Dev F

Just watched the second episode, and two things particularly amused me: In the segment about the Terryology Institute, there's a bit where the dad reads some goofy long random decimal off the invoice the institute sent him, and I immediately recognized it, because one day in high school I got bored in math class and memorized the square root of 8. I guess I guess Terrence Howard must've done some weird math thing that involved taking the square root of 8? (Though one of the digits got messed up at some point, because the square root of 8 is 2.82842712474619, whereas the number the guy reads is 2.82842712374619.) As the child of a librarian, I thought it was funny that the producer tried to get the interviewee in the Leonardo DiCaprio Computer Center segment to say she considered Leo a librarian too and she tried to be amenable, but then couldn't resist saying "or certainly a library staff member," because librarians are very sensitive about letting anyone call themselves a librarian if they don't have a master's degree in library science.

Yeah, I always get a kick out of supporting characters who are just unapologetically awful: Pete Campbell on Mad Men, Jeremy Jamm on Parks and Recreation, Ellen Tigh on Battlestar Galactica . . .

I mean, the UFO stuff is part of why I don't like season 2 quite as much as season 1, but I didn't have as big a problem with it as with the sin eater thing. Partly because, as you said, UFO sightings were a real thing during the setting of the season, whether or not there were actually any alien spacecraft hovering around. So I can imagine a true-crime story in which there was a chaotic gunfight that was interrupted by weird lights in the sky, and some of the survivors whispered that it was an extraterrestrial visitation. And then Fargo "dramatizes" it decades later by filling the scene with actual alien flying saucers. In addition, the very episode in which the UFO drops in also makes a point of reinforcing the true-crime angle of the series. Recall that this is the episode in which we see the "real" book on which the series is supposedly based, The History of True Crime in the Mid West, and Martin Freeman comes back to narrate some supposed passages in voice of its author, Barton Brixby. And Brixby very conspicuously doesn't mention the UFO while puzzling over some of the more mundane aspects of the story, which suggests that there's a more down-to-earth version of narrative that doesn't end with "and then some aliens show up." And finally, the next and last episode of the season punctures the supernatural implications of the UFO—the same way, as I mentioned before, the Coen brothers usually do. We've been set up to think that the UFO will tie into the mysterious books and pictures that Betsy Solverson's father has strewn obsessively all over his study, but when she finally confronts him about them, he reveals that they're not about alien visitors at all; they're about Hank's personal quest to bring people together through a universal language. As with Malvo and Hanzee, the ultimate point is that these unfathomable forces matter less than simple decency and compassion and ultimately fade into the background of a very human story. Munch's story this season, on the other hand, doesn't get any of that sort of shading. There's no attempt to tie him in with the "This is a true story" conceit of the series; there's no final revelation that has us rethinking his paranormal nature. It's implied three episodes in that he's an immortal sin eater, and the finale reveals that, yes, he actually is an immortal sin eater. Maybe it's the lack of any development that makes it feel like a facile morality play to me. I think of the Coens' version of an overtly supernatural character: John Goodman as Charlie Meadows in Barton Fink. Charlie's story isn't that he's introduced early in the movie as the devil, and in the end it turns out he is the devil. He's introduced as the sort of "common man" that the main character Barton professes to care deeply about but actually has contempt for, and when it's revealed that Charlie is actually a notorious serial killer and probably also Satan, it adds to our understanding of Barton's relationship with the common man. Munch, on the other hand, has an arc that's just sort of like: a) Man, this guy is weird, I wonder what his deal is? b) Oh, this flashback kind of implies that he's an immortal sin eater, but that's probably not literally true, right? c) Oh, wow, he's so weird, with no apparent human connections, that I wonder if we are supposed to think he's literally an immortal sin eater! d) Okay, yeah, we actually are. Or are there nuances to his story that I'm missing? I'm starting to think that the fraught nature of questions of gender identity is making this a more complicated issue than it needs to be. Putting aside whether Scotty's penchant for suits means she's being "boyish" or what it says about her gender presentation, I just think it's awkward to make it into this big character point in the first episode and then do nothing with it for the rest of the season. Imagine that Scotty's interest had been in something that didn't really have gender identity implications. Like, say, she loves playing hockey. And her grandmother disapproves because she doesn't think it's appropriate for a young lady, but her parents are super supportive, to show that they don't have Lorraine's outmoded conservative prejudices. That's basically what you're arguing that the "crossdressing" story is meant to be about, right? And no one in this day and age would say that a girl playing hockey means she's really a boy or anything like that, so we can take all that out of the equation. Imagine further that Munch wears a hockey jersey all the time. It's never explained, but once or twice another character mentions it derisively. And maybe once or twice in the early episodes we see Scotty doing stick-handling drills or something . . . And then Scotty's interest in hockey isn't mentioned again for the rest of the season, even at the end when Munch shows up, still wearing his jersey. That would be weird, right? And maybe I wouldn't be thinking so much about how both these characters' storylines could've been handled differently if the season had otherwise been chockablock with brilliant character moments and story twists and there just wasn't room to do more with Munch or Scotty. But way too much of the season was taken up by roughly eight thousand scenes of Dot getting kidnapped and escaping in some clever way only to get kidnapped again ten minutes later. We couldn't lose just a couple of those repetitive beats to make room for, say, a scene between Lorraine and Scotty that explores the differences in how they think about what it means to be a girl or a woman, or a moment that juxtaposes Munch's supernatural background with the true-crime aesthetic of the series?

