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The FX series Justified, which is in its sixth and final season, is based on the novella Fire in the Hole by Elmore Leonard. Leonard was an executive producer of the series until his death in 2013. The show's creator and showrunner, Graham Yost, says he has made it his mission to stay as true as he can to Leonard's vision and storytelling style.

"Ultimately I look at this show as Elmore Leonard's show, and we're all in service of him and his view and his way of writing and creating these characters," Yost tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "So whatever feels like it works within that world is something we're open to."

Set in Harlan County, Ky., which is coal mining country, the story revolves around two men who have known each other since they were in the mines together as teens: Raylan Givens, played by Timothy Olyphant, and Boyd Crowder, played by Walton Goggins. Raylan is now a deputy U.S. marshal and Boyd is an outlaw whose criminal activities include robbing banks. Raylan wants to move to Florida to reconnect with his ex-wife and their 5-month-old child, but first he wants to bring Boyd down, which means catching him when he pulls off his next heist.

The show is violent, but Yost says he and the writers have to walk a line to keep the network happy.

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Deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens (Olyphant, left) meets with security expert Ty Walker (Garret Dillahunt, center) and gangster Avery Markham (Sam Elliott). Yost says the show is violent but it can't be too violent because of the network's parameters. Byron Cohen/FX hide caption

itoggle caption Byron Cohen/FX

Deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens (Olyphant, left) meets with security expert Ty Walker (Garret Dillahunt, center) and gangster Avery Markham (Sam Elliott). Yost says the show is violent but it can't be too violent because of the network's parameters.

Byron Cohen/FX

"Elmore's world is a violent world," he says. "In the best Elmore scenes, you think that something is either going to take a hard turn into romance and some kind of liaison, or it's going to take it the other way and go into violence. There's often something oddly humorous about the violence in Elmore's movies and in his books."

The show relies so heavily on Leonard's vision that Yost says fans who want a peek into how the show might end should read Leonard's works.

"Not because that will tell you how the series will end," he says, "but because it's always a good idea to read some Elmore Leonard. But there is, in his world, a certain way of ending things, and we aim for that."

Yost is also a producer of the FX series The Americans.

Interview Highlights

On the character of Boyd, who starts the show as a white supremacist

It's more interesting to me if [Boyd] is using the skinheads as cannon fodder in his desire to rob banks. And ... in the pilot, Boyd doesn't go into the bank, he sends two other guys in. He blows up a car first to distract the law enforcement and then drives up to the bank [while] two other guys go in and do the dirty work and come out with the money. I just liked him as this character who was manipulating other people.

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Walton Goggins plays Boyd Crowder on Justified. His character almost died in the pilot, but the writers liked his chemistry with actor Tim Olyphant, so they decided to keep him alive. Prashant Gupta/FX hide caption

itoggle caption Prashant Gupta/FX

Walton Goggins plays Boyd Crowder on Justified. His character almost died in the pilot, but the writers liked his chemistry with actor Tim Olyphant, so they decided to keep him alive.

Prashant Gupta/FX

When we decided to keep Boyd alive, that was a big decision. When we shot the pilot, Boyd was dead at the end of [it]. And then we tested the show and we had all just fallen in love with Walton [Goggins] and the chemistry between Walton and Tim [Olyphant], so we decided to keep him alive.

So what emerged was the notion of this character, Boyd, as being someone who will come up with a new scheme, a new way of looking at the world, and he'll seem to totally believe it. But it can be very different from what he had been doing in the past.

On creating authentic bad guys

We didn't do any research down in Harlan before we started writing the first season. But between the first and second season, a group of us — I think five or six of the writers and [the producers] — we all went down to Lexington and met the marshals. And then we went down and spent a few days in Harlan.

And one of the first things we heard — I remember [we] were out on an ATV tour up in the hills, and one of the guys [said] that he recognized a lot of the characters that we had created in the first season, and that gave us a big collective sense of relief that we weren't so far off the mark.

"We were always trying to apply Elmore's rules of making characters interesting and having them speak well and be smart and clever."

