Spoiler alert: If you haven't watched the Feb. 10 episode of Justified — "The Trash and the Snake," written by Chris Provenzano and Ingrid Escajeda 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 discuss the twists and turns and tease where we're headed.

We have to start with the return of Dickie Bennett (Emmy winner Jeremy Davies), which was a great surprise. How did you decide to bring him back?

Well, we knew that we wanted someone else who appears in the episode, our lovely Loretta McCready [played by Kaitlyn Dever]. She came out of the weed business; the Bennetts were in the weed business. We all felt it was part and parcel of what Markham is in town to do, and so we liked the idea of Loretta putting down stakes and saying she's taking the money that she got from Mags and she's going to get in that business. The primo land would be the Bennett land — we just liked the idea of her snaking that land out from under Dickie and what his reaction would be. The whole thing is just for him to howl in pain, "Loretta!"



I had to rewind his entrance, when he rolled in and said, "What up, pimps?" to Raylan and Gutterson. As a viewer, you can't wait to see what Jeremy's going to do with a monologue: where he'll take his pauses, the sounds that he'll make, the hand gestures. Is it the same for the cast and crew?

All that stuff, yeah. Other actors just have to wait till he stops talking before they can say their line. He has inhabited this Dickieness that is so insane, that is entirely hard to predict what you're going to get, but you know it will be spontaneous and interesting and absolutely can't take your eyes off him.



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It was great to have Gutterson there to witness the Dickie show, and Raylan's "Archangel" bit, which also made it feel different than Raylan's last visit to see Dickie.

It's just great to have Raylan and Gutterson together at any time because they're on the same side, but they're also giving each other s--t. Jacob is such a simply comic actor that it's great to have him react, then pan to the crazy shenanigans. Just the notion of Dickie going off on this thing of visions and then Raylan just playing into it.



Who's responsible for that Gutterson line in an earlier scene about him preferring to die by having Sigourney Weaver choke him out with her thighs?



Absolutely Jacob [Pitts], and wonderful, because back in the day, when I lived in New York, I knew Sigourney through friends. People will think I put that in there, but that was just Jacob.

Another surprise people will definitely be talking about is Wiz (guest star Jake Busey) blowing up. What was the inspiration for that moment, which, like Picker's death last season, was hilarious?

I'll take some credit. I just said, "Wouldn't it be cool if Duffy and Boyd go on a test mission to see how to get into a vault like that?" Duffy, having come up through the security business, would know people who knew how to break into safes. So then Ingrid came up with the character of the Wiz, and the whole notion of him calling himself the Wiz. And then we got Jake Busey, which sort of added a whole level to it — just this guy who is so cocky and self-important and grandiose. We just liked the idea of him blowing up. I mean, it was as simple as that. There's nothing any grander than that.



When they were shooting this sort of mortar full of fake guts and blood at Walton [Goggins] and Jere [Burns], Adam Arkin asked them to keep their eyes open. Some got in Jere's eye, but he's a pro, and he just really struggled to keep his eyes open even though this stuff was flying at their faces. I think at the end of the series, we could put together a little reel of Wynn Duffy reacting to horrible, horrible violence. [Laughs.] He has blood sprayed on him in Season 4 when he's sitting in his motor coach and Nicky Augustine shoots the corrupt FBI guy. That's just part of Wynn's burden.

The one thing that got cut out is, we had a follow-on scene where Boyd and Duffy go back to the Wiz's house to clean up, because they got the guts on them, and in comes Bridget [the girl with the snake], who was named in honor of Bridget Fonda, who was in Jackie Brown. She realizes the Wiz is dead, and she's furious, and Duffy gives her $10,000 to shut up, and he says, "And I mean, shut up. I mean you don't talk to anyone, and you stop talking now." And she says, "Well, this is the start," and he shoots her in the head. "I told you to stop talking."

One of the things that was going to come out in the scene was that it was her who had called the Wiz and rang his cell phone, which set off the explosives. We liked the idea of the Wiz being truly hoisted on his own petard — which, by the way, a petard was a grenade of some sort way back when. So he blows up on his own. We shot it, and we just felt that with the propulsion of the episode, it just wasn't necessary. Part of it was, we wanted to re-establish Duffy's badassery, but you know, you've had Jere Burns, you don't need to re-establish that.

