‘Justified’ Season 5 Episode 4 ‘Over the Mountain’ Recap — A Messer of a Situation

Raylan realizes just how much of a threat the Crowes are to Kentucky, Boyd finds out who’s backing his cousin Johnny and Ava runs into a stormtrooper sized problem…

By Damon Martin — Editor/Lead Writer

Dewey Crowe was certainly no boy scout.

Now that phrase can be taken both figuratively and literally after Tuesday night’s episode of Justified where everyone’s favorite redneck pimp took his bartender Wade Messer out into the woods with the intention of killing him for betraying his trust by skimming his brothel Audrey’s and paying the dividends to Boyd Crowder. Thanks to his cousin Daryl’s insistence to take care of the problem, Dewey for all of his faults has never really been a killer but that’s what he had to do to take care of Messer.

Little did Messer know when he wandered into the woods to dig up some of Dewey’s hidden money that he was really there to dig his own grave. The only problem is Messer’s shovel was the extendable kind used mostly by boy scout troops where the average height of the person digging was about 5 feet tall. Upon seeing the size of the shovel, Dewey bows out from attempting to help him dig.

“I didn’t bring my shovel cause you said you had one. It’s not my fault it’s some Webelo piece of shit” ~ Dewey Crowe

As Messer turned his back, Dewey loaded a round in his gun and pointed it at his old friend and the bartender to his establishment. Messer charged but got shot in the process and after rolling around and struggling to escape, Dewey got the upper hand and knocked him out. Thinking his prey was finished, Dewey went back to truck to find something better to dig with than a Webelo shovel, but when he returned Messer was gone and he was in definite trouble.

Dewey goes on the hunt to find Messer, but ends up falling to the bottom of the hill before finally getting back on his the track before his victim can find help. It’s here that Dewey makes an impassioned plea to the Lord to help him out of this dire situation. It really was a heartfelt moment between sinner and prophet.

“Jesus if you help me find him, once I kill him I swear I’ll straighten up.” ~ Dewey Crowe

A moment later, Dewey spots some blood on a nearby rock and as his prayers were answered he stumbles upon Messer laying in the dirt, bleeding and begging for help. Before Dewey can put a final bullet in him, some offroaders with their four-wheelers show up to ‘rescue’ the wayward hiker from trouble. Dewey accepts their help while leaving a beaten Messer laying in the woods, obviously hoping he dies before anyone else comes along to offer up assistance.

A Mess of an Informant

Raylan gets some interesting news when he’s called into Art’s office where USADA Vasquez is waiting for him as well. It seems after he got out of prison, Wade Messer turned informant for the government and he’s been giving them information on Boyd’s operation as he found out about it. None of his leads have panned out thus far, but he’s still sitting on the government’s protected list as a confidential informant. The only problem is he’s supposed to check in at least once a day and not only has he not done that but his phone is still tracking back to Audrey’s except he’s not there.

Art sends Tim along with Raylan to look for Messer, starting at Audrey’s where the pair of Marshals runs into young Kendall Crowe. The kid is tending bar in Messer’s absence and Raylan immediately recognizes what running into this kid means — there’s a whole lot of Crowes roosting around Harlan County these days.

At Messer’s house, Tim and Raylan run into a rather unpleasant pitbull who holds them at bay until another Crowe appears — this time it’s Danny. He says he’s living at Messer’s house because they are roommates now. The prospect of this comedy of errors has Raylan intrigued immediately. Messer and company maybe?

“That’s a sitcom I’d pay to see” ~ Raylan

Danny’s not giving up any information on Messer’s whereabouts so Tim and Raylan’s next stop is at Boyd’s bar where they will look to question Harlan’s new crime boss on where his latest employee has wandered off to.