- Graham Yost, creator of 'Justified'

Again, we were always trying to apply Elmore's rules of making characters interesting and having them speak well and be smart and clever. Yes, we've filled that part of the world with a lot of bad guys, far more than there actually are, but I was always hoping that people in Harlan would view our show in the same way that people in New Jersey view The Sopranos, which is, "OK, it's not reality, but it's fun." We didn't want to ever insult people so we always tried to keep our bad guys pretty clever. I think if you create a lot of stupid characters, that's insulting, but if they're interesting bad guys, I think that's sort of fun.

On the "verbal fireworks" of the show's dialogue

I think to a degree over the course of the seasons we've kind of gone farther even than Elmore might have into the colorful nature of the language. But I have to say, we just had so much fun doing it. [The] particular line, "You're a card in fate's right hand," that's [writer] Chris Provenzano — I can see his fingerprints on that one. ...

There are certain characters, specifically Boyd — Boyd is just a blast to write. There was a line, in fact, that I wrote in season four where a character says to Boyd, "Man, you'll use 40 words when four would do." It can be a bit of a trap for writers — we can kind of get into it almost too much and have to peel it back a little because we don't want to go way over the top, although I'm sure at times we have. But it's a great freedom.

On working with Elmore Leonard

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[Leonard] had spent probably 10 years in the '60s and '70s writing screenplays for Hollywood and he got out of that business because he didn't like getting notes: ... change this character, move this scene around, do this, do that. ... So he lived by that: He didn't give us notes. The only tussle ... we had over the pilot was the hat — that he saw much more of what's called a "businessman's Stetson" on Raylan, basically the kind of hat that the troopers were wearing escorting Lee Harvey Oswald when Jack Ruby shot him. We tried that hat on Tim and it just didn't look great — it didn't look as [good as] a more regular cowboy hat did. That was about the only big fight we had with Elmore on the whole thing.

I joked with him after he had seen the pilot and he really liked it, and I said, "Of course you really like it, 90 percent of the dialogue is from you." Because I felt if you're going to adapt Elmore Leonard, [you should] use as much as you can of him.

On how Justified will end

I was on a showrunner's panel several seasons ago and [Terence] Winters [of Boardwalk Empire and The Sopranos] was talking about Boardwalk [and] said he wanted Nucky to live long enough that he could go into a New Jersey diner and kill Tony Soprano. I said, "I don't know how Justified is going to end, but I think I know what song is going to be playing somewhere toward the end." ... We got hooked on playing this great country song "You'll Never Leave Harlan Alive" — we used it at the end of the first season and the second season, I think we skipped the third season, but we know that will play a part of it. ... It's just the question of who will live and who will die.

Back in August, scientists published a worrisome report about Ebola in West Africa: The virus was rapidly changing its genetic code as it spread through people. Ebola was mutating about twice as fast as it did in previous outbreaks, a team from Harvard University found.

The study spurred a bunch of concerns. Could the virus evolve into a more dangerous pathogen? Could it start spreading through the airborne route?

Virologists said neither scenarios were likely. Past outbreaks showed that pathogens don't easily change their mode of transmission. And sometimes they become less deadly as they adapt to people.

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But there was one legitimate concern: Diagnostic tests and experimental treatments could stop working if Ebola changed its genetic code too quickly.

Now scientists at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases have new data that alleviate these concerns.

Nine months into the epidemic, Ebola wasn't mutating any faster than in previous outbreaks, Heinz Feldmann and his colleagues report Thursday in the journal Science.

In fact, Ebola's genes remained relatively stable between June and November 2014, the team found, despite the extensive human-to-human transmission taking place during that time.

"Our data indicate that EBOV [Ebolavirus] is not undergoing rapid evolution in humans during the current outbreak," Feldmann and his colleagues write. At the same time, there's no evidence the virus has become more deadly.

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The team came to these conclusions after sequencing the genomes of four Ebola viruses taken from patients in Mali from October and November. They compared the genetic codes of these strains to those sequenced in June from Sierra Leone and from other outbreaks in the past. The strains weren't as different as previous studies predicted they should be.

"This is some good news for the development of interventions," says Dr. Anthony Fauci, who directs the NIAID but wasn't directly involved with the study. "The data also indicate it's quite unlikely the virus will mutate and change its way of transmission."

One study, of course, can't give the whole picture. To date, the world has recorded nearly 25,000 cases. The study analyzed only four genomes — just a tiny slice of the virus strains circulating in West Africa. Other versions of the virus may be evolving more rapidly.

