"The Hunt" is one of my favorite episodes of Justified because it's so uncharacteristically stripped-down and intimate. Written by Taylor Elmore and Keith Schreier and directed by John Dahl (The Last Seduction, Rounders), it consists mainly of duets (Raylan and Winona, Boyd and Ava, Avery and Seabass, followed by Avery and Art), interspersed with scenes of Ty Walker wandering around the countryside after being wounded in a gunfight. The Ty scenes involve other characters as well (such as Avery, who talks to Ty on the phone, and those two frat boys outside the gas station men's room where Ty digs a slug from his arm), but they're so intensely focused on the former mercenary's desperation and determination that you could nearly call them monologues or solos, anyway.
The scene between Avery and Art was a gem, showing how tough guys try to intimidate each other through sarcasm and phony jocularity. Avery asks if Art is the "closer"the title character on that cop series is a womanthen suggests he's losing his potency along with his hair, and asks if he can still hook a fish with his fishing pole. Art's response is hilarious and perfect: "You know, I've been married for 28 years, I don't get the pole out as much as I used to." Then he gracefully pivots to interrogating Avery about his relationship with Katherine ("...but I hear you do. I hear you pulled Katherine Hale into your boat") and insinuating that he informed on Katherine's husband and his former partner, Grady, back in the day. This is a brilliantly written and acted scene, and the direction is subtly perfect as well: If you watch it again, notice how Dahl always positions the two characters so that they're exactly the same size in the frame, mirroring and sometimes overlapping each other, confirming that they are in every way equals, in forcefulness if not morality.
A lot of the scenes are self-contained and quite long: The first scene between Boyd and Ava at Boyd's parents' cabin clocks in at five and a half minutes, an eternity by TV's standards. The only really graphic violence is Ty shooting the two EMTs who arrive in the ambulance (he just wanted to steal their drugs and would have, until one of them insisted on calling in a chopper to investigate this "hiking accident"). Ava slaps Boyd and Boyd chokes Ava, but this feels less like a self-contained act of mayhem than the logical outgrowth of fearsomely intense emotions that have been boiling up between them over the course of seven episodes. For long stretches, this episode feels like a very cinematic adaptation of a stage play, and I mean that as praise. At certain points it reminded me of "Soprano Home Movies," the lake-house-set season-six installment of The Sopranos that a friend calls Who's Afraid of Virginia Mook? It's just extraordinary: if not the best episode in this already great season, then certainly the most original.