Hello, Cousin Johnny

Last week we learned that it was Johnny Crowder who was hitting Boyd’s shipments and making off with his precious heroin. To ensure all parties would meet and walk out of the room with a heart still beating, Johnny and Boyd agree to sit down at the county jail with Ava sitting at the same table. Johnny is no longer hiding his feelings for Ava — truth be told she’s the reason he’s at the jail in the first place. Boyd spouts off at his cousin’s betrayal and his unrelenting grudge about the shotgun blast he took to the stomach courtesy of Bo Crowder some time ago. Boyd’s proclivity for wordplay angers Johnny, who fires back at his cousin’s love of all things vocabulary.

“Shit, I just about forgot how much I hate the sound of your voice, using every word in the Webster’s without ever saying a damn thing” ~ Johnny Crowder

Boyd offers his cousin a deal where they can reunite and work together towards a common goal everyone loves — money. Needless to say, Johnny has no interest in any such deal and he storms out. With Ava looking for a brief moment with her fiancé, Boyd stomps out just as fast. Something tells me Ava’s patience is growing thin and her desire to get out of jail will intensify in just a little bit.

Boyd’s reasoning for leaving Ava behind without so much as a kiss goodbye is the fact that he has Carl stalking and tracking Johnny to wherever he’s headed. They are betting big that Johnny will be heading off to meet with whatever backer he’s found to find the gumption to strike his shipments on two different occasions. Following a long drive all the way to where they are almost into Nashville, Tennessee, Boyd gets the answer he’s been looking for and finds out who is backing Johnny

It’s none other than Rodney ‘Hot Rod’ Dunham — our favorite weed dealer from Memphis who appeared earlier this season when he got mixed up with Loretta McCready before Raylan shuffled him out of town. For the past few seasons we’ve heard about Hot Rod’s power and influence, mostly held in the world of weed dealers in Tennessee but he’s apparently venturing north with a new partner and going after Boyd’s heroin territory.

Of course, Boyd plans on dealing with Hot Rod in due time, but it won’t be tonight.

“You gonna cut down a tree that size, you need to make sure you bring a very big saw” ~ Boyd Crowder talking about Hot Rod Dunham

The beginning of Boyd’s plan somehow involves the bodies of the men he’s killed over the past few weeks starting with the hijackers who attempted to steal his money along with the Canadians who were killed for the heroin shipment courtesy of Johnny Crowder. How he plans on using the dead bodies remains to be seen.

Counting Crowes

The hunt for Wade Messer continues back at Boyd’s bar where Raylan leaves his partner Tim to occupy his former coal mining buddy while he goes on the search for a pay-as-you-go phone given to the Audrey’s bartender in case of emergency. While Raylan goes on the search, Tim and Boyd engage in a game of scrabble, which I’m just dying to know how it turned out given the kind of vocabulary we’ve seen on Mr. Crowder all these years.

Raylan’s GPS search turns up at a small bed and breakfast where they find Messer’s dead body laying in the woods nearby. At the same time he’s being discovered, Daryl and Dewey show up and find out that sure enough Messer is dead. It saves Daryl from some bad business of killing off another Crowe, but as we learned in the season premiere, the Crowes are just this side of the Lannisters when it comes to offing relatives if it means a greater good for the family.

Raylan informs Boyd, Tim as well as the guys back at the office that Messer is dead. Despite the U.S. district attorney’s finger pointing at Boyd as the suspect, Raylan knows that this is the work of the Crowe family. Why they targeted Messer is unknown, but he knows they are behind it all.

To strike back at them, he shows up at the bar and goes face to face with Daryl in a back and forth war of words that ends with Raylan pulling out a piece of paper that claims Kendall Crowe as property of the state. No matter how deep blood runs, a minor child running a bar in the middle of a brothel is frowned upon just about everywhere. Daryl thinks this move is funny, but Raylan isn’t laughing

“Not so much funny haha, but funny odd” ~ Raylan says to Daryl

Despite his brother’s objection, Kendall goes with Raylan willingly and this first stand off is just the start to bitter war that’s going to rage in Kentucky for some time to come this season.

