What Is Clement Mansel's Motive In Justified: City Primeval?

This post contains spoilers for the latest episode of "Justified: City Primeval."

Clement Manzel (Boyd Holbrook) is a wild man. That's not just my assessment; the villain of "Justified: City Primeval" actually saunters into the show this season with the nickname "The Oklahoma Wildman," a moniker that's just as chaotic as the big bad himself. Holbrook has done an incredible job so far injecting the man with a sense of unhinged danger and unearned confidence. He's a murderer who seems to get away with his crimes again and again through sheer force of will, threatening whoever stands in his way. Now, with a dead judge's little black book in his hands, he seems like he could be unstoppable.

But what does Manzel actually want? In the latest episode of the series, he and his girlfriend Sandy (Adelaide Clemens) — who seems to be a pile of frayed nerves but is also sincerely into him, too — corner her schmuck of a boyfriend, an Albanian mobster who seems like the perfect mark for whatever the pair have planned. The episode ends with the mobster in a bad position, as Manzel has access to his safe and a gun pointed at his head. Yet while Sandy is skittish in the presence of law enforcement, Manzel seems to want to stay in town, seemingly just to see how long he can get away with whatever he wants.

To guess at Clement Manzel's motives might be a fool's errand because he seems to be written in the way many Elmore Leonard antagonists are — as a super-cool foil to an even cooler hero. Manzel exists to antagonize Timothy Olyphant's Raylan, full stop. He's intrigued by the lawman's fixation on him and excited by the idea of being chased by someone who clearly loves the chase. As he puts it in one scene, someone Raylan's age would only still be working as a Marshal if they "just love it so much they gotta be dragged off." On some level, it seems like Manzel wants to be the one to drag Raylan off.

Yet he also has other motivations, many of them murky or otherwise obscured by his impulsive attitude. He seems to want to use the judge's blackmail book to get money, but he frequently makes decisions that could cut his whole endeavor short before it even begins. He shoots Sweety's (Vondie Curtis-Hall) companions for no reason, is ready to shoot the Marshals through the wall when they come looking for Sandy, and infiltrates Willa's (Vivian Olyphant) and Carolyn's (Aunjanue Ellis) safe spaces just to show that he can. There's a Joker-like quality to the guy — it's like he's playing with his food and looking at the whole world like it's his next meal.

In Elmore Leonard's book "City Primeval," Manzel is still a wild card, but there's one motivating factor that puts his temperamental nature in perspective: racism. The book puts readers in Manzel's head early on, and it's a very unpleasant place to be. He thinks in a string of racial and homophobic epithets, and imagines the non-white characters around him have some sore of attitude and need to be put in their place. It makes sense that the TV show would tone this down, but that deeply ingrained bigotry at least makes the book version of Manzel the type of person all readers would, unfortunately, be familiar with.

The show instead opts for a version of the villain who is at times inscrutably weird. He has a thing for The White Stripes, listening to "Seven Nation Army" in the first episode and singing "We Are Going To Be Friends" in the second. In one of Manzel's only scenes so far that doesn't end with him threatening or hurting someone, he sings an unnerving but upbeat rendition of "Kokomo" at Sweety. In another scene, he also tells a strange, probably fake story about how his mom was blown away by a hurricane.

It seems like Manzel is from the same school of eccentric villainy that brought us Jason Momoa's Dante in "Fast X" or a particularly wacky Bond villain, yet his quirks don't seem so odd as to distract from the story. Instead, we get the sense that he's a man who loves to sew chaos and take what he wants when he wants — and who really, really wants attention when he does it. We'll see if it's something he still wants when he realizes exactly who he's been messing with all season.

"Justified: City Primeval" airs new episodes Tuesdays on FX.