Review: Justified: City Primeval, “The Smoking Gun” | Episode 7
A penultimate episode that understands the story being told better than the rest of the series
Raylan and Mansell show down.
That is the official FX description for “The Smoking Gun,” and naturally, it made for some assumptions as to just what exactly this penultimate episode of Justified: City Primeval would entail. The big assumption was that this would be the episode in which Raylan Givens finally shoots Clement Mansell, but that didn’t end up being the case. Instead, the promised showdown was yet another conversation1 between these two characters embroiled in this series’ strange case of cat and mouse. (It’s kind of like a version of Tom & Jerry where Tom is way too old for any of this shit and acts accordingly, and Jerry is even more of a psychopath and wears tighty whities.) But of course that’s what the “showdown” was going to be. Not just because it makes the most sense for any potential shoot-out to be in the finale: It’s the way this whole series has been structured. “The Smoking Gun” serves as a set-up and the perfect complement to the impending finish. Howev…