THE MANDALORIAN, SEASON TWO

 

John and Al welcome their old buddy Bucho to the show, to school them on cartoons, celebrate justice for Pedro Pascal's skull, and blink nervously at the endless slate of Star Wars shows coming down the pike

FARGO PODCAST

 

With a touch of MANDALORIAN talk at the end.

ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD PODCAST

 

John and I have made it to the end of the QT canon, with the weird, shockingly violent but overwhelmingly wistful Once Upon A Time In Hollywood.  We will do one more to try to put some sort of capper on this whole ramshackle affair, but for now just chill out, have three or four whiskey sours, and do all the rating/reviewing/subscribing you can, okay friends?

FARGO 4.11 - "STORIA AMERICANA"

 

Okay then?

The fourth season of Fargo will go down as its most disjointed, and generally least good, outing.  Which is a shame, because it may have had as many great pieces of performance and filmmaking as the prior seasons, none of which had to contend with a global pandemic forcing production to abruptly halt at an extremely inopportune juncture; when far too much had been completed to go back and try to redo things from scratch, but also there was no ending.  Not until one could be cobbled together several months later, under conditions that were still far from ideal and noticeably shifted away from the signature winter seasonality that defines the show even as it roams far in time and wide away from the titular town to explore the entire Great Plains. 

And if there is one thing this last episode feels, it is hasty.  It’s impossible to know how much of the season’s structural woes are directly attributable to the ‘rona, but that the finale is somehow the shortest episode of a season that had multiple entries pushing 90 minutes early on strikes me as something that just would not have happened in “normal” times.  Even if it is just an unfortunate coincidence, this season feels the affects of the pandemic, with key storylines and characters feeling forcibly distanced from each other to the story’s detriment, right through the end.

"This is my daughter.  Remember, she use to narrate this show?"

For instance, watching only the premiere and the finale, you would have expected that Ethelrida, Oraetta and Ebal were much more prominent throughout the season than they actually were.  But Ethelrida really did remarkably little outside of providing bookend voiceovers that literally open and close the season.  She uncovered Oraetta’s murders and wrote an anonymous letter to her boss, and then 5 or 6 episodes later told Loy. Which had the immediate effect of freeing her family from indentured servitude, for reasons that sure seemed a lot more self-evident to those characters than they did to me.  In any case, this is fine stuff to involve her in as far as it goes.  It just only goes far enough to fill maybe half a season, and the other half has this weird gap where the character that was set up as the main protagonist and moral center of the show should be. 

Her primary foil, Oraetta, only fares a little better.  She is set up to be a classic Fargo agent of chaos, and in the first couple episodes manages to kick off the gang war plotline by capriciously killing a mob boss, insinuate herself into an affair with his son, and attempt to simultaneously befriend and poison that (seeming) main protagonist and moral center whose family is entwined with the other side of the mob the war. That’s a lot to load up a plate with, on the first trip to the buffet.  Which just makes it feel weird when all of it quickly falls by the wayside so she can spend the rest of the season failing to poison her annoying boss, a subplot no one else on the show knows or cares about, only to submit to summary execution rather too meekly in the finale.  Compare that to all the shenanigans that Kirsten Dunst’s Peggy or David Thewlis’s Varga got up to throughout their respective seasons, and it just feels rather threadbare.  Both women needed to have more back and forth with each other or some other plotlines, in order to tie all the various strands tighter and to meet the level of performance Jessie Buckley and E’myri Crutchfield were bringing to bear on characters that got benched for such inexplicably long stretches. 

As for Ebal, he also looms larger than even I predicted when I said he would live to bring peace to the warring families in the end.  He does do this, but not by integrating th  much as forcibly assimilating the Cannon operation into the larger network of La Cosa Nostra.  This power play is fine in theory, as I have liked the performance from the start, and there are some ideas here befitting the more corporatist syndicate that will go on to make a lot of the same sort of moves on the Gerhardt family a couple decades down the line.  When the Fadda Family was actually a family made of criminal individuals, it made more sense that a rival clan like the Cannons could outmaneuver, outwit and potentially wipe them out.  But when Ebal embraces a “new way” of doing things for the New World, including the Faddas’ role as cogs in a larger, more inhuman machine, it quickly recasts the war from a tribal conflict into a hostile takeover of a commercial enterprise.  One where it doesn’t matter how many battles Loy wins, because the same tides will continue wash away any gains he makes sooner rather than later.  And as comfortable as Ebal looks sitting in that Big Chair that always dwarfed Josto and enjoying the full Godfather lighting effects, it still feels like a lot of the resolution is getting hung rather suddenly on a character that sat out the majority of the season.

On a related note, I can see how it is fitting that the final “battles” of the war that we see are these internecine executions of Josto and Happy undertaken by their own nominal allies. Thematically, this underlines the severing of familial loyalties for the new, more impersonal way of doing things and reinforces Josto’s graveside plea of how the American Dream is a trap where “they make you eat each other.”  But it also feels a touch anticlimactic, and not purposefully so.  More that the big finish they are aiming for is hobbled by the misallocation of resources that failed to make Happy, Leon, or Ebal as important to the body of the season as they are to this climax.

So what’s it all about in the end? Ethelrida’s narration that brings us in and takes us out of the season seems like it should be the Rosetta Stone to tell us what all this bloodshed and nonsense signifies, but her odd fade out of the story as it progresses really muddles that. The idea of Assimilation was hit heavy in the premiere voiceover, but in the finale the emphasis is on what History means to a nation of immigrants who are all bringing very different stories with them. When she asks whose history gets told, and emphasizes that this is her story in the finale, plays off the bit in Josto’s final plea where part of his case against the rigged game that is America is that “they make us forget” in a way that should be more resonant. If only the run of episodes leading up to it backed her declaration a bit more.

