The cat-and-mouse game between Raylan and Boyd could potentially go on forever—partly because it’s never entirely apparent who’s the cat and who’s the mouse, and partly because neither one of them is willing to pounce. They simply bat each other around, because the bonds of the past are too great to crumble against the animosities of the present. We know that Boyd, for example, is as vicious as others in the Crowder clan—and several times as smart and diabolical—but when it comes to Raylan, he’s just a little less ruthless than his criminal instincts might otherwise dictate. Same goes for Raylan. There’s a reason he didn’t shoot to kill that night at Ava’s place: No matter how much Boyd repulses him—the guy is a neo-Nazi terrorist and armed bandit, after all—they have a history together that’s far too complicated to satisfy Raylan’s quick-draw M.O.
There were a lot of great scenes in tonight’s stellar hour, but the two big ones between Raylan and Boyd—which we’ve been waiting since the pilot to see, despite Boyd turning up briefly a few times—were the standouts. Raylan comes to prison to pump Boyd for information on the masked man who came blasting into Ava’s room with a sawed-off shotgun, figuring it was a Crowder seeking to avenge her husband’s death. What happens is kind of a shock: Despite being the one who’s incarcerated and under interrogation, Boyd is in complete control of the situation. He knows how to get under Raylan’s skin, and for once we see Raylan’s much-vaunted anger boiling to the surface. It’s not a pretty sight, seeing this hero who so coolly dispatches his adversaries reduced to someone that weak and easily provoked; he knows Boyd is manipulating him, but he can’t keep it from getting under his skin.
At the same time, when Boyd later says, “I’m honestly trying to help you out,” I think we have to take that at face value. And when he talks about the roots of Raylan’s troubles—watching his father abuse his mother as a child—Boyd is doing a more emphatic variation on Hannibal Lecter’s “Are the lambs still screaming?” speech to Clarice in The Silence Of The Lambs. He knows Raylan better than anyone we’ve met so far, and that gives him a degree of leverage that no one else has over him.
Boyd also hits us with the great and unexpected revelation that Ava wasn’t the real target of the shooting. Raylan was. That means, heading into the back half of the season, Bo Crowder and his boys will be gunning for Ava (once he’s out of jail in a few months, that is), and the drug cartel from Miami will be after Raylan. This clusterfuck of hitmen and vigilantes stands to be the stuff of very exciting television, and “Blind Spot” seems to be the right time for the serialized material to pick up momentum and start to eclipse crime-of-the-week stuff. (Then again, the show could downshift from here just like it did the episode after the pilot.)