And with viruses, Fauci says, you never know what will happen. "One should not be surprised that RNA viruses, like Ebola, mutate," he says. "They do that all the time. The questions are how much are they mutating and are there functional consequences of those mutations."

The few mutations observed in the Mali sequences don't look like they would effect Ebola tests, potential vaccines or treatments, Fauci says.

It's unclear why the current study disagrees with the previous one from Harvard University. One possibility is that the two teams used different computer models to estimate the mutation rate. When the NIAID team applied its model to the earlier data from Harvard, the team also came up with the lower mutation rate — the one that matches the rate observed in previous outbreaks in Central Africa.

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genetics

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Global Health

The very first time we encounter Dong Nguyen, one of several hotly-debated characters in Tina Fey's The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, he's just introduced himself to Kimmy in their GED class. And as surely happens to Dong constantly since he immigrated to New York from Vietnam, she's stifling a giggle over his name.

"Nice to meet you, (chuckle) Dong (chuckle), I'm Kimmy," she spits out. But this time, Dong, played by Ki Hong Lee (The Maze Runner and a whole bunch of Wong Fu videos), has his own reason to snort. "In Vietnam, Kimmy means penis!" he says, leaving her stumbling for words.

It's a completely disarming scene. The irony that Dong is the one teasing Kimmy about her name floats completely over his head, which is partly what makes him such an endearing character: he unwittingly reclaims the gag. The joke is an equalizing force; depending on the context, both of their names can read as ridiculous.

But for a lot of viewers, including a lot of Asian-American ones, the traits that make Dong such a classic Fey-sian misfit also make him a dull, even infuriating Asian stereotype: his thickly accented, broken English; his gig delivering Chinese food by bike; his aptitude for math; his deportation-anxiety story line. So which is it: does Dong push back against Asian stereotypes, or does he just prop them up?

So which is it: does Dong push back against Asian stereotypes, or does he just prop them up?

Here too, it's all about context. In the bigger, bird's-eye view of Asian-Americans on-screen, the squickiness people feel over Dong is completely understandable, since the landscape was so desolate until so very recently. But within the universe of this show, Dong's foreignness completely makes sense, and it makes him a stronger character.

Unbreakable, after all, is all about foreignness. Everyone we come to care about is an outsider-misfit. Kimmy just spent the past 15 years in an underground bunker, trapped by an Ariel Castro-inspired doomsday cult, and is as new to the city as Dong. She's possibly the last person in New York still using the classified ads. She eats candy for dinner. Her struggling actor roommate finds he gets treated better in a werewolf costume than as a gay, black man. Her boss, a wealthy Native American woman, is purposely passing as white.

They're all delightfully awkward, and I think we're meant to like them more for the strangeness that binds them together. Their social ineptitudes are invitations to empathize, as the Atlantic's Megan Garber has put it.

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And when it comes to Dong and Kimmy — and their budding romance — I think we're meant to root for them to bond over their shared outsiderness, not in spite of it.

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But when I polled folks on Twitter about how they viewed Dong, some said they don't buy the "It's great satire!" or the "Hey, an Asian is a romantic leading man, be happy!" readings of this character.

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"Too early to tell," Ren Hsieh tweeted at me. "Asians have been mostly one-dimensional caricatures in TV/movies for so long, they don't know what to satire yet."

Over at the Wall Street Journal, Jeff Yang fleshes out a major source of the anxiety over Dong: the inescapable comparisons to Sixteen Candles' infamous Long Duk Dong, whose catch-phrases became the stuff of playground taunts for Asian-Americans growing up in the '80s. He's a foreign exchange student from some vaguely Asian country who exists solely to weird out the white suburbanites he's landed among. Everything about this Dong is portrayed as wrong, from his accent to his size to his choice in women, and viewers are never asked to see their world through his eyes.

But in Unbreakable, Dong is the one who's constantly thrown by Kimmy's antics. In one scene, she unwittingly makes a bunch of hand gestures that mean a parade of vulgarities in Vietnam. "What's wrong with you?" he asks, shaking his head. Dong is flipping the script, as Yang puts it, something his predecessor never got to do.

