Summary
Justified: City Primeval is really starting to find its groove now in a slower episode full of lots of fun character pairings and smart dialogue.
This recap of Justified: City Primeval Season 1 Episode 5, “You Good?”, contains spoilers.
As it turns out, the sort-of cliffhanger at the end of last week’s Episode 4 did indeed lead to Raylan and Carolyn spending the night together. And I bring that up now, right at the top, because it’s an important turning point in the story for both characters. Now, Raylan has a personal stake in the case that isn’t Willa; someone he doesn’t have to babysit. And Carolyn has someone she can potentially trust to get Clement Mansell out of her hair – if her personal circumstances don’t conspire to make his brand of madness an answer to various problems.
Nobody else is sleeping together in “You Good?”, except Clement and Sandy, obviously, but everyone seems to amble through the episode in that post-coital fog of indecision, like potential new avenues have cropped up everywhere but it’s impossible to determine which will lead to a dead end or a new beginning.
Justified: City Primeval Season 1 Episode 5 Recap
There’s no movement in the Judge Guy murder case, which is proving a problem for law enforcement. Raylan and Wendell are paired up again by the task force’s furious leadership and forced to tread old ground in the hope it’ll somehow yield new information. “If I wrote this case as a whodunit,” Wendell says at one point, “it wouldn’t have sold one copy.”
In theory, it should be simple. Raylan postulates, correctly, that whoever has the book did the crime, but proving anything is another matter entirely. We already know that Clement, now working with Sweetie, is in possession of the book, but nobody seems to be able to get anywhere near him, even as he swans around town blackmailing well-positioned businessmen.
Who do Clement and Sweetie blackmail?
One of the names plucked from the book is Bulldozer Burt, a real estate mogul whom Clement and Sweetie strong-arm into a payout that seems to Sweetie like life-changing money but to Clement like a first installment.
And that’s obviously going to be a problem. Clement’s “I’m doing whatever I want” approach to crime means he’ll inevitably be his own undoing, but also probably the undoing of everyone else around him first. I’m still strongly of the opinion that he killed Judge Guy entirely by chance, stumbled on the book also accidentally, and is just having fun seeing how much he can use it to extort people.
What that means, though, is that he’ll push and push until it all goes haywire, probably kill or maim some people in the aftermath, and leave his supposed “allies” like Sweetie to deal with the fallout. Sweetie and Carolyn both see the book and its names as a way to hit a home run, secure a sizeable fortune, and free themselves from whatever they’re mixed up in. That isn’t enough for Clement. As we saw when he tried to rob Skender, he couldn’t resist provoking an Albanian blood feud just for fun.
Why does Carolyn agree to use Judge Guy’s book?
Through Raylan’s new relationship with Carolyn we also learn a little more about her old relationship with Jamal, who first turns up outside her house when Raylan is leaving, and then later gatecrashes a meal they’re having.
We already knew Jamal was in debt, but here it also becomes clear that he’s extorting Carolyn out of alimony payments despite living with another woman, which she deduces literally during his telling her that he wants to work things out between them.
Thanks to all Jamal’s nonsense, Carolyn is flat broke, so she sees Judge Guy’s book – and one name in it, in particular – as an opportunity to assume the late judge’s position, which she feels she richly deserves and that is also being gunned for by Diane. It isn’t clear, yet, who she plans to extort to get what she wants, and it isn’t especially clear what other kinds of names might be in that book – a vague conversation between Clement and Sweetie is the only giveaway, and even then it’s not very much – but for dramatic purposes, there must be someone we know in there.
Justified: City Primeval Season 1 Episode 5 Ending Explained
At the end of the episode, Raylan meets up with Raymond Cruz, the protagonist of the novel the show is adapted from. Raylan has basically played Cruz’s role thus far, so it’s nice, if slightly confounding, to see him turn up.
And while they simply have a conversation about a couple of shootings, one of which may or may not have been – all together now – totally justified, it represents in many ways this revival at its best yet. Two short-tempered, morally flexible men meeting their mirror opposites, and seeing in each other what they can’t quite determine is the worst or the best of themselves.
You can catch Justified: City Primeval Season 1 Episode 5, “You Good?” exclusively on FX.
