive him back to Los Angeles if he couldn’t fly out. Not that that would have been safe. As it turned out, they had a paucity of snow in January and into February. Once we were done with Walton, then they got dumped on. They had all the snow they needed and they finished their stuff in Colorado, and now they’re back on the stages in L.A. It all worked out fine.

What we also did, and it was hard on us writing, was, [executive producer] Sarah Timberman worked out with their producer, Stacey Sher, that we would get Walton for that first week in January. So we shot stuff for [episodes] nine and 10 in that week. Then we got him for a few more days, and did the stuff for 11 and then 12 and 13. We had him here and there. For the last two weeks of filming, we shifted from a Monday to Friday schedule to a Wednesday through Sunday schedule so that we could have Walton on the weekends.

Actually, scheduling him was honestly not that much more difficult than scheduling for Kaitlyn Dever, who plays Loretta, because she’s on Last Man Standing. So we could only get her on certain days. Jere Burns is off doing his TBS show [Angie Tribeca], and I think Sam [Elliott] was doing something else and Mary [Steenburgen]’s on other shows. So, there was a lot of scheduling difficulties, but we got through it.

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