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The gesture Kimmy's making doesn't mean the same thing to Dong. Eric Liebowitz/Netflix hide caption

itoggle caption Eric Liebowitz/Netflix

The gesture Kimmy's making doesn't mean the same thing to Dong.

Eric Liebowitz/Netflix

And while we don't know what's next for Kimmy and Dong — the season ends on a romantic cliffhanger — we already know it'll look way different from Sixteen Candles's final scene, where Samantha shares a kiss with the studly all-American Jake Ryan. Kimmy's already told her Jake Ryan-esque suitor, a blonde trust-fund beau named Logan Beekman, to shove off when he reveals a few unsavory details, including that his British accent is fake. I get the feeling she dug the accent not for the reason Logan intended — it made him sound posh — but because it made him a little more of an outsider.

That's why I doubt viewers who have qualms with Dong would be satisfied if he'd been written as a sort of anti-stereotype, a Don Draper-esque smooth talker, perhaps, or a Jesse Pinkman-like hustler instead of the model minority type he's telegraphing. After all, in Unbreakable, as Yang puts it, the "non-WASP, nonstraight, nonmale characters, as mad and antic as they are, serve as the series' empathic anchors." In a show like this, would we root for a character like that?

If there were simply more Asian-American male characters on-screen, would Dong activate so many viewer's spidey senses?

On the other hand, if there were simply more Asian-American male characters on-screen, falling along a wider personality spectrum, would Dong — with his accent, his name, his job, and his math savviness — activate so many viewer's spidey senses? I happen to have a name people poke fun at, I'm pretty OK at math, and I used to work at a Chinese restaurant. The problem with Dong isn't that he's unrealistic. It's that we've seen the broad strokes of this character before, and in a landscape this limited, that grates, even if this show is doing something interesting with him.

"You're kind, you're funny, and both our names mean 'penis,' " Kimmy tells Dong when she admits she has a crush on him. The things that make him attractive to Kimmy, and a great character in this show, are the very things that make a lot of viewers wildly side-eye him. And that's totally understandable in a world where you can name the notable Asian-American men on-screen without running out of breath — and two of those characters are socially inept, hyper-foreign outsiders named Dong. In the context of the greater history of Asian-Americans on screen, any character named Dong is going to bring up a lot of complicated feels. Maybe in a perfect world, with plenty of sitcoms with Asian-American romantic leads, it'd be possible to read this character without the weight of everything that came before.

And at this point in the novel (which comes fairly early), you have to make a choice as a reader: Do you believe that Henry is suffering through an increasingly destructive mental illness? Or do you believe that his love for Val was so strong, his need for her so great, that the loss of her has shattered the structural underpinnings of the universe? That he has, in his misery, been given the ability to move back and forth through time in order to try and win her back?

Which side of that line you fall on may surprise you. You'll believe in the reality of Henry's smashed-up timeline(s) one minute, then know for sure that the 80-year-old Henry at the kitchen table and the 41-year-old Henry in the park are just figments generated by the unbalanced mind of a 19-year-old Henry. The line between fantasy and reality will be completely blurred before you're done.

And this, in turn, will allow you to sink into the clean, precise style of Ferguson's writing. He has a way with the language (in particular the lyrical bits of it, the odd, dangly details of lived-in lives), but the cleverest trick he pulls is in never modulating his voice or tone. Any contextual clues as to the reality (or unreality) of any given moment have been scrubbed from the text, and it all plays out in a constant state of fluttering, haloed authenticity. You can taste the weedy, sour first beers that Val and Gabe share months after Henry's disappearance, hear the jangling syncopation of the songs in Henry's head, and smell the mold in the shower. Ferguson never shies away.

And whether the narrative is tracking Val's very real present, Gabe's guilt-stricken, infected, half-fantastical now, or any of the multitude of Henrys populating the past, present and future, Ferguson does not judge. He does not coddle. He simply tells his tale and lets it lie there, as beautiful and broken as anything else in the world, its veracity to be judged by those who can only look in from the outside.

Jason Sheehan is an ex-chef, a former restaurant critic and the current food editor of Philadelphia magazine. But when no one is looking, he spends his time writing books about spaceships, aliens, giant robots and ray guns. Tales From the Radiation Age is his newest book.

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