“Thick As Mud”
22.05.12
“A guy matching Crowe’s description just knocked over a Fluff N Fold.”
As I’ve been noting the last few weeks, the various criminal elements in Justified ’s third season have been coalescing pretty quickly. And now that we know the players and the stakes, the show can focus more on payoffs that stem from one or two storylines, rather than trying to juggle too many at a time. This will likely mean more episodes like the stellar “Thick As Mud,” which has the luxury of zeroing in on the misadventures of Dewey Crowe while exerting less energy keeping other balls in the air. The result is the best hour of the season—tight, suspenseful, hilarious, and a great showcase for a peripheral character who finally gets his time in the spotlight.
Poor Dewey Crowe. It seems odd to feel any kind of affection for a character with a Third Reich tattoo emblazoned on his chest, but Dewey has always been naïve and impressionable, the sort of soldier (per Devil) that Boyd likes to have on his team, if only for his limitless malleability. (Had Boyd changed his gang from a white-supremacist group to a rainbow-pony club, Dewey probably could have been talked into those tattoos, too.) Point being, he isn’t very smart and he’s easy to manipulate, which is something Lance—the sadistic prison nurse still looking for an angle after Dickie’s $3 million didn’t materialize—obviously understood pretty quickly. Dewey is a man who could be convinced to scrounge up money to buy back his own kidneys—in part because he’s not the sort to question whether they’ve actually been removed from his body or not.
Source: A.V. Club