       COEN BINGO AND OTHER RANDOM STUFF

• As nice as it was to see Bokeem Woodbine again (and as much genuine acting as he crammed into 30 wordless seconds), I wonder if it was even worth including the stinger scene.  I have to think that anyone that knew what to make of his appearance had already pieced together that connection, and probably would have been more excited about it if they felt it was a theory they had a hand in crafting themselves rather than something spoon fed by the show.

• It terms of performances, I mentioned how Crutchfield and Buckley both did great despite languishing on the sidelines most of the season. Rock acquitted himself quite well to the most dramatic role he’s ever played, at least since New Jack City, but it was Schwartzman that ended up impressing me more in a role that I think presented a more delicate balance of silliness and caginess and petulance and menace to balance from moment to moment.  And I could have done with three more hours of a cat-and-mouse chase across the plains between Ben Wishaw’s Rabbi, Gaetano Bruno’s Calamita, and Corey Hendrix’s Omie Sparkman, as the latter two especially created intriguing characterizations out of minimal dialogue.

• I thought Josto's final walk to the grave was going to start evoking Bernie Bernbaum's walk into the titular woods in Miller's Crossing much more directly than it ended up doing.  Glad they didn't just have Schwartzman aping it directly, because that comparison couldn't do any favors.

• The oranges felt like a rather on-the-nose Godfather reference.  Oh yeah, Loy got shivved by a vengeful Zelmaire just as he accepted that his family could be safer and happier without the criminal clout he had been chasing. I probably should have mentioned that more directly, but it feels a bit obligatory by the point it happens.

LOVECRAFT COUNTRY PODCAST

 

We have a new podcast live where I go into a bit more depth on my previous Lovecraft Country post about how it's horror premise was undercut by odd structural decisions and the earnestness of its empowerment narrative.  It also ranges wider into the difficulties of doing horror in a serialized TV format, and different ways to skin that particular cat.

FARGO 4.10 - "HAPPY"

 

“Happy” finally brings Ethelrida back to the fore, after she was set up as the heart of the season early on and then seemingly forgot about entirely for about two-thirds of the runtime.  The episode is stronger for this added focus on a character that is herself one of the show’s strongest, but it also may be too late in the game for this season to draw itself together as something greater than the sum of its parts.  Perhaps those parts could have been sewn together more elegantly if it weren’t for the coronavirus disrupting production of the season when it was ¾ of the way complete.  But so it goes.  In any case, those individual parts are still largely great, even if I think there was a more ideal way to feature Ethelrida and Oraetta more in the middle section instead of watching Odis twitch his way through one hour after another, or Gaetano be a panting psychopath one more time.

What’s odd about this episode is that it dispatches both these characters, whose excess of screentime has been my single biggest issue with the season, in ways where I suddenly feel like we need more with them.  Most notably, Odis’s decision to go out as a real cop makes sense in theory, but is dramatized in a really odd, oblique way that I'm not even sure is intentional coming from this odd, oblique show. We ended episode 8 with his most extreme crime yet, committing multiple premeditated murders at the behest of a crime boss. Then he was entirely absent from episode 9, then 10 opens with him deciding to take this huge step back toward the light…except it’s depicted via a montage that is only partially focused on him, and his big move is to arrest the Italian gangsters, which initially seems like it would just be a continuation of doing Loy’s bidding.  The way it only gradually comes into focus that this actually represents a total renunciation of all his former corruption gives a limpness to the culmination of this character’s story that the snazzy camerawork and Jack Huston’s valiant efforts can’t entirely overcome.

Things are a bit different with Gaetano, who got a whole lot of attention early on when he was a one-dimensional beast awkwardly playing at Machiavellian schemes that he was not very good at.  But he was also, crucially, not so bad as to give it a real comical bent, or the type of livewire charge of unpredictability I think they were going for.  Strangely enough, the character started working better since he embraced a more simplistic role as his brother’s bulldog.  I feel like there was an angle of interesting characterization there, where part of Gaetano’s anger in the early season was heightened by knowing that he was a bad fit to be the schemer of the family, but feeling forced by Josto’s perceived weakness and stupidity to take on that role anyway, if only to expose said weakness.  And then when Josto proved to be more worthy than he realized, there is immense relief to return to being a blunt instrument.  All of which is there in the show if you squint, but could have been articulated more specifically, in my own opinion. 

But Gaetano’s exit also highlights another figure that may have gotten too much play this year: the role of happenstance and coincidence in shaping the fate of characters. That has always been an element of Fargo; for example Season 2, generally considered the apex of the series, opened with a wild congruence of unrelated factors (an obstinate judge, a hapless criminal, a UFO and a desperate hairdresser walk into a Waffle Hut…) that kicked off a cascade of increasingly depraved violence.  But there is a fundamental difference when this sort of randomness is part of the set up, rather than the resolution.  My general principle with this stuff is that contrivances, whether they be wild coincidences or whatever form of supernatural nonsense a particular genre traffics in, are good storytelling elements when their effect is to complicate things, and bad when they simplify things. 

Which creates a difficult position for a story like Fargo, which endeavors to bring some semblance of the random and confusing nature of real life to the realm of fiction.  There is a quixotic bent to this effort even at the best of times, as the reason why humans tell each other stories in the first place is to impose a sense of order on the formless chaos that makes up the day-to-day experience of being alive. Even elements included specifically to evoke a sense of meaningless randomness are still created with an intention, to represent the concept of purposelessness as part of some grander, conscious design.

