Justified - Whole Series in Ten Minutes or Less (Spoilers)

If you missed last sesson, want to start watching, or just want a recap read on...

In season one viewers are introduced to 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. Crowder 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 chicken. She does, Raylan arrives, he sits down, the men posture, and then Ava walks in and points a riffle 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 is 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 to him but Bo still isn't happy about all the money Arlo lost him while he was in prison but 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. They both go 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 murderer 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 when a young girl has been kidnapped. 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 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 and Boyd gets away scot-free with the money and a new acquaintance, Shelby. Boyd gives the money to Ava to help with the house and 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. She is thwarted by her poor planning and Raylan is kidnapped by Messer and strung in a 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. Boyd bribes a guard so that after he is thrown into solitary, that night 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 give 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 (a plot thwarted), 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 almost this 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 drive the final blow in the season final 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.

In a season where lines were crossed by Raylan with his interrogations of recurring character Wynn Duffy, Ava, with the way she treated the whore at Audrey’s, and other characters who should have been pawns being treated as kings and the former kings held as pawns, season three proved to be the most intriguing season yet. So tune in tonight to see if the fantastic momentum holds like the Elmore Leonard story on which it is based… And they'll know if you don't.