If you missed last season, want to start watching, or just want a recap, read on...
In season one viewers are introduced to Deputy US Marshal Raylan Givens a man best described by his ex-wife and sometimes girlfriend Winona as the "angriest man [she has] ever known." Raylan has been kicked out of Miami for shooting a high profile gun thug by the name of Tommy Bucks after said thug had kidnapped and killed a man in front of Raylan. Being forced to return to his hometown of Harlan, Kentucky, Raylan reconnects with Art Mullen, an old friend; Ava Crowder, a young woman with a crush; and Boyd Crowder, a former friend turned criminal. Boyd was wanted for questioning by the marshals in another matter, but when he blows up a church, then kills a man, their fates are all but sealed. When they reconnect, both men are initially happy to see each other before settling on opposite sides of the law -- and Ava's dinner table. Boyd asks if Raylan would kill him if he had the chance and Raylan responds "You make me pull, I put you down." Boyd kidnaps Ava, his brother's "widow and murderess", and has her invite Raylan over to her house for fried chicken. She does, Raylan arrives, he sits down, the men posture, and then Ava walks in and points a deer rifle at Boyd's chest. Before he can fire upon her, Raylan shoots him where he sits and says "we dug coal together."
In the hospital recovering from his near fatal gunshot wound, Boyd discovers God and in jail tries to turn men over the side of Jesus. This doesn't go over so well, until his equally incarcerated father Bo threatens any man who thinks he wants a go at Boyd. Raylan accidentally gets Bo released as a consequence of taking down a dirty sheriff in Harlan and starts a frowned upon relationship with Ava. When the AUSA in Buck’s case reveals he knows Raylan's been sleeping with Ava after a particularly difficult prisoner transport, the case against Boyd is also dropped as sleeping with the sole witness in your shooting investigation is apparently a bad thing. Raylan makes an attempt to put Boyd back in prison by talking to the witness to the church bombing. The man honestly doesn’t know anything and Raylan is forced to accept Boyd's freedom and the church he starts off in the wood devoted to helping convicts find god and bomb meth labs.
After he accidentally kills an undercover agent, the marshals in Lexington tried again to bring Crowder to justice, but again there are no witnesses and no one willing to take the fall. A couple-of-three raids later and Wade Messer confesses to the bombing letting Boyd off the hook. Bo, on the other hand, is thrilled that his son has found Jesus and is helping the family business by taking down people who don't pay protection money to him. He is less than happy to find Boyd is just as willing to attack those under his protection as not.
Raylan's father Arlo has never had a good relationship with his son. After shacking up with Raylan's aunt Helen, Arlo's late wife's sister, the bond grows more frequent but not stronger. The US Marshals eventually convince Arlo to turn on Bo, which turns out to be a mistake as Arlo tries to cross the marshals, but Bo still isn't happy about all the money Arlo lost him while he was in prison, so he sends Arlo to shoot Raylan in his hotel room and then call in the big boys to finish the job. Raylan gets the jump on Arlo and shoots him instead. Raylan then gets a call from Bo that he has Ava, Raylan's now ex-girlfriend, and will kill her if Raylan brings any police backup. So Raylan calls Boyd, knowing he is one of the few people he can trust with this. They go both to rescue Ava and get revenge on Bo, but before they can do either, Bo is shot dead by some of his and Buck's former associates from Miami. Boyd, Raylan, and Ava take shelter in the cabin while they formulae the plan that eventually sees Ava running thru the woods and Boyd going after the woman that killed his father. Raylan looks wryly after his former friend and starts to think of a way to bring this back square with the Marshal's service.
Season two starts with a long recap before launching into the action where Boyd has followed his father's murdereress and Raylan wasn't far behind. After sending Boyd back home with another bullet wound, he takes the girl to barter with the Man in Miami. They come to an agreement, but when Raylan comes back there's a new baddie in town. Actually Mags Bennett has always been active in Harlan, and the surrounding county Corbin, but she was off his radar until now that a young girl has been kidnapped by a known pedophile hired by Mags’ sons. After Raylan saves Loretta, Mags kills Loretta's father for going outside of the county for help. She decides to adopt Loretta and tell her nothing of what she did to her father.
