Start with a microbe, you end up with a redneck pondering speech

Here is a story from Canadian TV that helps put one back in their place: Ah, yes, tales of the “Methane-spewing microbe blamed in worst mass extinction.”

Speaking of methane-spewing, I am still laughing today at a particular scene from last night’s episode “Starvation” on the great FX series Justified. Yeah, I know some may have still not watched it so avert your eyes.

The wonderful redneck criminal character Dewey Crowe, played by Down Under-er Damon Herriman, is caught siphoning gas from a little old lady’s car. Asked if he wants some snack or such she trots off while Dewey hollers: “If you’re gonna be a minute, you mind if I run in and take a shit?”

Not surprisingly, the old woman returns with a double-barrel shotgun. Well, it isn’t surprising she returns with a gun, not that it isn’t surprising she comes back with a “side-by-side.” Or isn’t it?

I’m not all that good in character minutiae, especially with a fast-moving, Elmore Leonard-inspired TV series. But the show’s executive producer Graham Yost tells Entertainment Weekly that another comic exchange, this time between Dewey and lead Timothy Olyphant, has ties to the series’ beginning. Olyphant, who exquisitely plays U.S. Deputy Marshal Raylyn Givens, manages to arrest Dewey after he, figuratively, blew up a chance for the marshals to trap Dewey’s meaner brother Darryl. As Dewey is led away Raylyn gives the hapless criminal some advice that he might ” … stop referring to himself in the third person.”

“What? This guy?” Dewey asks, nodding toward the cop about to drive him to jail.

“Man, sometimes I don’t understand you.”

The last phrase, as it turns out, Dewey uttered in the pilot episode. I don’t know if I even saw the pilot. I’m sure I must’ve. I haven’t missed many of the episodes Justified‘s five season. This is one of the few golden nuggets in TV these days. It is a reminder that the show must’ve had a writer. And it did and it does.

Too bad it wasn’t me.