Justified's Final Season Will End With the Showdown Fans Have Been Waiting 6 Years to See

Executive producer Graham Yost dishes scoop on the final season of the FX drama, which kicks off tonight

While the Justified showrunners don't know exactly how the FX series is going to end (even though they're currently writing the penultimate episode now!), executive producer Graham Yost has a general idea.

"The very end of the series, the end of season six, Raylan [Tim Olyphant] and Boyd [Walton Goggins] have their final showdown and dot dot dot!" Yost tells E! News. "That's all I'm going to say. Everyone knows it's going to come down to them. It has to and it will."

Yost wanted to bring the final season back to the basics, and that's why the writers decided to pit Ava (Joelle Carter) in the middle of Raylan and Boyd.

"We hit upon Ava's betrayal in season five and really built the whole season leading toward that," Yost says. "We just thought it was great to rekindle Raylan and Boyd's animosity and putting Ava into this position between them. We knew we wanted to focus this last run on Raylan, Boyd and Ava. There's no better way to end it than to have Ava caught between them, and she is the glue that holds this season together."

Yost knows that there can't be a easy solution for Ava, as Raylan is using Ava as an undercover informant to build a RICO case against Boyd.

"Ava was put into an impossible situation and it remains impossible," Yost says. "She is torn between Raylan and her affection for Raylan and his threat of taking her back to prison where she might well die, and Boyd who she loves dearly but is also afraid of, and if he finds out, she might well die. She's caught between two very, very strong forces."

Does that mean fans can rule out a happy ending for Ava, or even for Raylan and Boyd?

"Well, we're doing an Elmore Leonard show," Yost says of the late author who inspired the show. "See how Elmore Leonard ends his books. Rarely is it a happy ending. But rarely is it a full-on tragedy. This is not like other FX shows. We're not Shield and we're not Sons of Anarchy. It's a very different animal. The closest that I'll come to describing the end at this point is that we are an Elmore Leonard show, and we aim to end the show as Elmore Leonard would."

Justified's sixth and final season premieres tonight at 10 p.m. on FX.