Justified: City Primeval will soon (but not soon enough) arrive to catch us up on Deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens’ post-Harlan life in a different environment. That’s one reason why “Long in the Tooth” is an essential rewatch, since it highlights the legend of the legendary lawman, who will soon emerge in Detroit with a “new Boyd” as teased in a new Entertainment Weekly feature piece. Of key interest in the piece is the question of whether Raylan, who made it out of Harlan alive, will be lucky enough to do the same with Detroit.
Really? Man, I don’t know if I can handle this franchise pulling a [SPOILER ALERT] similar move as a certain set of beloved movies. Apparently, though, showrunners Dave Andron and Michael Dinner feel that we should be prepared for anything to happen to Raylan, and that includes a visit from the Grim Reaper in addition to being confirmed as a not-so-ideal father. Dammit:
“If you’re bringing Raylan back, you put him up against a really, really bad guy who doesn’t have any problem killing people, because Raylan could die,” Andron says. “This is a limited [series] and Raylan could very well not make it out of this. Every season we ended the show with ‘You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive,’ but then he does. Right up until the end of the show, you know Raylan’s not going to die, and obviously he did not at the end. But I think, at this point, all bets are off.”
Dinner explains that one of the core aspects of the novel is how it’s really a “three-hander” between the cop, the criminal, and the lawyer in between them. “We wanted to stay true to that,” he says. “When American crime fiction is working on all cylinders, you have a feeling that cosmic forces are maneuvering people together and that one, if not all, of them will not be standing at the end. Raylan’s made it this far, but will he survive this? He very well might not.”
The series will co-star Timothy Olyphant’s real-life daughter, Vivian, as Raylan’s daughter, Willa Givens. And Vivian also delivers some valuable information in while reminiscing about visiting the Justified set during finale filming and revealing that there was so much ice cream on the scene. This revelation checks out for sure.
We shouldn’t expect any familiar faces beyond Raylan, however, because Olyphant warned that “[y]ou’re not going to recognize anyone” in this spinoff. The “new Boyd,” as referenced by Olyphant to EW, will be Clement Mansell, “a.k.a. The Oklahoma Wildman, a violent, sociopathic desperado who’s already slipped through the fingers of Detroit’s finest once.”
Mansell will be portrayed by Boyd Holbrook, who will hopefully be doing the same accent that he did in Narcos. So there, Grim Reaper!
(Via Entertainment Weekly)