Related: Graham Yost Talks 'Cash Game,' Sam Elliott, and a Twist Straight Out of Harlan

Getting back to Raylan, he and Avery finally came face-to-face at Loretta's, after it's clear to viewers that Walker and the rest of Markham's men are willing to kill to get the best land for their weed business and Loretta has no intention of selling. Tim Olyphant likes to joke that he's been doing Sam Elliott for years, just not as cool. How much excitement was there around that scene?

Tim came out of that scene and was just eyes wide and grinning — and I could tell that by talking to him on the phone. He just said, "More Sam Elliott." He just wanted scenes with him, and that's basically what everyone said from Episode 3, where Joelle [Carter] got to play a long scene with him and then Walton did. Everyone just gets a real kick out of playing opposite him. He was born to do an Elmore Leonard bad guy.



Having Raylan and Avery meet was a specific target for the episode. We knew we wanted Raylan to get there to kind of be saving Loretta, because Loretta is sort of the client of our series after Season 2, in a way. We're always rooting for her. We also wanted to show her having some grit on her own and that she is sort of unflappable at this point. So those were the goals, and then you just add Gutterson in there to be funny and have him stand on his gun. That's the fun of doing this show: You know you're going to get those characters all together. Don't screw it up, you got a shot at a good scene.

Will we see Loretta again this season?

You know, listen, Loretta is embarking on being a player in the weed business hoping it goes legal, and Markham wants the same thing. That's all I'll say.



How did you land on this legal weed business storyline for the final season?

We researched it. There's two things: One is, like every state in the union, there's obviously someone pushing a bill for medical. That hasn't gotten a lot of traction there, but we'll see within the next five years what happens nationally. It could slide back and Colorado could repeal, and Washington could, too, but more and more, the public sentiment is in favor. It's just, "Oh, come on, what are we doing? Why are we spending all this money trying to stop something that's a hell of a lot less dangerous than alcohol, in terms of lives lost and stuff?" So we just sort of feel that's where the nation is headed. However, the other thing about Kentucky is, it was the number one hemp growing region in the world at one point, and then when hemp got lumped in with marijuana, that all fell by the wayside. So there is this Kentucky tradition of hemp and, to a certain degree, cannabis.



This episode really tightened the screws on Ava. Her meeting Raylan in the stairwell of the hotel was almost more nerve-wracking than Raylan, Boyd, and Picker's stairway conversation in "Decoy."

And that stairwell was actually in the power plant where they blew up the Wiz. That's just the nature of the game. It's like, "Oh, we need a stairwell somewhere." "Oh, this one will do. We can put that with that day. Somebody just puts some signs on the wall and have an extra as a maid." We wanted the danger of it, of them actually meeting in the place where all these bad guys are.



Ava asks Raylan if holding someone's fate in his hand is a burden or what gets him out of bed in the morning. That's a question we'll return to a lot this season?

Well, you know, the last scene of Season 5 was Ava saying, "I'm scared," and Raylan saying, "You're going to be fine." So he does hold her fate in his hands. He can play pretty casual about her, turn it around and say, "You've got nothing to worry about" but Raylan's a hero. We never lose sight of that.



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View photos 'Hey Dude' star David Brisbin More

Katherine Hale (Mary Steenburgen) decided to spend the day with Ava. You get the feeling Katherine is waiting for Ava to screw up, and yet, in the car ride after their heist of the tennis bracelet, it's Katherine who looks momentarily uncomfortable after sharing that the jewelry store owner now locks the door on her when he used to meet her at it with champagne. What did you want to accomplish with that scene?

We didn't want it to reveal too much, but just a glimpse into what life post-Grady has been like for Katherine. That she's done OK, but she has certainly descended from the heights of where they had been and it is not something that she is happy about. There's actually one little bit where she just says, "S--t," and it was actually the tail end of a take where something happened in the traffic or something, and that was just Mary saying, "S--t." But we liked it so much that we put it into the show.



