‘Justified’ Season 1 Episode 6 ‘The Collection’ has Raylan Givens visiting his old friend Boyd in prison. Boyd, a criminal with multiple felonies to his name, has the effrontery of the newly converted to admonish Raylan on the state of his soul.
Of course Raylan Givens is a habitual breaker of many of the Commandments. Spoilers follow.
Art picks Raylan up after the latter has yet another forbidden tryst with Ava, who used a firearm to rid herself of a husband, something that disappoints Art to no end. But they are off to Cincinnati to deliver a writ of forfeiture. It seems that there is a horse breeder who has been dealing with various criminal enterprises and everything he may have bought with the proceeds is now the property of the US Marshals Service.
The Horse Breeder has some unique paintings that he is trying to unload, the artist being one Adolf Hitler. Hitler, of course, was more famous as a mass murderer than he was an artist, much to the sorrow of the world. But when an art dealer, played by Robert Picardo, is brought in to evaluate the paintings, he declares them to be fakes. This disappoints the art dealer, because he is a collector of original Hitlers. That is something that Raylan, who has seen much of human depravity, finds positively creepy.
The Horse Breeder’s wife, put out that the lifestyle she has become accustomed to will soon being going away along with her husband, has her husband killed by her lover, the stable manager. Unfortunately for her, all she knows about doing and concealing crimes she saw on the Discovery Channel. Raylan Givens knows about solving crimes from experience.
There is the fact that the Horse Breeder, dead of an apparent suicide, still has the gun in his hand. Raylan’s experience is that suicides drop their weapons upon death. The wife, now widow, burned a painting, making it appear that he had burned the fake Hitlers. But an analysis of the ashes reveal a kind of water based oils unknown in the 1910s. Even a forger would have used proper medium to fake a Hitler.
There is an interlude, meanwhile, with Raylan’s ex wife, Winona, whom he also seems to have feelings for, Winona seems to be married to a bad man with shady business dealings. Also Raylan meets the US Attorney who is investigating his propensity to shoot criminals instead of arresting them.
The Widow woman and her partner are lucky that way. Raylan maneuvers them into revealing themselves and then arrests them.
Then Raylan finds out the truth about the Art Dealer’s Hitler collection. He is indeed an avid collector of original Hitlers. He is, in fact, the son of Hitler’s personal art dealer. The thing is, he hates his father and despises Hitler and all that he stood for. So every Hitler painting he acquires, he burns, and places the ashes in a separate jar in his collection. That is his revenge.
Later, Raylan has a chat with Boyd again. Boyd has some information that will put Raylan’s wayward father, Arlo, behind bars forever. Is Raylan interested?
