Reminder: ‘Justified’ Starts In Less Than One Week

If you are anything like me, you spent the majority of your holidays parked in front of a television watching some combination of Law & Order, football, and strange movies with titles like The Dog Who Saved the Holidays (starring Dean Cain and Joey Lawrence!). In doing so, you probably also saw the commercial for the upcoming season of Justified a few dozen times, and it made you squee like teenage girl. “Hey, loogit,” you may have exclaimed. “It’s Raylan! And Boyd! And snakes! And guns! And, wait a second, is that the hot bartender from last season?!”

It sure is, you perceptive little devil, you. Spoiler-ish stuff ahead.

Even though Winona has left Raylan behind, he seems to be doing all right for himself. You’ll see a lot more of bartender Lindsey, both behind the bar and between the sheets. But she’s hiding a secret that could rock Raylan’s world. Speaking of secrets, Boyd seems to be even less trusting of his partners than usual this season. That may have something to do with the secret stash of cash he’s keeping from everyone — including Ava! [TV Guide]

And in an interview today, showrunner Graham Yost revealed the following:

We’re doing a couple different things this season. One is that we open with a flashback to what happened 30 years ago, loosely based on something that did happen around that time, called The Bluegrass Conspiracy. What we decided to do this season was have more of a mystery and, in a sense, a big fugitive pursuit. They don’t know who he is, so there’s that mystery to solve, and then it’ll go on from there.

And this, which is kind of a bummer, I guess:

I don’t think we get to see [Dewey Crowe] this season. Wynn Duffy (Jere Burns) is still around, he plays a big part this season. But if we’re lucky enough to see this through to its natural end — we’re looking at six seasons — Dewey will play a part. There are opportunities, because Arlo’s in prison this year, that we could have seen Dewey, but it’s like, we don’t want to just see Dewey, we want to have an episode about Dewey. And similarly with Dickie Bennett (Jeremy Davies), who is probably not going to appear this year.

So, to recap, here are some things we know about the upcoming season of Justified:

• Raylan is banging the hot bartender, and she has some sort of devious secret.
• Boyd appears to be hiding money and preaching and/or arguing with snake handlers.
• There will be mysterious fugitives and I don’t even know what that means but I love it.
• The big bad for this season is going to be a group of “hill people” who have been described as “a dangerous backwoods group of ruffians who aren’t all there.”
• Wynn Duffy is back, which means lots of witty repartee between him and Raylan. Always a highlight.
• Patton Oswalt will appear as Constable Bob, “a local constable who went to high school with Raylan and has been hired by the lawman to watch Arlo’s house,” who tells a single high school football story over and over like Al Bundy.
• Jeremy Davies cut his own hair like a lunatic again to prepare for a season that he’s not even in, which is kind of awesome.
• We will be recapping the show again this year, and we’ve got a bunch of fancy new badges that you can earn for participating in our discussions.
• All of this begins happening on January 8 at 10PM, which by my calculations, is less than one week from today.

This will do just fine. Yes, yes it most certainly will.