Two key Spinoff writers Alex Casey and Joseph Moore share a dirty little secret: they’ve never seen any of the defining ‘important’ TV shows of our time. They launched Catch Up Club to save them (and possibly you). This week they tipped their cowboy hats to the gritty neo-western Justified. //
Alex: Wassup, time to justify Justified?
Joseph: Bang bang bang bang bang! You are dead! Sorry, super into guns now
Alex: Argh! And I was just enjoying my soft shell crab/fried chicken! First lesson of Justified: never eat a meal with Marshal Raylan Givens
Joseph: Every meal in this episode ended in someone getting shot in the tummy right? Right in the food!
Alex: Truly Raylan’s Kitchen Nightmares. Did you like the programme?
Joseph: I really did. This is “my kinda show”
Alex: What makes it “your kinda show”? I liked the opening scene in Miami, it reminded me of Drive or something. Maybe just because he was like “you have two minutes” which I believe is Ryan Gosling’s only line of dialogue in Drive.
Joseph: I’m really into anything set in a shitty small town, with inhabitants that are very attached to said town and don’t want to leave there. I like a lead with a strong hat, and I like criminals with very messy lairs. I can never relate to a villain with some slick super lair with gadgets.
Alex: I’m reading between the lines here, and seems like you are saying that you like neo-Nazis. And that is not, Justified.
Joseph: I like seeing them depicted on screens… In fact I dream of a world where neo-Nazis are solely villains in exciting fast paced crime TV shows and nowhere to be seen IRL.
Alex: We can all look forward to that. There certainly are a few in Justified, we know this because they each get a shot devoted to them revealing their swastika chest tattoos in a theatrical way.
Joseph: Though I did like how it was semi floated that old mate main villain wasn’t a legit neo-Nazi. Not sure if I can take five seasons of swastika shots, though. Did you know ANYTHING about this going in?
Alex: I knew almost nothing. I knew that there was a marshall, wearing an enormous hat. So he shoots a guy in broad daylight, gets into big trouble, and gets reassigned to a case in the wop wops?
Joseph: As is always the way. Yeah he’s a top cop in Miami I guess, as made clear by his high ranking cool-police-hat.
Alex: That is seemingly glued to his head like the dad in Matilda.
Joseph: “But you can’t just go around shooting people,” they say to him. And send him to the shoot-iest town in all of Kentucky.
Alex: Such a shooty-town that people fire rocket launchers at cool church-goers. Are the church-goers Ethiopian?
Joseph: I’m gonna say Jamaican, Alex, because it was the guy from Cool Runnings. DID YOU SPOT THAT?!
Alex: I missed that, which probably makes me a big ol’ racist.
Joseph: Hey what’s that tattoo on your chest?
Alex: (layers and layers of Thin Lizzy tattoo cover-up sweat off instantly) Nooooooo!
Joseph: I knew it!
Alex: So basically in the ep, some neo-Nazis blow up a church, then one neo-Nazi kills the other neo-Nazi and old Dr Big Hat has been sent to solve the crime.
Joseph: But it’s not gonna be easy, cos these neo-Nazis are super super cool with killing policemen willy nilly.
Alex: It’s also not going to be easy because the man has A LOT of visits to make…
Joseph: …and if there’s one thing I like more than intense Grand Theft Auto-style shootouts – it’s visits.
Alex: He visits a woman, who recently shot her husband to death and made a right mess of the carpet.
Joseph: She keeps trying to offer him food. Which may be a metaphor for sex, or may just be food. I’m still getting my head around everyone’s sexual appetites / appetites in this show.
Alex: There’s definitely a lot of food, was there any sex?
Joseph: The wife of the dead guy sure tried it. Who could blame her I suppose, her husband just died.
Alex: Classic murderous pillow talk eh? So what do you think we have to look forward to? I ask this because I think, of everything we have sampled so far, this is the one that has grabbed me the least.
Joseph: I don’t know, it kind of jumped in head first with the massive cop shootouts, like some Breaking Bad S5 level stuff. I don’t know where they can take it from here but I love the setting, and the chemistry between Timothy Olyphant and Walton Goggins has got me pretty psyched.
Alex: Yeah, it truly came in “guns blazing” and I found it hard to stay engaged as soon as the gunfire stopped. Nice to see some Kentucky fried chicken in Kentucky though, tell you what.
Joseph: I don’t know, I’m intrigued as to the history of the leads in the mines, as that very brief and convenient flashback hinted at near the end.
Alex: Yeah, the dutch-tilted mine sequence was pretty jarring and weird. No hats allowed down a mine.
Joseph: It’s not cheap to film down mines Alex, so you gotta tilt that Dutch otherwise people will notice your plastic mine set.
Alex: Is that actually the origin of “going Dutch”? Makes you think.
Joseph: It does make you think – maybe more than this show does. It mainly makes you go “cool, guns!” Also hat-man has clearly got some baggage with his ex-wife (this show used the exact same CURVEBALL, HE’S GOT A WIFE style ending as Ep 1 of Mad Men)
Alex: Again with the C.U.C. parallels!
Joseph: I didn’t know much about this show coming in. All I knew was that it had crazy critical acclaim but basically no one I have ever met watches it. From what I hear it only gets better so I’ma stick with it.
Alex: Yeah, everyone has said to me “it gets better.” About life, and also this show. I want to see it get better. How are your other shows going?
Joseph: I’m still E01S01ing at this stage, Alex. I don’t know how to fix my habits
Alex: I’m watching House of Cards still. Wanna know what happens?
Joseph: Gimme a taster
Alex: Kevin Spacey started boning the young blogger. You’ll be pleased to know the Education Reform Bill is going well, Spacey locked a bunch of geniuses in a room to write it all in about two days. A whole lot of people got fired. He hasn’t used the rowing machine in a while.
Joseph: They need to hire you to write the MySky descriptions.
Alex: I am readily available for hire. So, what should we watch next week? Need something with guns, lakes, rowing machines, smoking, and a wife reveal.
Joseph: Downton Abbey then?
Alex: Downton Abbey it is.
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