But all such galaxy-brain profundity aside, this season and episode in particular seem to be pushing the envelope when it comes to the “random” plot elements.  There is only so much happenstance that can be included before it crosses some invisible line between a compelling approximation of the messiness of real life, and the frustrating nonsense of a story badly told.  And in this season it feels like the arbitrary elements are factoring in more heavily in the resolutions than ever before.  When the opening piled coincidence on top of coincidence – Don Fadda catching a random shot from a child’s pellet gun in the jugular, which happened to put him in the care of a nurse that happened to be a serial killer that happened to target patients like him and also happened to force herself into the orbit of his son and a neighbor that would happen to be entwined with the son’s main criminal rival, all more or less at once – that is one thing. Okay, the point is that it’s several things at once, but when Gaetano slips on a banana peel and falls all the way out of the show, that’s something different because it is removing a complication instead of creating one.  And it’s still another thing when, after Rabbi manages to arrive at a remote gas station at the precise moment when the man hunting him and the man hunting that hunter are in the middle of happening on each other there, a freak winter cyclone happens to drop directly on top of them all.  Or when the ghost that has haunted Ethelrida’s family for generations pops up just in time to save her life. 

None of these things, on their own merits, offend my delicate narrative sensibilities overly much.  And somehow I'm finding that the more overtly supernatural elements probably bother me the least of all.  They fit in the mold of paranormal happenings of seasons past, where the actual plot repercussions of these wild swerves from reality are surprisingly minimal. Or at least, they arise in situations that so clearly does not require a supernatural “fix” to resolve themselves that I don’t get worked up about it being a deus ex machina to escape a corner the author can't find any real way out of.  In the big shootout that ends S2, you could concoct any number of earthbound things to momentarily distract the criminal choking out the hero long enough for that hero to reach a gun and blow him away, so why not make it anactual UFO descending from the ether?  In the big mindfuck scene of S3, the heroine could just stumble out of the woods and steal a car from the parking lot of a bowling alley to escape the wounded killer lumbering after her, without any particular need for that bowling alley to manifest as a purgatorial waypoint where judgment is explicitly passed on wayward souls.  Similarly, whether or not the twister touches down right on top of that gas station, the gunplay we saw was enough to suggest none of those men were walking away from it alive anyway.  And there were any number of ways to foil Oraetta’s attempt on Ethelrida’s life without spectral intrusion; Lemuel could have woken up, or her mother could have, or the nurse could even have run afoul of some crude cans-on-a-string type alarm system mom had set up against the young suitor attempting to sneak into the room after hours. 

None of these changes, in any case, would prevent the rest of the story from playing out in the same fashion. And while I’d expect the lack of necessity of the supernatural elements for resolving any particular plot points to make them especially intolerable to my tastes, somehow that very gratuitousness makes them more palatable. The existence of the supernatural changes everything (in these moments), and nothing (in the grand scheme).  Which is a very Coen Brothers theme to be playing with, despite how scrupulous the brothers are about not explicitly confirming a higher power at work in their own films. Their thing is to heavily imply a supernatural dimension to characters and events while making sure everything – the odd moment from their goofier comedies notwithstanding – stays just within the realm of what can be justified in purely materialist terms.  The unified Coen oeuvre seems to be consistent about saying that whether there is a higher power or pure pointless chaos shaping the state of the world is not something we ever get to know for sure, while also suggesting that maybe the difference between sheer senseless chance and a divine but genuinely inscrutable plan doesn’t really amount to all that much, for all it affects our day-to-day conduct.

But even if the fantastical elements don’t change how the plot proceeds, they do change how we in the audience perceive things.  I have puzzled over the inclusion of such elements for a few seasons now, without coming up with a definitive take on why Hawley deemed such flights of fancy necessary to the stories being told.  And I still may not be able to break down for you in plain terms exactly why it needed to be a UFO for one season, or a bowling alley in this case and a tornado over here (unless the answers are The Man Who Wasn’t There, The Big Lebowski, and A Serious Man, respectively).  Or why aliens fit particularly in the one story while Jewish spirits are more appropriate for another.  But after multiple iterations, I can pull back and see a different purpose served by inserting these phenomena while keeping their exact nature obscure. 

Which is to fuck with us, essentially.  These eerie phenomena are certainly seen and interacted with by the characters in a diegetic sense, but they aren’t really there for the character’s sake.  They are there for us, in the audience. To put us on more equal footing with the characters that don’t get to share our gods-eye view of the broader context of the plot and their actions within it, and spend so much of their time frightened and terribly, terribly confused.  It is the inexorable nature of a sprawling, longform television series is to keep showing us more, and more, and thus our perspective becomes increasingly omniscient as time goes on.  This can create a disconnect over time on serialized shows with a large cast and/or centralized mystery that it wants to explore slowly.  LOST, for example, increasingly struggled in the later seasons to balance how many more disparate pieces of the lore obsessive fanbase had catalogued over the years of accumulated flashbacks and teases and perspective shifts than any one character on the island could possibly have pieced together themselves.  This made it easier to become frustrated with characters who could not conceivably know half as much about what is happening to them as we do at home.  Game Of Thrones faced a more subtle version of the same issue, I think, as it became harder over time to empathize with the naturally blinkered perspectives of the characters that don’t get to partake in the globe-trotting tour of all the far-flung storylines that we took for granted as our entire experience of that world.  I think this had an effect to sharpen the frustration with certain “stupid” characters, while also helping us to perhaps over-empathize with at least one characteras their loyalties became almost as divided as the audience’s.

