Check out the snippets I picked out from TVFanatic.com and YourEntertainmentCorner.com‘s review of tonight’s episode. So far all I hear is great things. 🙂

Boyd was just fantastic in this entire episode, though. Between the cell phone to house phone call, stealing the crew’s cell phones and having Ava call one to give himself time to switch the bomb – and then shooting the bad guys that didn’t get everything but their feet blown up by the bomb, Mr. Crowder definitely got his groove back.

But the question remains: is Boyd for good or for evil? Yeah, he stopped those jerks from blowing up and robbing the mine, but he ended up killing the three of them and taking the money to give to Ava. When Ava asked him why he agreed to the job in the first place, Boyd responded: “Because it’s what I do. It’s who I am, Ava. As hard as I’ve been trying to pretend otherwise. Everybody else seems to know that but me.”

The man knows that he is a bad egg, he just didn’t want to believe it.

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I won’t go into detail about the exact moments leading up to the scheme Kyle (Michael Mosley) wrangles Boyd (Walton Goggins) into. You need to watch each moment because there are subtle details, which will inevitably play a larger role in future episodes. “Just remember your ABC’s – Always Be Cool.” ~ Boyd Crowder

The conversation between Boyd and Ava (Joelle Carter) afterwards is very telling.

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I highly recommend reading the full review of the episode over at HitFix, you can find the link below. It’s definitely worth the read.

And I remain floored by how the show has convincingly pulled off this transformation with Boyd in only a season and a quarter. I knew from “The Shield” what a great, charismatic actor Walton Goggins can be, but the Boyd of the pilot was so loathsome that it should feel like a cheat that he’s now someone we’re cheering for. But it doesn’t. You can’t forget the terrible things Boyd did before – which Kyle brings up in explaining why Boyd should be the one to kill the guard – but he’s trying another path now, his own twisted take on Raylan’s path, and one that’s likely to bring him together with Raylan’s ex, and Goggins and the writers are all making this work. He was so on fire throughout the episode, in fact, that I was willing to overlook just how dumb Kyle was to give so much responsibility – not just planting the explosives, but handling the money, etc. – to Boyd, which was the only way he was able to pull off the triple-cross.

Boyd’s ABC adventure was so compelling, in fact, that it would be easy to overlook how strong the rest of “Cottonmouth” was. But by putting the unrelated standalone stories on hold for a week, we got to spend a whole lot of time on the growing beef between Raylan and the Bennetts(*). And we got another glimpse of the cold, unapologetic ruthlessness of Mags, who barely paused for a moment – more out of fatigue than regret – after hammering Coover’s non-gun hand(**) before returning to talk more business.

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You can read the full review for ‘For Blood or Money’ over at TV Buzz.

Meanwhile, in the delightfully bucolic hamlet of Harlan, Boyd is (perhaps) contemplating a return to bank robbery. Walton Goggins keeps bringing layers to his performance that can seem sinister or sincere, sometimes in the same sentence. Although his relationship with Ava has turned out to be purely platonic, a tentative connection seems to be growing. Their easygoing conversation on the porch about wig styling and rock stars was truly charming. Of course, she did shoot his brother dead, so there’s that obstacle to romance.