Justified: Dark as a Dungeon – Review

Justified continues to impress with the varying plotlines and interacting characters. Each episode of the final season introduces new scenarios that are becoming more and more intense. However, each of these scenarios also becomes more humorous at the same time. The latest episode, “Dark as a Dungeon”, increases the intensity while providing some resolution and teases for upcoming episodes.

Finally, Justified has provided some much-needed resolution on a few of the plotlines. For starters, the manhunt for Ty Walker had been ramping up the intensity. Walker was still injured, but he managed to evade police pursuit despite some solid efforts by Tim Gutterson and Rachel Brooks. Walker had evaded the police for so long that he actually caused some strange reactions from Avery Markham and Raylan Givens. For some reason, Markham and Raylan were so desperate to catch Walker that they formed a coalition and launched a desperate campaign to capture Walker, complete with some added motivations.

While Walker was evading police capture, Ava and Boyd were still trying to figure out a way to avoid getting killed or thrown in prison. Their plans to escape Harlan with a lot of money weren’t spectacular, but the desperation actually made their situation worse. Even worse, Boyd’s plan to blow up an old mine shaft while digging into Markham’s vault wasn’t going very well. Zachariah started subtly sabotaging Boyd’s operation while trying to charge more money for his services. This sabotage angered Boyd and put Raylan in pursuit of Zachariah. Ultimately, this pursuit for Zachariah didn’t amount to anything, but it did lead to an important fight.

Finally, Raylan also spent a portion of the episode taking care of family affairs. He started by cleaning out Arlo’s house and throwing out all of the illicit drugs and illegal weaponry. During this search, Raylan found a box of Arlo’s military stuff that contained a random hidden key. Additionally, Raylan also began to make plans with the local mortician for moving his mother’s grave to an actual cemetery. The rest of the remains didn’t matter to Raylan, so he resorted to making witty jokes about the situation. Thankfully, these jokes also led into more jokes and bickering with Tim Gutterson.

“Dark as a Dungeon” was a great, but very confusing episode of Justified. Raylan’s story was entertaining at times, but the moments with Arlo’s remains came out of nowhere. The story didn’t seem to fit with anything else in the season. In fact, this storyline seemed to be self-contained and didn’t lead to anything. However, it was nice to see Arlo reappear in the show, even though he was a ghost. Thankfully, the rest of the episode was absolutely enjoyable. Plus, the resolution in Ty Walker’s story was even better. The ending of the episode was rather foreboding, but that is to be expected with some of Justified’s storylines.