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FX’s Justified is full of characters pining to get to the top, but its teenage queenpin was the cream of the crop.
FX’s Justified is full of small-town criminals and backwater gangsters, all of whom are trying to make their mark on Harlan County, Kentucky, and lawmen (or women) trying to thwart them. They are often tangled up with each other, going back and forth as they try to stay on top. However, one character seemed destined to always come out on top no matter what life threw at her: Loretta McCready (Kaitlyn Dever).
Like many of Justified’s characters, Loretta comes from a criminal family. Her father Walt (Chris Mulkey) is a low-level pot grower who, unbeknownst to him, grew his product on the Bennett family’s land. The Bennetts are one of Harlan’s premier criminal families, known for growing and dealing marijuana (and feuding with the Givens family), and they take it as a personal insult that Walt would grow on their land.
Because of this and the fact that Walt called the cops on a Bennett employee that was making inappropriate advances toward Loretta, Mags and her sons decide to do Walt in, shooting him non-fatally and later poisoning him with tainted moonshine. Mags then takes Loretta in, initially lying and saying that Walt has gone away to work for the Bennetts.
Loretta is a smart girl, though, and despite being a young teenager, she understands the marijuana business. She helped her father harvest his plants, and she sells pot herself. Mags sees her acumen and possible use and treats Loretta like her own child, even trusting her with things she’s never let her sons do. And Loretta, whose mother is also dead, initially values Mag’s guidance and confidence.
Loretta also crosses paths with Raylan while dealing to her friends, but he isn’t interested in her illegal activities. He’s been investigating Walt’s disappearance and rightly suspects the Bennetts. Knowing that Loretta is staying with them, he offers her a disposable phone and tells her to call him if she needs help for any reason. She does exactly that after seeing Coover Bennett wearing her father’s watch and putting the pieces together; this culminates in Raylan shooting Coover, who then falls down a mine shaft and dies. Loretta gets placed in a foster home thanks to Raylan’s intervention, but she initially refuses to settle with them.
Raylan and Loretta form a bond, largely due to both having dead mothers and deeply flawed criminal fathers. He consoles her about her father’s murder and persuades her to give her foster family — and in turn, a normal teenage life — a second chance. She does, but she also starts formulating a plan to get revenge on Mags for killing her father. In the Season 2 finale, she shoots Mags in the leg but is talked out of actually murdering her by Raylan.
Raylan seeks Loretta out again in Season 3, trying to find Mags’ missing fortune. But it soon becomes clear that Loretta herself is in possession of the money, and Dickie Bennett wants to get it back. He decides to let Loretta keep the money, since it was what Mags wanted, on the condition that she doesn’t spend it. And the pair banter and Loretta ultimately come out on top. In Season 5, Loretta uses Raylan to solve a problem with Dunham (Mickey Jones), another former associate of Mags; as he drives her home, Raylan realizes she’s played him, but Loretta points out that he would have helped her anyway due to their bond.
Then, in the show’s final season, Loretta is shown to have bought the Bennett land under an alias. She gets targeted by Avery Markham (Sam Elliott), a gangster looking to invest in the marijuana trade as it becomes legal; he tries to buy the land from her, but she resists. Markham wants to use Harlan for his weed empire. But Loretta comes up with a plan for the locals to benefit from the weed business without being indebted to this wealthy outsider.
Loretta eventually offers to partner with him, stating that she knows the community and the weed business, but given that Markham dies in the finale, it’s likely that she goes through with her original plan and becomes a marijuana entrepreneur in her own right. Through a mix of practicality, ruthlessness and business smarts, Loretta manages to succeed where the adults around her consistently fail.
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