City Primeval Was A Triumphant Return – But What About Season 2?

Smooth-talking criminal Boyd has always been opposite Raylan at the center of “Justified,” so it feels right for him to make a comeback in the finale’s last moments. That being said, his sign-off at the end of season 6 of the original series was tremendous, so I hope any face-off the pair end up in will keep in mind the character development he’s gone through over the years. Boyd started the show as a Svengali-like leader decked out in white supremacist regalia, and ended it as a dangerous yet bizarrely endearing man in black with a whole lot of blood on his hands. He and Raylan have also always existed as two sides of the same coin — one a surprisingly heartfelt criminal, the other a surprisingly violent hero.

Raylan’s struggled with his own morality and the weight of his badge and gun since the beginning of “Justified” (the show, after all, began with him shooting a man for revenge’s sake), but “Justified: City Primeval” upped the ante by taking a hard-boiled neo-noir approach to the justice system. By the time Raylan takes an early retirement in the finale, taking his ability to shoot an unarmed Clement Mansell (Boyd Holbrook) as a sign he needed to quit, it’s clear the character has little faith left in the law and order system. Yet he’ll need all the help he can get to track down Boyd, a man whose life he spared several times before because, as he put it, “We dug coal together.”

Any showdown between the pair should be appropriately loaded given their complicated history, but I hope if “Justified” returns, it won’t make Boyd a simple supervillain figure. The relationship between the two opposing forces is more interesting than that, and the show knows it.