Boyd tries to make amends to Ava, a woman who in the pilot described him as “creepy,” by helping to pay the mortgage on her house. She agrees, as long as he does nothing illegal or that she disapproves of, so Boyd goes back into the mines. He manages pretty well before a group of men ask him to be a part of a heist they were planning for the mine. He reluctantly signs up, but then finds out that they plan to kill him. After an orchestrated amount of sabotage on his part, when they go to kill him, they blow themselves up. Boyd gets away scot-free with the money and a new acquaintance, Shelby. Boyd gives the money to Ava to help with the house; not long after, they find themselves in bed together. Soon Raylan is instructed to protect a lady from the mining company while she's visiting. Carol hires Boyd as her enforcer without telling Raylan. She and Mags are trying to get people to sign their land over to them, each for her own purpose: Carol, so the company can strip the mine and Mags, supposedly so that she can protect it.
Boyd puts together Mags' plan and signs the remaining pieces of land over to himself. He turns them over to Mags with the understanding he would then be in charge of all the crime in Harlan except weed, which Mags wants for her boys, and whores, which Ava forbade. Mags, then sells her shares to the mining company for which the whole town hates her because they intend to strip mine it. Her one solace is Loretta until Loretta finds out that Mags killed her daddy and sets upon trying to kill the woman herself. Mags is thwarted by her sons’ poor planning. Raylan is kidnapped by Messer and strung in trees so that Mags' son Dickie can beat the hell out of him with a baseball bat as revenge for Raylan crippling him in high school. Boyd shows up just in time to save Raylan and almost takes his revenge on Dickie for Dickie's earlier shooting of Ava, but Raylan asks to borrow him so Dickie can take him to his momma.
Raylan has a sit down with Mags where they talk about how all her kids are dead except Dickie the disappointment, the town people hating her, Loretta knowing the truth and in the end she takes her own life with while drinking a mixture she called “apple pie” mixed with a little poison. "It was in the glass not the jar."
Season three sees Raylan in the hospital after he was shot towards the end of the previous season. His ex-wife and current pregnant girlfriend, Winona had been leaving him until she was stopped and told Raylan is in critical condition. She rushes to his side and for three months makes no mention of leaving him, but after a particularly interesting shooting involving a brutal murderer by the nickname of Ice Pick, she leaves him again. Raylan tracks her down not because of their baby necessarily, but because of some money related to a cold case that’s gone missing. It’s not unfounded as Winona had stolen the money before but replaced it when she thought she would get caught. Unlike in the past, she didn’t do it this time.
Meanwhile Boyd is still pissed at Raylan for taking Dickie Bennett so he could talk to his momma. After a humorous debate as to whether Dickie can be traded back and forth “like a pig I borrowed from you,” Boyd lunges at the still-injured Raylan and pushes him through the glass walls of the marshal’s office. Immediately he surrenders to the other marshals and is put in the same state prison as Dickie Bennett. An episode or two later when he goes to make his move on Dickie, Boyd is pulled in to talk to Raylan who tells him that he intends to drop the charges against Boyd because as Raylan sees it, Boyd wasn’t attacking a federal officer but an old friend. In actuality, the marshals had put together Boyd’s plan and hoped to stop it before he could implement it. Boyd bribes a guard so that after he is thrown into solitary, his cell is left open as is his next door neighbor Dickie Benett’s. Boyd strangles Dickie to get him to tell him where the remaining Bennett money is and Dickie tells Boyd, and the guard listening unbeknownst to either of them at the door, that even if he wanted to give Boyd the money, he couldn’t because a man named Limehouse was holding it and wouldn’t give it to Boyd even if Dickie personally said it was alright. When Boyd is sprung and goes to talk to Limehouse to cut a deal that if Dickie were to die, as there’d be no more Bennett heirs (overlooking a couple of Mags’ grandchildren,) that they could split the money. Limehouse refuses.
Seeing an opening in the Harlan crime empire, and grossly underestimating Boyd, Robert Quarles comes down from Detroit in an effort to start up his own oxy mill. The season hinges on Quarles becoming more unhinged; killing Winona’s ex-husband to try and pin it on Raylan, shooting at Boyd’s gang outside a bar, trying to buy the sheriff, and eventually kidnapping two young boys. Limehouse at the same time is trying to know everything there is to know about everything and succeeding magnificently. Boyd has to kill one of his longer standing allies in crime when he betrays him to Limehouse and this almost proves his undoing. Little does he know another traitor lurks in his midst….
