TV GUIDE: Matt's TV Week in Review
Mar 23, 2012
by Matt Roush
... JUSTIFYING THOSE EMMY ODDS: Last year, FX's glorious Justified managed to snag a well-deserved Emmy for its electrifying guest villain, Margo Martindale as the unforgettable Mags Bennett. This week, the show made an equally strong claim for Neal McDonough to get some serious awards attention as the magnetically psychopathic Robert Quarles. He is becoming seriously and marvelously unhinged, especially after being bested in manipulating the sheriff's election by a triumphant Boyd Crowder, who taunts this carpetbagger as a "conquistador" no longer in control of the savages. "I hope you've enjoyed your stay and you never forget who packed your bags," Boyd says in that quietly lethal way of his.
But Quarles isn't going anywhere just yet. Popping Oxy like Chiclets, he grins with coiled menace as he declares, "I got nowhere else to go." This is a desperate man in desperate straits, and he barely even flinches when a young man named Donovan holds a gun to his head, seeking vengeance for whatever horrors Quarles visited upon his hustler friend Brady. This moment brings out the best in McDonough, in a searing monologue that reveals Quarles' own damaged upbringing, as a "pretty boy" pimped out by his junkie dad. Quarles disarms Donovan by saying of the ill-fated hustler Brady: "Hurt him? No, son, I never hurt him. I did everything I could to help him." With a hug, he adds, "And then I set him free." There are tears, but Donovan should never have let down his guard. (We later see the boy tied up in Quarles' bathroom, apparently about to meet the same hideous fate as Brady.)
Quarles' other big moment is a confrontation with his lawman nemesis Raylan Givens in the bar where Raylan's living. Against the advice of his hapless sidekick Wynn Duffy, Quarles gets right in the marshal's face to threaten him — "Someday you're gonna be walking down the street and I'm gonna put a bullet right in the back of your skull, and you're gonna drop" — and before they can go all Gunsmoke on each other, the fetching bar owner Lindsey defuses the situation with her own shotgun. (Love that after Quarles walks out, Lindsey's "now what?" to Raylan leads to a bout of hot sex. Beats prepping for Dickie Bennett's hearing, which doesn't go the way Raylan rehearsed it.)
With only three episodes left to go, I can't wait to see who gets the final showdown with Quarles: Raylan, Boyd, Limehouse. Whichever way it goes, it's going to be epic...
Justified airs Tuesday at 10/9C on FX.
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