Justified (TV series)/Tear Jerker

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • "Reckoning" gets two to more or less bookend the episode:
    • The beginning of, when Raylan walks into the house where Aunt Helen's body lay, and
    • Towards the end, with Raylan about to execute Dickie, explaining exactly what his Aunt Helen meant to him, and because of everything he remembered she did for her, finds himself unable to kill him.
  • During "Brother's Keeper," Loretta insisting to Raylan that she has a father around to scare off unwanted suitors left this troper a little teary - seeing as Raylan and the audience already know that he's not.
  • Raylan talking Loretta out of shooting Mags in revenge for killing her father by telling her how much it will change her in the second two finale, and in particular:

Raylan: Ask yourself what your daddy would want you to do.
Loretta: (starting to cry) I want him to be here to tell me.

  • Mags Bennet may be a wicked, wicked woman, but the look on her face when Raylan tells her she can't see Loretta is heartbreaking
  • As is the scene where she commits suicide, partially because she seems to be intentionally mirroring her actions from the scene in the first episode of the second season where she poisoned Loretta's father, arguably the most villainous thing she did all season
  • Winona in "When the Guns Come Out" giving Raylan the shaft again, this time probably for real. It's especially painful because Raylan seriously began to think about retirement for her and it turned out she was lying through her teeth about being okay with his job. It was going on for weeks. Art, Tim and Rachel knew. Raylan didn't.
  • Ellen May, visibly traumatized after Trixie's death in "When the Guns Come Out," and after Krystal's death in "Loose Ends." Delroy's indirect role in the women's deaths, combined with his callousness to Ellen May's suffering, made it even more heartbreaking.
  • Watching Mrs. Dodd after she finds out that her son Tanner is dead.
  • In "Guy Walks Into a Bar," listening to Quarles tell Donovan about the sexual abuse he endured as a child. Subverted when we later see Donovan bound in Quarles' bathroom.
  • That truly awful moment in the season 3 finale when Quarles tricks the boys' mother into getting out of the van and makes them drive off without her. The heartbreaking moment is seeing her run after the van in vain, tripping and falling, crying for her sons.
    • To that end, Raylan's tranquil fury at the death of a fellow cop, especially after he finds out Arlo shot him, possibly because he thought the cop in the hat was Raylan. His face as the episode closes says it all.
Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Justified_(TV_series)/Tear_Jerker?oldid=1843880"