Raylan, in addition to Winona leaving, has to deal with his father, a constant pain in his side, who drives the final blow in the season finale when it’s revealed that his father shot a cop, one of Raylan’s friends, because he was wearing a hat similar to Raylan’s and the cop was menacing Boyd, whom Arlo had already referred to as “Raylan” and “son.” Arlo attempts to stick the knife further by confessing not only to the crime he committed, but to Boyd’s as well allowing his adopted “son” to run free. “All he saw was a man in a hat pointing a gun at Boyd.”
Season four attempted to shake up the plot by instead of having a big bad to take down, Raylan faced a mystery; the mystery of Waldo Truth, Drew Thompson, and the day cocaine came to Harlan.
The season started with a flashback: a man falling violently from the sky, landing nearly on another man’s driveway. The significance of which wouldn’t be fully revealed until the next episode. In the present, Boyd is straightening out a kink in his empire, Arlo’s now vacant house is broken into by a couple of kids, and Raylan is dealing with a bail jumper as part of a moonlighting job, an attempt to get more money with Winona’s baby now firmly on its way. Raylan gets the call that Arlo’s house has been vandalized and during a stop to the hardware store, loses his car and the bail jumper.
Frequent Audrey’s prostitute Ellen May is scared when one of her frequent clients gives her cocaine and dresses as a giant fake bear without warning her. She understandably shoots the man. Unfortunately for her, Ava doesn’t see the wounding of one of their regular clients as a good thing. She and Boyd have a debate as to what to do with her, ultimately deciding that Ellen May has to die. Luckily, one of Boyd’s old army buddies Colton has come back in search of employment; unluckily, she escapes before he has a chance to kill her, seemingly rescued by the sheriff.
Raylan gets his bail jumper back and goes to talk to Arlo about a driver’s license he found in a bag from the new hole in his father’s house. Arlo claims to know nothing, but later slits the throat of a man who overheard the conversation. Raylan goes to talk to the Truth family and discovers that “Waldo Truth” has been dead for thirty years despite still drawing a draw check from the government. After being kidnapped by hill folk and searching for a missing man with the only clue being a severed foot, Raylan gets on a firmer trail for Drew Thompson, the man actually responsible for what happened thirty years ago. Raylan catches Drew, now posing as the local sheriff, but by that point, more than half the cast wants him for some reason or another. Raylan gets him into protective custody with the help of the season newcomer Constable Bob’s knowledge of the train system.
Boyd and Ava make some dangerous new friends and, after crossing them, make a deal with the still powerful Theo Tonin to make the “Harlan elite” back off. All this not long after Boyd told Ava he intended to go legit and make the Crowder name one that people weren’t afraid of letting their kids socialize with. And with the promise of a new marriage too….
Despite seemingly tying everything up in a neat bow, Boyd and Raylan still have the threat of Tonin’s man Nicky Augustine looming over their heads. Augustine attempts to bring Raylan to his side by having the still pregnant Winona kidnapped. Raylan makes a deal with Tonin’s son to have Augustine assassinated. Where that will leave Raylan in the new season is anyone’s guess.
Boyd and Ava meanwhile have one more threat: the threat that the body of Delroy reppearing, a man Ava killed the previous season. They go into the mine shaft where they dumped the body, find the sherrif’s man already has exhumed him, exchange Delroy’s body with a decoy, and they would have gotten away with it if Boyd hadn’t have made the fatal error of pissing off both the Harlan elite and the sister of a man trying to sell religion to Harlan. With the forces against them, Ava is caught redhanded with Delroy’s body and Boyd is let off scot-free for the season. He is given half of the heroin distribution in the county, his second goal of the season. And he has lost another long standing aly, his cousin Johnny, although Johnny wasn’t killed like the previous snitch.
What we can look forward to this season is Jere Burn’s Wynn Duffy promoted to series regular, the expansion of the Crowe family, and the effect Ava’s jail time is going to have on Boyd.