This issue is especially relevant to Fargo, where the confusion and frustration at not seeing the full picture are essential to the thematic thrust of the series, as well as the Coen filmography from which it offshoots.  And so there is particular value in underlining for the audience that there are forces and designs directing these wild events that even we are not privy to understanding any more than the characters.  It might have seemed at first blush that making the supernatural underpinnings of the Coen filmography so overt would fly in the face of how deliberately they work to keep them unspoken. But I am coming around to this idea that it may be the series’s masterstroke.  Because eschewing literal recreation in favor of translating the spirit of the work to the contours of a new medium is where the true art of adaptation lies.

      COEN BINGO AND OTHER RANDOM STUFF

• “Stay Inside, Stay Alive” is one of the headlines in the opening montage, which I wonder if it was added after the coronavirus shut down production.

• The body count in crime/action movies always tend to be a bit ridiculous when you take a step back and compare it to even the most notorious true crimes in history.  Fargo seems to be having a special bit of fun with this, as the gang war dropping 27 bodies on just one side outstrips just about any criminal conflict in recorded history.  And that isn't even factoring in the train station shootout that left literally dozens of citizens and police slaughtered, years before mass shootings were a nightmarishly commonplace occurrence.  The president would have declared all of Kansas City a war zone long before this point in any "real" world sense.

• Re: Zombie Captain Roach, is there any indication that he has actually been trying to harm the Pearl women?  It seems possible that we could still get a reveal that he is cursed to try to help them by appearing to warn them of imminent danger/death.  His appearance when Swanee was on the verge of death, for instance, prompted Zelmaire to prod her to roll over before she vomited. And obviously he foils Oraetta's attempt on Ethelrida's life.

• One of the more overt effects of the COVID-induced break in production is that Satchel appears to have walked all the way from Christmas to late Spring since the last episode.  But it has a nice subtle side-effect of the boy looking and sounding like he's grown up considerably in his day or two alone on the road.

• I guess Gaetano’s death was foreshadowed by his big pratfall on the ice earlier in the season, but I dunno.  It still feels a little half-baked.

• I felt like it was non-Coen movies that were getting more overt shout-outs this week. Gaetano's stupid death apes White Boy Bob's in (the excellent) Out Of Sight, the swooping POV effect as Oraetta sneaks into the Smutny house at night evokes the Coen's best bud Sam Raim's signature camera moves from (the excellent) Evil Dead series, and I even got a whiff of (the excellent) Rushmore's big payback sequence during the opening montage that saw Jason Schwartzman waltzing out of doorways in slow motion.

HATEFUL EIGHT PODCAST

 

The guys welcome Chris Pernell to parse the underpinnings of the American Western, whether Michael Madsen is actually good,  truth and lies, Tarantino's age-blindness, Netflix's clumsy editing,  and arguably the most provocative and least coherent ending of QT's career.

FARGO 4.09 - "EAST/WEST"

 

It feels increasingly pointless to refer to Fargo the film as the source material that Fargo the series is “based on”.  The first season or so may have had some more fun playing with bits from the movie, but as it went on it drew much more broadly and loosely from the entire Coen filmography.  Particularly in this fourth incarnation, the show has left even the basic climate and character types that defined the movie behind to draw much more directly from Miller’s Crossing and Raising Arizona, - and with “East/West”, The Wizard Of Oz - than Fargo itself.  We’ll get back around to the Oz riffing in a bit, but this episode also brings to the fore the most significant difference between the film and series, which is the overt stylistic flourishes and flights of cinematographic fancy that the Coen’s original work never had the time or inclination for.  The film is rigorous about maintaining an absolutely straight-faced presentation of the increasingly absurd and violent events it depicts, which is something of a Coen trademark.  Noah Hawley, by contrast, is a much louder stylist, which might seem like it would clash with the restrained nature of Fargo, but for my money creates an appealing odd-couple synergy.  I imagine the deadpan nature of the film would, if stretched uniformly over the course of several seasons of longform television, begin to feel as flat and lifeless as cold porridge.  Conversely, when Hawley was given free rein to indulge his more gonzo instincts with Legion, the resulting porridge was too hot; an overwhelming visual smorgasbord that quickly detached from any real sense of narrative coherence or relatable characterization. 

Which is to say that Fargo, with its more earthbound plotting and centering around no-nonsense protagonists, presents a more stubbornly grounded reality for Hawley’s more grandiloquent proclivities to strain against, creating a marriage of artist and material that is not too hot and not too cold.  I won’t call it a perfect blend, because perfection is an illusory concept, whether applied to art or porridge temperature. I’ll settle instead for the less grandiloquent claim that it creates a heat level more ideal to my particular tastes.  Put in still plainer terms, “East/West” and Fargo generally represents the upper level of stylistic indulgence that I can fully vibe with, because even when it is going wild I can still tell, on a basic level, what the fuck is going on.  Despite the fair degree of symbolic abstraction and artsy-fartsiness at play, but I can certainly describe what actually happened in this episode.  It does not cross over to that realm of conscious unreality where more outre' shows like Legion or Twin Peaks often live, a place where it starts to seem like the author regards the plot and characters they created as burdens impeding the more esoteric, free-flowing jazz they really want to play.

"No, seriously.  That's David Bowie in the giant kettle. 
Why are you looking at me like that?"

