In Justified, the freewheeling crime drama based on a series of stories by Elmore Leonard, we grow accustomed to an abundance of moving parts. Straddling the line between police procedural and psychologically-driven prestige television, the show is unusual for the amount of time we spend at leisure with hardened criminals. Whether it’s the weekly con or the arching narratives of Boyd Crowder or Mags Bennett, we become acquainted with their quirks and foibles and watch them in repose during downtime or fallow periods. But the whirring cogs and the scope of enterprise in Harlan County keep things ticking along at a steady pace.
In ‘Save My Love’, the seventh episode of the second season of Justified, it is the parts that move rather than the people. Harlan County, so often the site of action in the series, becomes barely an apparition as all of the intrigue in Lexington, Kentucky centres upon the marshals office and courthouse. Bomb threats and other combustible elements serve to heighten the drama of a clock with a timer, but we watch rapt and helpless as the protagonists whose concern lies not over lit fuses but in faded bands of green.
‘Save My Love’ serves surreptitiously as the climax of a two-parter. In the previous episode ‘Blaze of Glory’, deputy marshal Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant) and court stenographer Winona Hawkins (Natalie Zea) linger in the evidence room of the courthouse trying to piece together their relationship. They daydream and reminisce, conjuring a future with two rocking chairs on the porch and a flurry of little Raylans. The realities of Raylan’s profession and the crisp chime of an elevator bring their reveries to a halt.
Winona has had no better luck with her second husband, the real estate broker Gary Hawkins (William Ragsdale), who is entangled with the Dixie Mafia and has fallen deeply into debt. Though they are separated and she is spending most of her nights with Raylan, she learns that Gary has used their house as collateral for the intended purchase of a horse. Gary assures her that the horse is a champion Arabian, but the fault lines between them grow wider and the track seems increasingly tough.
Angered by Gary and with Raylan proving typically evasive, when Winona comes across a box full of money in the evidence locker she stops for a closer look. She arrives at the bank clutching a single crumpled bill, and her change of heart comes too late when she lands in the middle of a robbery. While chief deputy Art Mullen (Nick Searcy) settles a personal vendetta, Raylan spends the remainder of the episode chasing the elusive bill, which threatens to implicate Winona. Come the end of ‘Blaze of Glory’ the crooks have been variously apprehended, Raylan appears to have recovered the crucial evidence, and all the drama has fizzled out.
Instead ‘Save My Love’ reconstructs the stakes and ratchets up the tension. Winona wakes upon the realisation that the stolen money is still missing: the hundred dollar bill she took from the evidence locker had a torn corner, while the bills Raylan recovered are all intact. Raylan hurries to the office, where his problems quickly stack up. It is Wednesday: not his fault, but it was his turn to bring in coffee. Worse still the marshals office has been enlisted by the FBI to wade through the previous day’s evidence. Raylan attempts to explain his disquiet by saying that he slept through his alarm, but Art who has known Raylan longest looks at his troubled colleague askance.
Raylan winds up on a wild goose chase, taking in the local police department, several rides up and down the elevator, and the office scanning machine. He has the precious bill in his possession, but as it has already been scanned as evidence, he must return it to the pack.
So Raylan throws up his hands and takes off his hat. He returns to Winona not as saviour but comforter, advising the weeping woman that a hundred dollars isn’t such a big deal. Instead Winona cracks the case wide open. Pulling a gym bag from beneath their shared motel room bed, she explains that the hundred dollar bill was only a tester. In fact she took all of the money from the box in the evidence locker, and at more than two hundred thousand dollars it’s a sizeable pot.
‘Save My Love’ then is a comedy of errors, playing out within the close confines of the Lexington courthouse and marshals office like an oversized and unusually animated Rube Goldberg machine. Whether it’s taking hold of the torn hundred or returning the gym bag full of money to its rightful place in the vault, the essential task seems simple but the process keeps being interrupted and the component parts fall endlessly into the wrong hands. Heightened security forces Raylan to take the bag in through the marshals entrance, when Winona tries to leave it in her office she is stymied by the demands of an impatient judge, and suddenly everybody seems to possess prying eyes.
A woman in peril seems especially susceptible to some casual sexism. At the bank in ‘Blaze of Glory’ it is Winona’s prone figure which singles her out from the rest of the crowd, and after snatching the one hundred dollar bill the offending goon kicks her in the face anyway, because he knows that she will never give him what he wants. Later when he is confronted by Raylan, the overconfident criminal says that Winona ‘didn’t seem so innocent’, adding with a leer, ‘Does she taste as good as she looks?’
He gets a punch in the face for his trouble, but at the courthouse there are fewer scruples and a different balance of power between Winona and Mike Reardon (Stephen Root), the presiding judge. When Winona asks to leave her bag up in her office, Reardon dismisses the request, saying ‘I know fifty men in this building who’d pay good money to sniff your gym clothes’.
Beyond the fraught comedy, careful plotting, and narrowing tension, some of the pleasure in ‘Save My Love’ lies in watching Raylan squirm. He is usually our go-between, irksome but still respected back at the office even while he makes the mean streets of Harlan more like home. Here the thick of the action is more like a quagmire, and Raylan is shorn of his usual avuncular wit and gutsy personality, facing a set of circumstances which cannot be handled by the unholstering of a gun.
There are glimpses of the familiar repartee when Raylan comes across Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins) in the courtroom, who has been cultivated by his old mining company for some specialist security work. Otherwise Raylan appears stammering and tense. Outside environmental activists and other anti-coal protesters are rallying. When someone calls in a bomb threat, forcing a search of the building, it seems like the game might be up.
Judge Reardon may be crude but he is also probing. When he calls Raylan into his chambers, he cannot believe that he and Winona allowed each other to slip away. In a sense the cat and mouse of ‘Save My Love’ serves to enact some of the difficulties in the relationship between Winona and Raylan: the hesitations and insecurities, the buck passing, the lingering tensions and all of those things deferred or left unsaid.
Back at the motel as Raylan pulls on his clothes to head to the marshals office, Winona wonders aloud whether he is angry over all of the trouble she is putting him through. When he asks ‘What do you think?’, Winona says ‘I think you’re gonna save me’. Raylan will no doubt do his level best.
Yet there is a transactional quality to their relationship by this point, which is only heightened by the palming of money. There is passion but also a sense of obligation as they carry out their clandestine affair. Are Raylan and Winona saving themselves or saving each other? Shit or step out of the elevator. They are going to have to talk things through sooner or later, and figure the difference between dynamite and road flares.
