The Justified: City Primeval Roundup is a weekly recap feature where we take the various people, places, and things from the new limited series and score them on a scale from one to five cowboy hats. We play fast and loose with the rules here, similar to the way Raylan Givens handles an investigation. A real loose cannon situation over here.
EPISODE TWO — “THE OKLAHOMA WILDMAN”
Tighty whiteys
There are lots of ways to tell Clement Mansell is a bad dude. There’s all the murders we’ve seen him commit, for one, which is a pretty good tip-off. There’s the thing where he showed up at Raylan’s hotel and invited his daughter to dinner. There’s the general look of wild-eyed menace on his face all the time, no matter what he’s doing, which is a really nice piece of acting work by Boyd Holbrook. But there’s also the underpants.
I am just generally distrustful of people who wear tighty-whiteys, especially like this, just lounging around during the day. It’s suspicious. Yes, sure, the thing where one of his hands has a gun in it and he appears to be scratching his crotch with the barrel of it doesn’t help either, but still. The fact that they’re not that comfortable is like fourth on the list of my issues with them. It’s a really nice touch by the wardrobe department to put a serial killing maniac in them like this. Really drives it home.
Okay, think about it this way: Imagine you knock on someone’s door and they answer it in nothing but these little briefs. Now imagine you knock on someone’s door and they answer it in boxers. Which person creeps you out more? No contest, right?
Case closed.
Dunking your foot in the toilet
Oh, Sandy. Just piling bad decisions on top of each other, stacking them real, real high. High enough that she probably should have climbed up the pile of bad choices to hide that gun in Sweety’s ceiling instead of hopping up on the toilet in heels. Now she’s got a broken shoe and a wet foot and neither of those are in the top ten of her problems. We’ll do some more on this subject later.
The only silver lining here is that she wasn’t wearing sneakers. Breaking the heel and ruining the nice shoes isn’t great either but, as anyone who has stepped in a deep puddle or plunked a foot into a toilet while wearing, like Air Max’s can attest, sloshing around all day with a wet shoe and sock is a miserable experience. Sandy doesn’t need to add all that to her list.
Clement Mansell
Things we learned about Clement Mansell in the second episode:
- He and Sweety have worked together for a while, including one drug dealer stickup that resulted in multiple dead bodies
- Carolyn is his lawyer but she may not like that very much
- He has an energy not entirely dissimilar to the Joker where he is fascinated by the news coverage of his actions and he is willing to let someone beat the hell out of him if it helps him make a chaotic chess move or two
Again, very different from the Raylan-Boyd relationship in a very interesting way. He makes Raylan a little nutso. That’s a recipe for fun. I mean, for us. Raylan… not so much.
My stupid brain
Follow me here…
We learned that the original arresting officer in the old Mansell case was named Raymond Cruz…
Raymond Cruz is played by Paul Calderon, who also played a police detective on Bosch…
Raymond Cruz is also the name of the real-life actor who played Tuco Salamanca on Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul…
And all of that had me so distracted and twisted into a little brain pretzel that I had to go back and rewind the show because I realized I had stopped paying attention for like five minutes.
It’s fine.
Raylan Givens
It’s interesting to see Raylan in Protective Dad Mode like this. It’s not that we’ve never seen him paint outside the lines a little bit. He loves to do that. But this was one of those rare times where he did so out of rage, just black-eyed fury over someone putting his daughter in danger. It’s going to get him in a different kind of trouble, too. He’s used to the whole “I don’t like your methods but you get the job done” speech. He’s gotten that one probably 1000 times. I don’t know how often he’s gotten the “please don’t beat the hell out of a murder suspect with your bare hands in front of a hotel and a few dozen eyewitnesses” speech, though. I suspect he’ll enjoy that one less.
He still does have that Spidey Sense, though, the one that told him Mansell was in the hotel while they were talking to Sandy, and the one that told him Carolyn might not enjoy representing Mansell all that much. It’s fun to see him work. It’s really fun to watch him trade words with his adversaries. Those fists could be a problem, though.
Sandy Stanton
Sandy has:
- A broken heel and a wet foot
- A boss at the casino who is tired of her tardiness
- A gun that killed a judge hidden in a bathroom
- A detective and a U.S. Marshal following her around a lot
- A cold
It’s not great.
Sweety
I kind of love Sweety. Every city needs one failed musician who almost made it big and now runs a little bar with a mostly criminal clientele and guns hidden all over the place and who sells bags of weeds to blond casino hostesses between pouring two fingers of bourbon to guys who are either going to or coming from a bank robbery. I need him to be okay.
Carolyn Wilder
Carolyn and Raylan continue to make little smoldering eyes at each other while they’re sparring with their words over whether and/or how much he should back off of her and/or her demonic clients. That’s fun. I like this for Raylan. Less so for Carolyn because, like, Raylan does not have a great history in the love department, at least as far as choosing suitable mates, and as far as the ones he does get tangled up with later getting kidnapped or placed in harm’s way. Carolyn seems like she can handle herself, though. We still like her so far. I want to see her put on Raylan’s hat at some point.
Willa Givens
Listen, Raylan deserves this. Years of tormenting various authority figures in his own life by bending or ignoring the rules, years of wisecracks and smirks, all coming back to him in the form of a teenage girl who is not impressed at all by his badge and hat.
It’ll be interesting where things go from here, though, now that she knows Mansell used her as a threat and she was at a dinner table with a maniac. I suspect it will not deter her very much. She might not be running around hustling Rolex hustlers and strolling through dilapidated warehouses as much, but that rebellious Givens blood is still rushing through her veins.
Criminals who have lots of knowledge about ancient Egyptian deities
Very few things I love more than criminals who know kind of a lot about history or mythology and use it in a little monologue to fill in backstory about another character or event. I should start doing this stuff. Like, when I’m at Wawa ordering a sandwich and they tell me they’re out of some ingredient, instead of saying “ahhhh nuts” like I usually do, I take a deep breath and launch into a soliloquy about Washington and his troops being short on supplies at Valley Forge, too, but making it work anyway.
I suspect people would hate it a lot.
Wendell Robinson
Love this guy so far.
Little callbacks
Back in the first episode, when the cops were talking about tracking down whoever killed the judge, they said they wanted to be sure they arrested the person in his bed before he had a chance to run.
In the flashback to Mansell’s arrest, he was picked up… sitting in his bed.
I don’t know if that was intentional but I did enjoy it a lot.
Chicken fingers
From Wikipedia:
Chicken fingers (also known as chicken goujons, chicken strips, chicken tenders, chicken nuggets or chicken fillets) are chicken meat prepared from the pectoralis minor muscles of the animal. These strips of white meat are located on either side of the breastbone, under the breast meat (pectoralis major). They may also be made with similarly shaped pieces cut from chicken meat, usually the breast, or sometimes just pulverized chicken flesh.
Chicken tenders were first made in Manchester, New Hampshire at the Puritan Backroom in 1974. Restaurants in Savannah, Georgia, and Baton Rouge, Louisiana have challenged this claim with later assertions to the invention of chicken tenders, although the general consensus supports the claim in Manchester.
We are learning so much today.