So perhaps I should, if only to prove the point, describe what actually happens in the episode, outside all the artsy-fartsy abstractions.  Rabbi takes Satchel to the small town of Liberal, Kansas to lie low for a couple days while he retrieves some money he has stashed in the walls of a feed store.  But that feed store has been rebuilt as an appliance shop, and the owners of the new store have already spent most of the cash windfall they found when they took down the wall.  When Rabbi finds out it is the boy's birthday, he drives up the road to a filling station to try to procure him a candy bar or something.  There, he finds Fadda henchman Constant Calamita, who had been hunting him across the state, and Cannon henchman Omie Sparkman, who had been hunting Calamita in turn, already going at it.  Gunfire ensues, and everyone takes bullets which are ultimately irrelevant as a freak winter tornado sucks them all up anyway and distributes them across three counties.  Satchel, realizing that Rabbi is not returning, hits the road with a dog he found in a cupboard.

Nothing about these events is all that shocking in itself.  Well, the tornado is certainly an unusual device, but I’ve been predicting that one would come into play somehow since week two, I wasn’t (pardon the pun) blown away by that turn.  In any case, there is little in these plot turns that seems to demand that an entire episode be turned over to them exclusively, with no glance back to what’s happening in Kansas City, much less that it be done almost entirely in black and white and filled with oddly literary flourishes like the bifurcated boarding house, brazenly symbolic billboard, and direct references to fairy tales.  I used the porridge metaphor earlier because the episode is not content with just throwing Oz allusions all over the place, but also has a character specifically talk about Goldilocks.  The original story, not the Disney-fied version where the witches were replaced by bears.  He identifies Goldilocks as an “outsider in search of yourself”, which pointedly applies to Satchel at the end of the episode, but even more directly to Rabbi.  He bounced from a crime family that was too soft (the Jews that seemed to treat him well even as he helped plot their massacre) to one that was too hard (his own father, quoting the “someone has been sleeping in my bed” line from Goldilocks while forcing him to execute another child) to one that was…well, still not quite right. 

That this background would create an identity crisis of sorts is obvious, and it may contribute to his outsized reaction to the incomplete billboard.  He gets angrier insisting that leaving people in uncertainty "ain't right" than he does confronting the shopkeepers that appropriated his secret stash. Not that killing them would have done him any good at that point, and in fact would have delayed him from foiling Satchel’s near-arrest for Sitting Quietly Alone While Black.  Which…may have actually worked out better for them both, if it had put Rabbi off the cupcake hunt, or even just delayed his start by like two more minutes. 

But despite the direct Goldilocks references, the Wizard Of Oz riffing is somehow even more prominent, and also frankly confusing in its particulars.  For example, while Rabbi is carried off by the twister, it’s Satchel that wakes up to a colorized world after that storm separated him from his parental figure. The boy finds himself a Toto-sized dog to accompany him on the road in the end, so I guess he is the Dorothy analogue?  And the strange lands he finds himself in is explicitly Kansas, instead of “not Kansas anymore”.  The hotel is, like Oz, presided over by feuding sister  “witches” of the East and West, with one more overtly racist/wicked, while the other only makes a vague, spiteful pretense of tolerance - which fits with the Wicked-esque interpretation that Glinda the Good Witch only presents as kindly when she' s really using Dorothy to kill her enemies instead of actually helping her.

Or I could be remembering this wrong.  It's been awhile.

But if the other oddball residents of the hotel are supposed to approximate the Scarecrow/Tin Man/Cowardly Lion, those parallels were too subtle for me to trace.  I was more struck by how everyone in the house seemed to have confused, if not suspicious, relationships with their companions.  Obviously our duo is hiding their true identities, on account of the whole “hunted by a murderous fiend” thing so many Fargo characters go through at some point.  But it’s also unclear if the Reverend is traveling with his actual mother, or wife that goes by “mother” a la the Pence family.  The officer is traveling with a young “niece” that he speaks to like a spouse. And the man with the mysterious ailment (leprosy?) next door has some sort of weird teenage attendant/doctor/mad scientist seeing to his treatment. 

What exactly to make of all this quasi-literary oddity, I’m sure I don’t know.  But if I’m left in tortuous uncertainty, it hardly compares to where Satchel is left at episode’s end – a boy standing alone on a remote road in winter.  Which I’d guess is the last we will see of him here, leaving us fill in the blanks of how that road will lead him to, presumably, become the criminal enforcer named Milligan we met in season two.  And I’m fine with that, as there is still plenty of business left to complete back in Kansas City.   

      COEN BINGO AND OTHER RANDOM STUFF

• Okay, the way that Calamita does not register a gigantic cyclone forming a few yards behind him is not especially believable. 

• The radio in the car mentions a shootout at the slaughterhouse back in KC, so I guess that will be is to be a part of the climax.

• I wish we had gotten more time with Omie Sparkman, which is a mark of a successful characterization.  Corey Hendrix made him into a great, distinctive get-shit-done-er type with a relaxed confidence and not much time.

• The Barton Arms has to be an oblique reference to Barton Fink, who also spent his time holed up in an creaky old hotel filled with off-putting types. 

• The leper recalls the Coen trope of the decrepit old man that a protagonist has to pay pilgrimage to on their journeys (see: A Serious Man, The Big Lebowski, Intolerable Cruelty, No Country For Old Men), which is also sort of a Wizard Of Oz thing, as it usually involves the hero learning that this man-behind-the-curtain they thought had the answers.  Which I'd say is a stretch, but I tried to google a quote I recall from them saying all their movies turned out to be remake of Oz, and came across a diffierent interview where they make that connection in exactly as many words.

• This episode acts as a partial corrective to my griping about the sidelining of Rabbi, Ethelrida and Oraetta in the prior 4-5 weeks.  But it’s hard to see, with only 2 episodes left, how those women could play a similarly central role in the finale as they did in the premiere, and not have their inactivity throughout the rest of the season still feel conspicuous.

• “The History Of True Crime In The Midwest” book first appeared in Season 2.

