Walton Goggins Accepts Most Memorable Line, Makes You Miss 'Justified' All Over Again
Justified won two awards in our inaugural reader-voted Yahooies honoring the best of the 2014-’15 TV season: Most Satisfying Series Finale and Most Memorable Line. Fans know you couldn’t have one without the other.
Related: Yahooies: Your 2015 Winners
After six seasons, it came down to one final scene between Deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant) and Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins), the crime king of his hometown Kentucky holler.
Raylan went to see Boyd in prison to convince him that Ava (Joelle Carter) is dead so he won’t ever look for her and find his son. Boyd asked why Raylan had come to deliver the “news” in person, and Raylan said if he allows himself to be sentimental, there is one thing he comes back to: “We dug coal together,” Boyd guessed. “That’s right,” Raylan said.
It brought the series full circle: At the end of the pilot, Raylan had shot Boyd in Ava’s kitchen and told him, “I’m sorry, but you called it.” Raylan flashed back to running out of a mine with Boyd. Ava asked Raylan why he’d said he was sorry: “Boyd and I dug coal together,” he answered.
In our series finale postmortem, showrunner Graham Yost told us it was Goggins who pitched the idea to return to that line. So we asked the actor to accept the honor on the show’s behalf. As he reminds us in the statement below, it goes even farther back to “Fire in the Hole,” the Elmore Leonard short story upon which the Justified pilot — which was originally going to end with Boyd dead as well — was based.
Our show, ‘Justified,’ has always been a collaborative journey. Graham is the kind of person, the kind of leader that allows for the best idea to win. When we were coming to the end of our six-year Elmore Leonard odyssey, we all became very reflective about our respective experiences. For me… I was interested in the reasons why we did this… What are we saying… What do we want to say about love, loyalty, friendship, and all the rest. Boyd Crowder and Raylan Givens have a deep bond, a shared experience that transcends any animosity that the two may have personally. I wanted to make sure that the audience understood that. I wanted them to feel the connection, the affection that Boyd had towards Raylan. There is no better way to convey that emotion than to echo the poetry that Elmore Leonard wrote in the short story: We Dug Coal Together!
Their friendship will forever be that complex and that simple.
Thank you, fans, for going on this ride with us.
Walton Goggins