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Apologies if this has been discussed to death in The Discourse, but since this entire season is (partially) a comic book style retcon/untold tale of why the Kansas City organization was so improbably diverse in the 1970s: I think it's pretty generally accepted that Satchel Cannon is going to grow up to be Mike Milligan. The other big named characters from Kansas City in s2 are Joe Bulo (Brad Garrett), Hamish Broker (Adam Arkin), and the Kitchen Brothers. I don't think they (or anyone bearing their surnames) have shown up in s4 as of yet. BUT. The only other one I really remember being named is the guy sent up from Kansas City to clean up Mike's mess, a slim white guy looking to be in his sixties referred only as "The Undertaker". Could this where Thurman Smutney ends up?
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Oct 30, 2020 07:36
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| # ¿ May 13, 2024 18:09 |
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Quick facts: 1) Liberal, Kansas is a real town in Kansas. I've been there. 2) It *is* the self-proclaimed Pancake Hub of the Universe. 2a) 1950 was the first year of the Pancake Race so it's maybe weird to have a show taking place over the holidays in 1950 already have that enshrined at the town limits, but canonically some dude is putting up fresh signs for a new decade around Liberal. 3) Liberal, Kansas is the home of the "Dorothy's House" Wizard of Oz museum, though it didn't get moved there until the early 1980s.. 4) Liberal, Kansas (and really most of the southwest quadrant of Kansas) has as its bigger employer the beef industry. The main employer (at least for the past 30-40 years, don't know about in 1950) in the region are various farms and slaughterhouses. I suspect that was the smell, not so much "fresh air". 5) They have a semipro baseball team called The Liberal Bee Jays, which is something. I don't really know what to make of a lot of this episode. I liked it, though.
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Nov 18, 2020 06:05
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Comrade Fakename posted:Just absolutely lol at the building in the montage where Cannon is looking out of his car that was covered in mobile phone masts. Just look at this poo poo!
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Dec 1, 2020 19:02
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For what it's worth, in addition to the single surviving Kitchen Brother at the wheel, Mike's wearing the exact same outfit (or at least a very similar deep burgundy coat, pale powder blue shirt, and bolo tie) as he does in the office drone scene at the end of season 2. And he's told to ditch the cowboy look and 'long hair' in that scene. So it's presumably meant to be the same day. The two possibilities (one more likely than the other) is that it's him being driven to that meeting, as there's plenty of rural roads to look out on between Sioux Falls and Kansas City. But I suppose a more distant possibility is that the scene takes place after the assignment to accounting, and Mike and Gale are driving west through Kansas on the actual same road Satchel walked thirty years prior so it's a literal flashback, and Mike's ending is saying "gently caress it" to office drudgery to seek his fortune in the West. Checking and doublechecking his gun would be more in line with that drive, but I assume it's the former, given how Hawley sounded pretty dubious about revisiting Mike Milligan in the future, and apparently a discarded version of the scene was described like this: quote:There were other versions. There was a version where after Loy's death, we jumped forward in time to the '90s, and we see Bokeem now as part of this corporate engine, the Kansas City mafia. When we last saw him [in season two], we left him in an office with a typewriter. It was going to be this idea that he prospered in that business on some level, but now that we understood his past, we would understand that he was "passing" in order to do it.
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Dec 2, 2020 00:26
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I know there's plenty of story left, but as of right now what reason would Munch have to want to kill Dot? Obviously she caused him to fail at his assigned job and sliced his face up, but she was just a job, and a job he hasn't been paid for. His anger and vengeance seems solely focused on the Tillmans.
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Dec 7, 2023 19:50
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My assumption was that the dream sequence initially played out as Dot planned to do; I don't know what she had buried underneath the windmill, be it a weapon or evidence to use against Roy or whatever, but she was going to get it and discovered that it had been taken by Linda. Then she tracked down Linda as Plan B.
