‘Justified’ Season 1 Episode 2 ‘Riverbrook’ spins one of those wonderful stories of the misadventures of classic Elmore Leonard characters, a group of colorful, albeit very dim witted criminals, from the point of view of Raylan Givens.
Spoilers surely follow.
‘Justified’ Season 1 Episode 2 ‘Riverbrook’ starts with Raylan Givens doing a seemingly boring job of transporting a prisoner from one jail to another. The prisoner, a rather dumb young punk, actually makes the mistake of trying to escape from Deputy Marshal Givens. This hardly ever works, so the perp is delivered and Raylan begins his long journey home.
Meanwhile two members of a prison Bluegrass Band, including an older gentleman named Cooper with three months to go on a 15-year sentence, decide to run. This is another job for Raylan, tedious but necessary.
Raylan stops by a convenience store and notices two men, a clerk and a customer perhaps, who are dressed rather oddly. They are wearing T shirts that are on sale at the store. The one behind Raylan is Mr. Cooper, who gets the drop on the Deputy Marshal with a shot gun. Raylan, nonplussed for having such an embarrassing thing happen to him, is locked up in a storage room sans badge, guns, and hat. Then Cooper turns on his partner and drives him away, taking Raylan’s car for himself.
Flash forward the next morning and Raylan, now freed, is informed that the car was found parked at the airport with his hat in it, but no guns. Cooper wants them to think that he has skipped out, but no one is fooled by that.
Cooper, it seems, married a much younger, former stripper who divorced him during the 10th year of his incarceration and has taken up with her cousin. As it turns out, the money from the bank heist Cooper pulled that got him sent up in the first place is still unrecovered. His ex wife and her cousin are now looking for it, which is what caused Cooper to take leave of prison to start with.
Cooper catches up to his ex wife and her cousin, and instead of killing them, agrees to let them split 10 percent of the take if they help him find it. Very generous of him.
It seems that Cooper hid the swag in a then under-construction house that was near a then newly constructed school. The three criminals enter the house, still unsold, and start tearing up the floorboards. No money. Someone has obviously acquired it. Cousin shoots Cooper in the stomach and he and ex wife flee; Cousin thinks he knows where the swag is.
It is (or was) in fact in another house, unfortunately occupied by a couple whom, having found the money during a renovation, spent it all on a new car, flat screen tvs, and so on.
Cousin and ex wife’s troubles are just beginning. Raylan and company, having rescued the wounded Cooper, surmise that there are, in fact, two schools, and that it was the other one that was a land mark. Raylan and his friends surround the house with the Cousin, the ex wife, and the hostages.
Raylan, generous soul that he is, gives Cousin a chance to surrender. Dumb crook that he is, he does not take it and is himself taken out by Deputy Marshal Tim Gutterson, who learned his sniper skills in Afghanistan.
The episode ends with Raylan now transporting Cooper to his new, long term Club Fed facility.
There is also a couple of scenes, one with Boyd, who now thinks that Raylan is God’s instrument to send him on the right path via the bullet to the chest, and one with Ava, the 30-06 divorce who wants to sleep with Raylan and will settle for a slow dance. “You know why Pentecostals do not have sex standing up?” asks Raylan. “It might lead to dancing.”
And Ava will, no doubt, lead to trouble in future episodes.
Source: Justified, Riverbrook, TV.Com