• I love the camera effect that pulls into Rabbi’s face and then goes all sideways as he is pulled up by the tornado.

FARGO 4.08 - "THE NADIR"

 

 

“The Nadir” continues the trend of the mob war progressing with twists and turns (and plenty of automatic gunfire) that are exciting in their own right, even as it keeps crowding out some of the most intriguing characters and plotlines the season has created.  This is not a travesty in every case; I have no more burning desire than Josto himself to be spending more time with his betrothed or her politico father. I can't claim to have been on the edge of my seat when Ethelrida's mom had a drink with Loy's wife and planned a funeral for a kid we know is still alive. Nor am I particularly disappointed to not get more extensive misadventures with Mr. “I see myself as management” Leon before he comes back to pull a Benny-Blanco-from-the-Bronx after Loy has managed to eke out a win over the Faddas. 

On the flip side, I am disappointed to have Rabbi and Satchel completely absent for two straight weeks after their storyline reached its explosive turning point.  And it’s getting to be criminal how little Ethelrida has appeared or actually done all year.  Despite being clearly positioned as the heart of the show and primary POV character (the season opened with her voiceover guiding us into this world, remember), two-thirds of the season have passed and she is still sitting well off to the side of all the criminal goings on that occupy 90% of the show’s focus.  Her only interactions with any of that stuff come from a brief flirtation with Lemuel, who is himself only around because he’s been lodged at her funeral home specifically to keep him on the periphery of the main conflict.  

"Put me in, Coach!"

At the least, we are starting to get more than a single scene with Oraetta per episode.  Here, she spurns Josto’s declaration of love after a darkly funny exchange of the most traumatic childhood secrets imaginable (being that he was molested by the enemy his father gave him away to, and she was systematically poisoned by her mother in a case of Munchausen By Proxy) that both parties completely fail to even register.  In her case, she is understandably preoccupied by the news that the man she poisoned has survived and attempted murder charges are very likely coming her way.  She prepares to skip town, which may be the most reasonable response she’s had to anything all season, but stops short when she finds Ethelrida’s journal in her murder closet and pieces together who wrote the letter snitching on her murder spree.  Which is mostly to say, this storyline has basically caught up to where we knew it was going since episode 4. 

As I mention every week, the gangland stuff is choice enough that I don’t want to gripe about it overmuch.  But if you want a clear demonstration of the imbalance between the storylines, look to Odis.  You can’t say his time has been totally wasted, since this week he finally chooses a side and murders Deafy and Swanee on Loy’s orders, following a shootout that leaves a patently absurd number of cops and bystanders shot dead.  This is a suitably explosive payoff to “justify” the screentime devoted to Odis thus far, but the fact remains that he has gotten as much as Rabbi, Ethelrida and Oraetta combined – and is still not as good a character as any of them. 

"Heck, I'm a better character, and I'm just a worse version of another great character I played."

I could make a similar case about Gaetano, but he at least is exhibiting more dimension as time goes on.  Loy’s ploy to release him to tear his own family apart backfires spectacularly when it actually serves to bury the hatchet between the brothers.  In the deepest display of thinking we’ve seen from him, the big little brother susses out that if he knows exactly what his enemy wants him to do, maybe he should think twice about doing it.  That he is actually proud of his brother for having the stones to attempt murdering a child in order to get him murdered in turn  may not be the reaction of an actual human being, but it does fit with the caricature he's been so far.  And he may give Josto a little too much credit for strategic genius, as this plan was as much a failure as Loy’s when it came to execution (though I’d maintain it was conceptually sound given the hand he was dealt up to that point).  But thinking back on his little speech about how everyone in America wanting to be president someday gets in the way of just doing the job they actually have, it does also track that he would embrace his own role as simply "the bull", once assured that his brother has the requisite ruthlessness to be “the snake”.

Or maybe none of it makes any sense, and I’m just inclined to accept this development because I find the brothers presenting a united front against the Cannons to make the conflict more interesting.  That’s certainly possible.  But I consider it a good sign that my biggest complaint about the season is that there are multiple characters I want more of.  Also, there's a freaking zombie running around creeping on people.  Fuck if I know what he's on about, other than being a general harbinger of bad vibes.  But I like the spice it brings.

COEN BINGO AND OTHER RANDOM SHIT

• Ebal remains aloof from the family reunion, continuing to set him up to be the key to integrating the crime families once the Fadda brothers (and probably Loy) are out of the picture. 

• When they talk jazz, Lemuel touts the untethered musical approach of Charlie Parker while Etherlrida appreciates the more classically structured approach of Louis Armstrong.  It strikes me that he might be more of a fan of Noah Hawley’s other FX series Legion, which is a psychedelic, incoherent orgy of style. Whereas of course she would embody the meticulously-plotted rigors of Fargo.

• The face Zelmaire makes at Deafy when they spot each other in the station is one of those things that make it impossible for me to understand how anyone can’t love this show despite any legit flaws it might have.

• Loy’s saying that Mormons are “pretty unfriendly, really.  But it’s the way you’re unfriendly, like you’re doing me a favor” is a word-for-word match of Mike Milligan’s appraisal of “Minnesota Nice” in S2.

• It could be I just haven't brushed up on my Coen minutia in a few years now, but I haven't been clocking  a lot direct references.  I did get a touch of Miller’s Crossing’s “Danny Boy” scene in the way Gaetano fearlessly repels a gang of machine-gun toting assassins.  Although they missed an easy opportunity for him to pick up one of the attackers’ guns and fire it after their car as they flee.

GAME OF THRONES PODCAST(S)

 

John and I took a departure from our Tarantino series to talk about Schwartzblog's favorite topic, Game Of Thrones. 