Ava Meet Jonathan

Ava’s stint in jail has mostly been shown to us through the brief visits she gets with Boyd each week, but with his power struggle fighting back against his cousin as well as an ongoing rivalry with local businessman Lee Paxton boiling over, their time together has gotten less and less while the distance between them continues to grow. This week we finally see Ava in her cell where she meets up with an unruly guard played by Danny Strong aka Jonathan from ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer‘.

It seems this guard, despite his small stature in size, is aiming to treat Ava to a little jail house assault unless she gives him the goods without any struggle. The prison rape scenes we see play out in shows like this or Sons of Anarchy or even Oz may seem extreme, but if anything they only get to the tip of the iceberg of what really goes on behind bars. It can be a vile, pernicious world and Ava just got her first invitation to the party. The guard taunts her to tell exactly what’s on her mind when she had a smirk on her face when he first entered the cell. That’s when Ava drops the line of the week on him.

“I was thinking aren’t you a little short for a Stormtrooper?” ~ Ava

The guard doesn’t take too kindly to the jab at his height and slams Ava against the wall demanding that she disrobe and bend over. Luckily before anything can go too far, a female guard shows up and he plays it off like nothing happened. A few moments later while outside for a smoke, the female guard talks up our boy Jonathan before smacking him across the head with a baton and getting the point across that this kind of event will never happen again. Whether she’s on Boyd’s payroll or not to make sure Ava isn’t messed with is unknown, but she certainly played her part to ensure her safety in this situation.

Too Many Canadians

Raylan finally gets some much needed alone time with his girl Allison, but after they do the horizontal shuffle, she immediately gets to the point of him leaving the house. A slight look into her day reveals that Allison was about to get her head bashed in by a father whose son was taken away after she discovered that he was chained to a radiator and forced to urinate and deficate in a small bucket left in the garage by his loving daddy. Obviously shaken by how close she came to death thanks to a warped father and his destructive sense of family, she falls into Raylan’s arms for some comfort. It appears this isn’t just a fling and Raylan is finding someone equally as deep and damaged. Maybe this is the woman that will fill out his other half where others like Winona could never completely understand how Raylan ticks.

While Raylan has been at work and play all day, Art has been busy following up on a lead for an investigation he’s been running on his own. Remember the call Art made into a fellow agent in Detroit looking into the execution style murder of Nicky Augustine? It’s here that we run into Will Sasso’s Canadian drug dealer character again, who has been caught with drugs across the border but promises to give up some good info if he can just return to the great white north.

Art asks what kind of information he has on the Nicky Augustine killing and that’s when the Canadian drops a bomb on him. Before Sammy Tonin died, he confided that he had a Federal agent in his pocket or that a Federal agent was present the night Nicky Augustine was gunned down. He knew this because before he was shot dead, Sammy passed along the information to his good friend Mr. Picker (who eventually turned on and shot Sammy dead). Mr. Picker is now under the protection of someone Art is very familiar with up his way — Wynn Duffy.

Art asks his good friend from the Marshals service if he plans to deport the Sasso back to Canda and that’s where he drops the second best line of the week:

“We’ve got too many damn Canadians in this country. Justin Bieber, Celine Dion….Steve Nash”

Raylan’s secrets are coming back to haunt him and before too long he might just be sharing space in a cell right beside his good buddy Boyd.

Paxton’s Resolve

One last thing before we go, Paxton is given the hand full with tattoos to prove that Boyd is dead. He’s such a happy old bastard knowing that his enemy has been murdered. Paxton promises that Mooney will be the next Sheriff of Harlan County before asking his wife Mara for some delicious dinner. She turns to ask if now that Boyd’s dead will he drop his vendetta against Ava Crowder. Quickly he fires back, not a chance — Ava already got away with killing her husband, this is one crime she won’t walk away from.

Next week on Justified there’s more fall out from the Nicky Augustine murder plus another Joss Whedon favorite pays a visit to Harlan when Alan Tudyk joins the cast.