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.
- 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.
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