I mean, I get that that's the general point, but the specific thing Lorraine seemed to disapprove of was that Scotty was mildly gender nonforming. And the resolution wasn't that Lorraine realized she was being unaccepting or whatever; the only resolution was that Scotty just kinda stopped being notably tomboyish partway through the season and nobody ever mentioned it again. It sits especially weird with me given the "one year later" epilogue, since I don't think it's crazy to read it as, like, It's a year later and Scotty's not a tomboy anymore—it was just a phase! Which, fine, that happens, but as a generalized implication I find it a little icky. A more interesting thing they could've explored, I think, was not to give Scotty a "trans storyline" or anything so extreme, but just to dig into the idea that as a child being raised among fierce women and mild-mannered men, she sees masculinity, counterintuitively, as a closer match for her sweet, nurturing personality than femininity. (That kind of idiosyncratic stereotyping is something I'm familiar with from my own childhood with a working mother and stay-at-home dad; when my sister was little she once announced confidently that "women don't cook and men don't iron!") It was the season 1 episode "Alpine Shepherd Boy." Amusingly, that episode being named "Jell-O" was the whole reason they decided to title every episode in the form "Something-o" ("Uno," "Nacho," "Five-O" . . .). And then for legal reasons it was the only episode title of season 1 that didn't take that form!

It's spelled "Bisquik" on Hulu, I'm guessing because there would've been legal issues with using the exact trademarked name of a product as an episode title. (In the same way that an episode of Better Call Saul was supposed to be called "Jell-O," but their lawyers made them change it.) It's funny, because Hawley is very invested in that "This is a true story" line. He mentioned again this season, as he did in season 3, that he chose the date of the season to make it as recent as possible while still maintaining the conceit that the show is the dramatization of an actual true crime story: "Since it says it’s a true story, it has to be long enough in the past that the first book could have been written about the true crime." And yet he doesn't seem at all concerned about the fact that it's a true crime story with a magical immortal sin eater in it! Sure, a docudrama can take liberties with the "true story," but wouldn't a liberty this fantastical sort of be like, I dunno, Ryan Murphy revealing at the end of The People v. O. J. Simpson that Johnnie Cochran was Anansi the spider god? It just totally busts the genre.