One thing about the jewelry store scene: the jeweler, Winston, you recognize him? That is David Brisbin, and he played Mr. Ernst, who owned and operated the Bar None Ranch on Hey Dude [the Nickelodeon show where Yost started his career]. And Dave and I have remained close friends since 1989, and I always try to get him in [my shows] somewhere. He's just a great actor, very funny. He had a big part in Boomtown. And I will say one other thing, the stolen tennis bracelet that [Katherine] swapped out plays a role in the rest of the season.

Now I'm already thinking... is she going to frame Ava?



No. Nothing like that. You'll see.

We found out two other things about Katherine this episode: that she believes Avery ratted on her husband, and that's why she's determined to steal from him, and that she knows about Albert (Danny Strong), the guard whose change of heart Ava needs everyone to believe resulted in her release.

They tried to cross the T's and dot the I's on the story of how Ava got released, but Albert is the weak link in the story and that's a big part of the next episode.



So we'll see Danny Strong again?



Yes, and it was hard to get him because he was directing an episode of [Fox's] Empire, which is his show. But we managed to get him, so we were very lucky, and it was fun to hang with him.

The episode ends with Ava wanting desperately to leave, and Boyd telling her, "No, we're going to steal Markham's money and his idea and be the weed kings of Harlan." So first, you're like, poor Ava. But then you're thinking how both Raylan and Boyd want to bring down Markham. A lot of fans will hope they'll find themselves on the same side again, at some point.



We have a strange dynamic in this show in that we've got a hero and a villain, Raylan and Boyd, but in order to have story, we also have to bring in someone else, and you need that other person to have conflict with both Raylan and Boyd. So you can start to think that Raylan and Boyd can be on the same side, but they're not on the same side. So that poses challenges for us writing the show, but it's also where a lot of our meat comes because they're not in alignment. And yeah, that was a big goal for this episode, the idea that from the first episode of this season, Boyd has been saying, "Let's go." So finally, when Ava says, "Let's go," Boyd says, "You have to hold on a second; I want to stay." The ramifications of that are what the next episode is about.

Raylan also paid Art (Nick Searcy) another visit this episode. Most people think of Raylan as invincible, but Art seems to always be there to remind us that Raylan can get bit in the ass, too. Was that the goal of that scene?



It was a couple of things. Raylan says, "I just want to get Boyd and go," and then along comes Avery Markham, and he says the story about his mother and the trash and the snake, which became the title of the episode: You see a snake, you don't just come back and say you saw a snake; you take care of it. So he's a lawman, and he feels he needs to take care of Avery Markham and look into this. And our [technical] advisor says, "Yeah, anyone you come across, you're interested, and you're asking around. You're trying to find out how do they play? Can this case be even bigger than we thought?"

But the other side of that is, does Raylan really want to leave? Because if you keep on finding excuses to do other stuff, and you take your eyes off your main goal, doesn't that sort of say that — at some level, maybe even on a primarily unconscious level — maybe you don't want to leave? So, now we've got Boyd saying at the end of the episode, "I want to stay," Ava saying she wants to leave, and Raylan both saying he wants to leave and acting like he wants to stay. That's sort of, in many ways, the point of the episode.

There's one other thing in that scene with Art, when they bring up the whole idea of who ratted out Grady Hale? Who killed Vasquez's boss? Who killed Grady in prison? All these questions of 14 years ago, and Art is a bored man recooperating on medical leave and he says, basically, "If I get too bored, maybe I'll sniff around." That also becomes part of the next few episodes.

You're shooting the series finale this week. How are you feeling about it?



We feel pretty good about it. It's not going to satisfy everyone, but I think it will satisfy a lot of people, and again, our primary goal, in absentia, posthumously, we're trying to please Elmore. What would he have done? At the end of the day, if he went, "Yeah, that was the right way to end it" — that's been our goal.

Click the photo below to launch the gallery of our picks for the funniest Justified moments in the first five seasons:

Justified airs Tuesdays at 10 p.m. on FX.