It is split into two parts, the first generally attempting to dissect the various trends in entertainment that conspired to make the HBO series the biggest thing in the world for nearly a decade, and second looking at the ending and attendant audience disappointment that it wrought. 

Give it a listen on your preferred podcast platform, and throw in a quick rating or upvote or whatever they use, why not? 

FARGO 4.07 - "LAYAWAY"

 

As the main gang war storyline has continued to ramp up these last few weeks, the backburner storylines are becoming increasingly notable for their absence.  Most glaringly with the Smutneys, who had multiple grenades detonate in their midst simultaneously, with the Cannons taking over their business and Ethelrida stumbling upon one of the most prolific mass murderers in history living next door (to say nothing of the zombie apparitions haunting their home), and have since just sort of taken a few weeks off from the show.  Oraetta, for her part, has tabled her affair with Josto, which has gone unmentioned for those same few weeks as she deals with the threat to expose her killing spree.  Which does, as I type it out, sound like a reasonably important thing to occupy a main character for a couple of mid-season episodes. But it has felt a touch perfunctory in execution, as she pops in for single, fairly brief appearances each of the last three week.   She finally poisons her unctuous boss in this episode’s opening, which is an enormously risky and dramatic move from an objective standpont, but feels oddly perfunctory when it’s been so clearly coming since their first encounter.

Deafy also continues to be relegated to a single quick pop-in per episode.  He remains a fun enough presence due to Timothy Olyphant’s facility with these tenacious law enforcement types, but he hasn’t actually done anything since shaking down Ethelrida at school what seems like ages ago.  Confronting Odis about his playing both sides of the gang war in addition to both sides of the law gives him a choice line or two, but it doesn’t produce any real result for his investigation or storyline.  Technically, it is the straw that spurs the crooked cop to attempt to skip town, but he had ample reason to make that move already and in any case it’s not like that attempt amounts to anything.

It’s not that the main mob war storyline isn’t holding up its end, as it continues crackling along with double-crosses and killings and inventive plotting to spare.  It’s just that if we are to believe that the non-gangster storylines are or will carry equal narrative weight in the conclusion, this stretch of episodes is not doing the greatest jobs keeping those others plates spinning.  Compared to years past, it seems like the show is floundering a bit keeping the decent, salt of the earth “heart of the show” character at the forefront without giving that character a badge, and the clear mandate to be actively investigating the crime storylines that comes along with it.  And on the flip side, the malevolent agent-of-chaos figure does not usually feel as cordoned off from the main narrative as Oraetta still does this far into the season.  I’m sure that will change forthwith, but having those ancillary characters hanging around in limbo has me sort of idly concerned about how they will be reintregrated to become as essential to the finale as one assumes they will be.   

In the meantime, though, even if the criminals are sucking up all the air in the room, I’m happy enough with all the murdering and scheming and thematic monologuing and crises of conscience they are going through.  I could probably be well satisfied with a version of the season that was just the gang war and nothing else.  Even the characters that haven’t entirely worked for me are at least occupying their most interesting positions yet.  Odis still comes off as a pile of tics than a real person, even after getting the backstory to “explain” those tics, but his untenable position between the two mobs and his badge seems like it has to resolve itself in some interesting developments.  And if Gaetano was never really a believable character in his own right, that same lack of development works in a weird way to make his current function, as a bull being loosed back into the china shop, more exciting.  There’s not much telling what he might do, since he is not an actual person held back by any real human concerns.

He is set free by Loy, who seems a bit confused himself as to whether he is doing so out of an aspirational attempt to prove he and his race to be capable of a less barbaric form of warfare than his enemies are expecting, or a cold-blooded calculus that it is more likely to hurt his enemies than him in the immediate term.  And while the Cannons could certainly come to rue letting the beast off the chain, is the very last thing Josto wants to happen.  There has to be some chapter of The Art Of War that dictates that doing the opposite of what your opponent wants you to do can’t be that far off from the correct thing.

But as for what comes next, it appears to follow the grand Fargo tradition of some figure of pure violent malevolence stalking the “protagonists” (see: prior thoughts on the Coen's use of Nemesis figures), except in triplicate.  Gaetano is free to come after his brother, while Calamita, having come up empty huffing and puffing at Mrs. Cannon’s door, is on the trail of Rabbi and Satchel, and yet to learn that he has been cut loose from the protection of the Family.  And Oraetta may or may not have realized that Ethelrida is the one who wrote the letter snitching on her, but she will be after her soon enough. Things are going to get a lot bloodier before they get better.

COEN BINGO AND OTHER RANDOM SHIT

• Oraetta taking a moment to work out her best fake scream is a great beat.

• The set and costume design are, overall, fantastic.  But when Loy pulls over to look at the Diner’s Club billboard, it felt rather apparent that this scene set in Kansas City in the winter 1950 was being shot in Chicago in the spring of 2019. 

• It actually feels like the whole credit card angle could have been an after-market addition to the storyline that was added in when the shooting reconvened to finish up the end of the season post-COVID shutdown.

• Loy waiting outside the bathroom door to kill Zero and disappearing is evoking the most confounding moment in No Country For Old Men.  Damn, that's a great movie. 

DJANGO UNCHAINED PODCAST

 

Trouble City stream

John and Al welcome Jesse Perry to talk about Tarantino's sloppiest piece of provocation, DJANGO UNCHAINED.  They talk at great length about the film's great length, speculate on different iterations the movie could have taken, manage to avoid saying the N-Word, even once!

