Justified – Season 6, Episode 7 – Hunting Trip 1

Other things happened in this episode, but this was really all about Boyd and Ava.

Oh, Winona was back, to basically say that Raylan could have his cake (her, his daughter) and eat it too (the job, and the way he does it). This is quite convenient for Raylan, but Natalie Zea is able to pull off her part as Winona – and we can believe that a frightening life with Raylan is better than being alone with a baby all the time. I had forgotten that their marriage was supposedly hopeless, but that’s my fault, and so the show refreshed my memory in a charming way, raising the stakes for Raylan. Hey, he’s not just stalling for time in Kentucky because there’s nothing waiting for him in Florida except shared custody arrangements. He’s got Winona and a screaming baby – who helpfully stopped screaming when in his care at the office.

And Walker isn’t a goner yet, despite Markham’s apparently successful attempt to bribe his war buddy into not coming to his aid. Walker performs some surgery on himself, then guns down two paramedics. So he’ still on the loose. There’s some back and forth between Art and Markham about who snitched on his ex-partner, Katherine’s now-dead husband.

But enough about that. The episode turns on Boyd’s camping trip with Ava after getting his call from Limehouse. He knows something, she knows it isn’t good, and the whole trip is knee-deep in menace. He’s offering her a drink that he had saved up for a future wife, which is still supposed to be Ava and which he insists she drink early. There’s back and forth about Boyd’s older brother, shot and killed by Ava in the first season and rarely mentioned again until this one. That hasn’t worked as well, because it feels like they’re trying to add extra reasons for suspicion between them when they have enough already. The slapping scene also didn’t do it for me, because again, they were squabbling over side issues when there’s a big one: Ava is working to bring Boyd down, and Boyd knows it.

But in the end, the delayed showdown is worth the wait. Boyd taunts and threatens Ava the entire episode, and finally he gets the confession that Ava has been working with Raylan. Boyd hands her his gun, telling her to shoot him if she’s been sleeping with him. (This seems like a bit of an odd aside, as Boyd has not demonstrated this level of insecurity before, but fine, he knows their history, and we saw last episode’s kiss.)  But in the final moment of the episode, we see it was really a test. The gun wasn’t loaded when Boyd handed it to Ava, but he loads it after she gives it back. What’s left unclear is what happens next. How does this couple survive, despite Ava’s reasonable protests that he left her in an impossible position? It’s not clear. It certainly doesn’t look good. But Ava has come clean to Boyd. What happens next? It seems likely that it won’t end well, for one or both of them. But Boyd, at last, isn’t presented as a fool. And the show left me eager for its next chapter.