For the second straight episode, Raylan Givens goes about his deputy marshal business in Justified, but as crime-of-the-week episodes go, I found “Fixer” to be slightly stronger than the last one, because it said something about Raylan, even if it didn’t move his story too far forward. “Fixer” primarily concerns the weird bond between two fish-out-of-water types: Raylan, the walking anachronism, and bookie Arnold Pinter (David Eigenberg, best known as Cynthia Nixon’s on-again/off-again boyfriend on Sex And The City), a Brooklyn transplant who’s set up shop in Kentucky, but needs a steady infusion of chocolate egg creams to keep him sane. For various reasons, both men want to get out of town as soon as they can manage, but they don’t really have any place left to settle. They can never go home again, as the saying goes.
One of the consistent pleasures of Justified so far is the steady influx of Elmore Leonard-like criminal types—in short, quirky yet purposeful—played by some very good one-and-done character actors. Eigenberg’s Arnold Pinter, with his profane, mile-a-minute speech patterns and defiant New Yawk attitude, stands in sharp relief to the relaxed drawl of the natives. He obviously rubs them the wrong way, given his brash pronouncements about having to live among the “toothless, banjo-strumming redneck pricks” in his midst. Yet Raylan has an odd appreciation for his candor; Arnold makes no excuses for being a flim-flam artist, and Raylan seems comfortable knowing he comes about his criminality honesty. If there’s an angle, Arnold will exploit it; that’s his job.
Setting up shop in the back of a local restaurant, where he crunches the numbers and dispatches legbreakers to extract payments from deadbeat clients, Arnold is a snitch that nobody at the marshal’s office wants to work with. Naturally, that duty is passed along to Raylan, who gets the drop on a fugitive with the ironic name “Tiny,” who’s been working as muscle for Arnold’s operation. Finding “Tiny” turns out to be easier than it sounds, but the case draws Raylan into a larger plot: One of Arnold’s indebted clients, a “scumbag playboy” who goes by the hilarious name Travis Travers, ropes Arnold’s newest legbreaker into a scheme to kidnap his boss and shake him down for cash.