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Jan 1, 2024 01:34
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Open Source Idiom posted:There also seems to have been a shift in terms of Lorraine and Danish's attitudes to Dot, and I don't get when the show went from them institutionalising her to actually caring about her. Perhaps it's the police photos, but I guess I just don't buy that given how starkly absent of empathy they've been everywhere else. Whatever though, it's a minor thing. Between then and 'now', she is visited by Roy Tillman who fills in some of Dorothy/Nadine's past, and while Lorraine (and Danish) really dislike Roy and his whole Deal, their narrative still fits: Dot's the ex(?) wife of some low class corrupt sheriff, who can say what sort of scam she was pulling, either in cahoots with or against this Tillman rear end in a top hat? By the time Indira shows up with the abuse photos, the whole hospital thing went down where Dot escaped, disappeared, and snuck away with her daughter (Dot = bad!) but also in the midst of that she apparently saved Wayne from getting kidnapped and brought Scotty to a police officer rather than trying to get money for her or anything else. Plus Tillman pulled the whole banker thing, all of which starts to clarify that Roy Tillman is very bad and Dorothy was trying to stay away from him/keep him away from the Lyon Family/not in cahoots with the Tillmans. The police file is just sort of the final puzzle piece, the stark evidence that Tillman is terrible and that all of Dorothy's lies and evasions were not someone actively trying to scam the Lyon family, but the acts of the aggrieved/victimized party trying to keep themselves and their loved ones far away from Tillman. It makes sense to me, if you buy that Lorraine is more self-interested/cynical versus operating on pure malevolence. They're definitely not heroic or altruistic, but their version of reality shifted from "Dorothy is lying to us because she is a grifter" to "Dorothy was lying to us because her life before meeting Wayne was hellish and now we are also in direct conflict with the person who made it that way."
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Jan 11, 2024 14:18
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I'm not really sure what it's "beating the viewer over the head" about or honestly how it is doing said beating. I assume "it" here is that "there exists a reactionary/insurrectionist movement today in the United States that is intertwined with the notion of Law & Order and A Bygone Better America and militant separatists and Evangelical movements and Donald Trump" and I can't tell if the issue is "telling a story about that" or "telling a story about that while explicitly mentioning Donald Trump or Ammon Bundy or Lavoy Finicum" or, and I do sympathize with this even if I don't think it's productive and there are probably lots of other shows to watch, "we are living through this and it's awful and I want entertainment that does not remind me of this".Open Source Idiom posted:Given some of the things she says -- e.g. her feudal ideology, policing her granddaughter's (mild!) non standard gender presentment -- makes me think she's conservative. How does you read incorporate those elements? We're introduced to her in the Christmas photo shoot scene: 1. She scolds Danish for "ruining her entrance" down the staircase 2. She gets lovely about Scotty wearing a suit 3. Tells Danish he can't be in the photo because it's "family only" 4. Has everyone pose with assault rifles She outright says the guns are for their image, "to project their values", and the Lorraine we know by now clearly values/valued Danish as much as she does anyone who is not her son or granddaughter. My read of the the Scotty stuff is less "she is going to be actively transphobic and start funding lovely laws" and more "we're taking this photograph to cater to a certain audience that is going to love guns and not want to see anything that gives them even a whiff of non-gender essentialism". Still a lovely comment, but motivated by Keeping Up Appearances as opposed to transphobia or whatever. And again, the events of the season have Lorraine directly butting up against actual Patriarchy and Gender Essentialism and etc. in the comparatively benign form of the lovely bankers calling her Lady and only wanting to talk to Danish, and then Tillman, and she rails against even the less violent form of the patriarchy pretty loving hard. Not suggesting she is an Ally or anything approaching that, but her view of the world is not at all in line with the Roy Tillmans and Odin Littles of the world. If there's anything that is being "beaten over the head" in this season, it's the conflict between all of the sort of conservative/Conservative factions in America and their view of an Imagined Past America and a desired Future America -- Lorraine represents the "business wing" of the Republican party, which yearns for unfettered free market capitalism and deep down a return to robber barons and/or feudalism and is not personally overly concerned with the culture wars -- Tillman et. al represent the "MAGA" wing, who drape everything in a veneer of faith and nostalgia but really just long for a time when Straight White Men ruled the Earth and could do whatever the gently caress they want to anyone else -- Munch is the shadow of actual history and faith that nobody seems to actually understand And everyone else are basically just the actual people who have to live in the world those other groups created. All of this has already been said in the thread and elsewhere, and I can see the argument that it's been pretty on the nose/repeating itself/possibly "beating you over the head with it" but also at the same time this and various other things (the dream sequence in particular) have been pretty lampshaded to some, and confusing to others, so I always wonder what the right level of subtle storytelling is actually the platonic ideal. Fargo (and the Coen Brothers movies in general: I'm thinking the original Fargo, Raising Arizona, Hudsucker Proxy, A Serous Man, even stuff like Barton Fink) has always been about The Stories People Tell Themselves About America butting up against The America They Live In and the history of actual America in one way or another, and I agree that this season has been broader and more obvious about it than a lot of what has come before. I can see why people would not love that, but I've certainly been enjoying it. Edge & Christian fucked around with this message at 05:22 on Jan 12, 2024 |