FARGO 4.06 - "CAMP ELEGANCE"

 

Okay, things are really cooking now.  The mob war is in full swing, with assassinations and kidnappings and counterplots flowing back and forth, and it’s at the intersection of this kind of intricate plotting and idiosyncratic character detail where the series shines most reliably.  The only real downside to all this gangster action is how it pushes Deafy and especially Ethelrida into making only brief, wordless cameos.  But even without the benefit of actual dialogue, the girl’s letter and marshal’s stakeout are still out there in the mix, disseminating information from one strand of plot to another, so it’s not as though they have just been forgotten.    

And if there is one outright gripe to get out of the way, it is how the show has Swanee shoot Gaetano in the head to knock him out and kidnap him.  Bad enough how the show is relying on the silly old trope that a simple bonk on the head is a totally secure and reliable way to put someone to sleep until you drag them to the next plot point, rather than a dangerous and wildly imprecise method that, even if it manages to hit the sweet spot between not killing a person outright and leaving them awake and pissed off, is still incredibly unlikely to incapacitate them for an interval of more than 30 seconds.  What is especially irksome is how the set up was such that Swanee could have just as easily clobbered him with something from behind as actually fire a bullet into his head, creating a brief sense that the show was teasing the death of a major character and quickly backtracking from it.  Not that Fargo has ever been precious about offing major characters before the climax, so it’s not like I think they were just afraid to go there. But it was an annoying note for just how unnecessary it was to get where the scene is going.

"We had nitpickers like this in Salt Lake a few years back..."

But overall, this was a crackerjack episode that more than made up for that one bum note with escalating action that strained the divided loyalties of various supporting players to their breaking points.  Odis gets batted back and forth most brutally, with Loy mock-executing and forcing him to first give up Gaetano’s whereabouts and then attempt to retrieve Satchel.  Well, I guess he forces him to first listen to a menacing thematically resonant monologue about fighting the weight of history and owning human beings as chattel, then give up Gaetano, then get the boy.  Chris Rock is handling these threatening speeches well individually, but the character is edging closer to self-parody as more and more of his scenes center around them. In any case, it has the desired effect on the crooked cop, who scurries to work for his new criminal masters.  

Loy knows, or should know, that the chances of this actually saving his son are dicey at best, but he also doesn’t have time to concoct a better plan.  Because Josto, for his part, has already given the order to kill the boy, realizing that the inevitable retaliation will actually work to rid him of his troublesome sibling without explicitly going against New York’s order to work with him, and still allow a potential avenue to de-escalate the war by pinning responsibility on the other disloyal thorn in his side, Calamita, and offering up his scalp as a peace offering.  It’s a ruthless and surprisingly savvy bit of gangster scheming to come from the pipsqueak don whose flailing we have mostly been invited to laugh at (and who still offers the biggest laughs of the episode trying to suppress his glee at the prospect of his brother’s death).  

But it’s undone by a touch of bad timing, and the fact that neither of the hangdog underlings he entrusts with the details of the plan choose loyalty to him over conscience.  We pretty much knew which way Rabbi would break, as he has told us he would protect the boy no matter what on multiple occasions already.  More of a surprise is poor bastard Antoon Dumini, as the latest minor Fargo character to receive a sudden, emotionally fraught and surprisingly effective spotlight.  He has been a hapless flunkie all season, up through two-thirds of this episode even, before the final act is given over to a look at his family situation and immigrant story of his own.  He was brought to Kansas as a prisoner of war, having been an actual child soldier of the type Rabbi claims his original family made him.  He takes Satchel to the titular, abandoned POW camp for his Miller’s Crossing-esque death march.   But reminiscing about how simply arriving in the land of plenty once revived him from the "skeleton" that years of wartime hardship and privation had made him jars something in his spirit.  At the moment of truth, can’t bring himself to pull the trigger.

His reward for defying orders and refusing to let an innocent child die is to be immediately shot in the back by Rabbi.  For whom killing another man making essentially the same moral choice as he is functions as a big heroic moment.  What does that mean?  It’s never very clear in the quixotic moral world of Fargo. Maybe Antoon’s decision came in time to save his soul, but not his life.  Maybe it’s just a bleak joke.  The chance that we ever get definitive answers to questions like that are about as good as Dr. Harvard’s odds of making it through the season without being poisoned by a macaroon.

COEN BINGO AND OTHER RANDOM SHIT

• The attack on Odis in his apartment blends the “bursting through the shower curtain” aspect of the kidnapping in the Fargo movie with a very deliberate aping of shot of the opening murder in No Country For Old Men when he is being choked out on the floor as his assailant stares creepily at the ceiling.

• Further NCFOM vibes in how Gaetano watches the shadows under the door to anticipate his attackers a la' Llewellyn Moss in the hotel attack.

• Joe Bulo from New York’s stay in Kansas City will extend another 29 years, at which point he will (in the form of Brad Garrett) get himself beheaded trying to annex Fargo into the outfit’s territory.

• Fosto asks Calamita “are you his boy”, which recalls how all the gangsters talk about Eddie Dane and Mink's down-low relationship in Miller's Crossing.

• The shot of the zombie looming behind Ethelrida as she blows out her birthday candles is creepy af, but hell if I know what it is signifying.

• Ebal continues to be painted in a reasonably sympathetic light, so I’m sticking with my prediction that he survives along with Bulo to integrate the warring clans.

• Calamita driving a car painted in the exact same plum shade as his snazzy suit is a wonderful little detail.

• Fosto compares Gaetano explicitly to a tornado, noting that when one blows by you don’t go chasing after it.  My guess that a tornado will disrupt the endgame somehow seems bolstered!  If it weren't for all the Christmas decorations continuing to indicate that tornado season is still 5-6 months away!