"Justified's" Final Season Started With a Major Death Last Night

Last night's "Justified" season premiere bid farewell to a fan favorite character.

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Complex Original

Image via Complex Original

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As the headline suggests, this post is full of SPOILERS, so proceed at your own risk.

Justified isn't playing around. To set the tone that they are indeed operating within a final season state of mind, creator Graham Yost and co. closed last night's season premiere with the murder of the series' longest running recurring character and fan favorite. Dewey Crowe (Damon Herriman) has died.

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The pint-sized troublemaker started out working as Goofy at a Disney water park, and as Raylan Givens noted, sometimes people peak too early in life. When we met him, he was about as inexplicably lovable as an ignorant neo-Nazi could possibly be, a happy underling blowing shit up and falling comically to both Raylan's sharp wit and the butt of his gun. Over the course of five full seasons he persisted, despite getting bullied by Raylan and the fellow criminal element alike. Example:

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Or the time corrupt prison guards made him think they'd stolen his kidney.

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Things were looking up for the idiotic, inadvertently affable hoodlum when he came up on a settlement against the federal government, using it to spring an early release and enough money to buy Audrey's whorehouse along with a fancy inflatable pool for its backyard.


That is, until his domineering older cousin with a suss swamp rat accent, Daryl, caught wind of his windfall and took over. Dewey proved no match for the power struggle and as things got progressively darker, he found himself committing his first murder while later witnessing Justified arch-villain Boyd committing one of his own in Mexico. Success was perennially just beyond his grasp.

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At the start of season six, Dewey again found himself sprung from jail but this time, with no fortune. He wanted nothing more than to engage in threesomes with his own employees and wax poetic about his self-carved turtle dove, or better yet, to be back blowing things up with Boyd. But with the marshals threatening to extradite him to Mexico lest he snitch, Boyd found himself unable to trust Dewey and Dewey found himself on the receiving end of a bullet from his (self-proclaimed) best friend.

Rest in peace, Dewey. We're not sure if you deserve to go to the Audrey's in the sky, but we'll miss your accidental humor and endearing foolishness. Here's hoping you at least achieved lightweight Worldstar infamy.

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[Gifs via Uproxx, Josh Croyle, Harlan Roulette, Matthew Willard]

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