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Jan 12, 2024 05:17
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Jerusalem posted:Re: Witt and the final episode of Season 5: So many people in season 5 have "codes" and everyone keeps insisting that debts must be paid, and consequences are coming, and etc. Witt has a code, and the reason he appears at all after the first episode is that he feels that he is in debt to Dorothy Lyons, and must repay that debt. This is a very honorable debt and the most honorable code of law/policing you're liable to see. It's honorable but ultimately pretty foolish, especially when it extends to his final scenes. He's a traffic cop with a busted leg, but he insists on embedding himself into an FBI hostage rescue team. Miraculously this all works out and they save Dorothy, but that sense of debt and honor extends to a traffic cop with a busted leg deciding that he needs to hunt down and arrest an incredibly dangerous militia leader who is surrounded by all of the aforementioned FBI guys himself, out of debt and honor. Even before the finale, Witt does the "right thing" by following Dorothy back to the Tillman ranch, and then goes beyond his police duty to personally inform Danish Graves about Dot's whereabouts, which ultimately gets Danish killed too. It's unpleasant and unsatisfying and I don't know in-universe what the "right" thing to do is, but Witt is an example of how feeling like every debt must be paid and every code must be unshakeable is dangerous, even when done with the best of intentions. He's one of the most pure-hearted characters (in contrast with the shades of gray to black that all of the other Code Having folks like Lorraine, Roy, Munch, etc. that bear the bulk of this theme) but good intentions do not save him. The message (and it's absolutely deliberate, Hawley talks about how the entire run of Fargo has been him "writing 51 hours about the evils of capitalism") is that broken systems are broken even when you do your absolute best to be a good person inside them. So it's important not to just have it crush lovely people.
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Jan 19, 2024 16:15
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I think the dissonance around Lorraine was deliberate, Noah Hawley is pretty explicit in interviews that Fargo is a) a series of stories about the stories America tells itself about America and b) "the evils of capitalism". For decades (centuries?) America has told itself stories about The Good Guy With a Gun, the Thin Blue Line, the One Noble Lawman, and so on. Popular culture is still rife with copaganda despite increasing awareness that is it copaganda. Even Fargo falls into it in many of its iterations. Season 5 has the absolute darkest distillate of this long running Story About America with Roy Tillman, who terrible on every level. It has the tragic result of believing in the pure distillation of The Noble Lawman with a Code in Witt Farr. They're two extreme sides of the spectrum, but there are still hundreds of stories being told (in fiction, in real life) even today about lawmen in between them, and America is conditioned to Believe that they're usually the heroes of their stories. And then there's Lorraine. She's a capitalist, a titan of industry. America has a long history of lionizing (or demonizing) them too, from Carnegie and Rockefeller to Edison, Ford, Gates, Bezos, Musk, the Kochs, the Murdochs, etc. etc. Even smaller stories about scrapper entrepreneurs and inventors and small business people. Lorraine is closer to Tillman than Farr on the "tragic hero -- damnable villain" spectrum of All Capitalists are Bastards, but like the loose cannon cop, the sheriff who takes matters into his own hands, the detective who has to bend the rules to get results, she spends the back half of the series being portrayed as part of the protagonist's team and taking down someone even worse than her. It doesn't make her "good" or a "hero" any more than Vic Mackey or Tony Soprano or Walter White or any other Difficult Man protagonist, and it's easy (for the viewers or even the creators) to slip into fist-pumping for these characters, especially (as with Lorraine vs. Roy) they're up against even bigger bastards. So it worked for me as sort of an inversion of the typical story, where the cop bends all of the rules and goes off the book to gently caress over the mob boss or corrupt magnate. And is directly followed by an extended scene where the main protagonist disarms a supernatural killing machine by repudiating her entire philosophy. I understand why it doesn't for others, re: the whole "no such thing as an anti-war war movie" and the countless people who end up rooting for the aforementioned Difficult Men.
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Jan 23, 2024 20:05
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| # ¿ May 13, 2024 18:09 |
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I'm not sure what I want from a weird Fargo continuation on the whole (besides Mike Milligan), but I do know that I want the big climax to be a very hopeless situation when suddenly Munch appears with a biscuit, and he eats it, and portals start opening up behind him like Avengers: Endgame and out walks Lorne Malvo, Hanzee Dent, VM Varga, Gaetano Fadda, Anthon Chigurh, Leonard Smalls, Karl Mundt, Gaear Grimsrud, Sy Ableman, and a badly CGI'd Paul Newman, all also eating biscuits. And then they forgive everyone.
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Jan 24, 2024 01:44
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