Spoiler alert! If you haven't watched this week's episode of Justified — "Alive Day," written by Benjamin Cavell and Jennifer Kennedy and directed by Peter Werner — stop reading now. As he'll do throughout the season, showrunner Graham Yost takes Yahoo TV inside the writers' room.

But first, an important update: Shooting of the series finale wrapped last Friday. Yes, there were tears. "My nickname's Weepy McWeepster. That goes back to Boomtown days," says Yost, who was reminded how he handled that show's less ceremonious end. "We had a gathering at an Irish pub in L.A. the night that it was canceled. I went around and I had a fistful of $5 bills, and if ever I started tearing up, I would hand $5 to someone. It was a way to coax me not to lose it. We're having a big-ass wrap party on Friday night, and there'll be more tears there. I may have to do that again... Maybe $6. One for each year the series aired."

Let's start with Choo-Choo (Duke Davis Roberts), who met his end this hour. Hearing Seabass refer to him as "dumb" was tough to take. Did you always know that Choo-Choo could be a character that would elicit that kind of response from viewers?

No, it was almost entirely due to the actor. It's just one of those things we've been blessed with on this show: an actor pops, and you just want to write more and more for him. I will tell you, there was almost an uprising on set with people saying, "No, no, you can't kill Choo-Choo! No! Bring him back!" Because he was just a beloved character, and the actor was just beloved as well. But for story purposes, we needed to start the unwinding of this particular coterie of Markham's henchmen.



Related: Graham Yost on the Kiss and the Cattle Prod in 'Sounding'

The car scene with Choo-Choo and Calhoun's escort, whom he was ordered to kill, must have been a tricky one to write: There needed to be an instant connection that was believable.

It needed an instant connection, but the connection goes deeper than whatever's between them. It's more Choo-Choo and his history. You get a little more glimpse into the weight that that carries for him, and that sense of before and after things happening in life and the desire to go back. For him, it's going back before the IED went off, but it's also now he's here in this situation. This is where his life has gone, and boy, he wishes it was different. He didn't require much humanizing because, again, the actor did such a great job making Choo-Choo this interesting character, but it added a level to it.



The conversation between Walker and Markham, when Walker was resisting Markham's order to murder Choo-Choo after Raylan and Gutterson figured out Choo-Choo had killed Calhoun, was a different kind of scene for those characters.

It's just fun to have the two of them in a really intense scene where it's not just a story point. It's not just Markham berating him and saying, "You got to do this or that." It was much more of a man-to-man talk, and there was a little Easter egg in there. It's unrelated to the character beats in a way, but at one point, Markham refers to being in Vietnam, which was an idea that Sam had, by the way — what if he was a Vietnam vet? — which we thought was interesting in terms of Arlo having been as well.



And he talks about coming upon a Vietcong who had stepped in a punji pit. Punji sticks were basically, if you don't know, like sharpened points of bamboo, and you would step on one, and it would go right through your foot. And they would smear them with excrement so that you would get infected. But the whole point of them, as he says in the scene, is that an injured man would slow down the whole group, and so they came across this Vietcong who killed himself. Well, back in Season 2... this is a long story. Are you ready for this?

Go for it.

Back in Season 2 — when we were concocting the opening episode, when we wanted to meet Loretta McCready — before it became Loretta in a marijuana drying shed being chased by a pedophile, we had had ideas about marijuana fields up in the woods, you know, in a meadow, and the various booby-traps that people would employ to protect their fields. And we came upon this idea that, given the history of the people in the area and how many would've served in Vietnam, someone had, in fact, laid out punji sticks hidden in the ground that people would step on.