Godammit, Dot, you should have finished him off when you had him down! It seems to me that these are both kind of the point: Dot was spared the responsibility for killing Roy because at the exact moment when she had her chance (and was definitely about to do it, I'd say), she was rescued by a man who would do anything not to kill him. Even then, she's positively desperate to go after him and finish him off, but Witt insists on going himself. Which is a no-brainer choice, obviously, since he's a cop and she's a traumatized hostage—but it's significant that he goes after Roy not to get revenge on Dot's behalf but to uphold his own standard of justice and decency even though it kills him. In a Christlike way (and a Coen-like way, amid many less Coen-like elements this season that I've already complained about), his death pays her debt. He wipes out the spiral of blood for blood, and it's because she's able to face the future without the stain of that act that, having just come from Trooper Farr's gravesite, she's able to face Ole Munch with grace and forgiveness. Oh, I'm not saying I was expecting for Scotty to turn out to be a trans boy or anything like that. (Some critics and commenters definitely got out over their skis on that one.) But at a certain point if you're doing so little with a character thread that it just kinda drops completely after a few episodes, was there really a point in doing it at all? Especially when it's done in a way that seems to link two characters together that otherwise seem totally dissimilar, but then that link doesn't amount to anything when they finally do meet. Better to not suggest a connection at all than to tease one and then never deliver on it! It's a problem I had with a number of the characterizations this year: they all seemed so vibrant and full of potential to begin with, but a lot of them didn't end up amounting to much. Wayne, for instance, seemed really interesting at first, this guy who's earnestly Minnesota Nice in the way that most people just pretend to be, like someone raised to be genuine by the disingenuous. But then they literally give him head trauma for half the season so he just wastes all his screen time babbling nonsense that only speaks to the fact that his brain isn't working right!

That scene in No Country for Old Men was the first thing I thought of, too—but for me it just reinforced my growing realization this season that I much prefer the Coen brothers' take on this sort of material to Noah Hawley's take in the last three seasons or so. In No Country, Carla Jean stands up to the spooky murderer come to collect her debt the same way Dot does. But, crucially, part of the way she does that is by puncturing his air of possibly supernatural malevolence. He tries to get her to go along with the self-important coin-flip ritual he's used throughout the film to guide his killings, but she dismisses the whole idea: "The coin don't have no say. It's just you." Possibly at the cost of her life, she refuses to validate the idea that he's some agent of divine destiny. And her skepticism is quickly validated: as he leaves her house, he's wounded in a car accident that under any normal understanding is completely random, but by the murderer's own standards is an indictment of him: "If the road you followed brought you to this, of what use was the road?" The first couple seasons of Fargo were in keeping with that more existential perspective. Season 1 ended with Malvo, the self-appointed devil figure, being gunned down like a normal man. Season 2 had Hanzee, this unflappable specter of vengeance, turning himself into just another crime boss whose empire eventually gets washed into the sea. But in more recent years we've gotten these figures like Ole Munch or V. M. Varga whose supernatural mien is never deflated. Indeed, Munch gets a redemption arc based around the firsthand confirmation that he actually is some sort of immortal sin eater. His mien is not just unpunctured in the end, it's inflated! Now, this kind of heavy-handed magical realism is a valid form of storytelling, of course, but as I mentioned in the discussion for the episode "Linda," I'm starting to realize how far it takes the series from what I love about the Coen brothers' source material. As I said there, the Coens have a neo-noir sensibility in which the punishment for bad behavior is the inescapable logic of unintended consequences: The road you followed brought you to this. But Hawley's perspective seems to rely too obviously on external intervention—either supernatural influence or just the heavy hand of the writer—to mete out punishment and convey meaning. And that changes the mode of the storytelling from neo-noir to morality play: Be good or the boogey man will eat you. And that's really not what I'm looking for in a Coen pastiche series. And I'm certainly not saying I needed for the episode to end with Dot being murdered like Carla Jean. But I would've much preferred an ending in which part of Munch's redemption involved him accepting the fact that he's just some guy, not an ageless symbol of humankind's debt burden. Early on, I theorized that his sin-eater backstory was meant to be symbolic—that, as a hit man and fixer, his job centers around taking on the burden of other people's sins, and it's by framing this as a sacrosanct transaction that he's able to compartmentalize the violence and greed that actually motivates him. I would've been much more interested in a story arc along those lines: Munch as a guy who mistakenly thinks of himself as an incorruptible sin eater, but in his final confrontation with Dot and her family, he's able to shed that mask and make some sort of peace with who he really is and what really motivates him. Then it's a story about a character and not the Living Embodiment of Our Debt Burden, y'know? Yeah, the sex and gender stuff ended up being pretty much a road to nowhere. Scotty is mildly tomboyish for a few episodes, and Munch randomly wears a kilt that people will occasionally label a skirt, but they don't amount to much or play off each other in a particularly interesting way. By the time Scotty is peeping sweetly at Munch in her pastel shirt and sparkly nails, it's not like she represents a more positive model of masculinity for him to follow or anything like that.

And when she was complaining to the unseen person on the phone, "Now, honestly, what's the point of being a billionaire if I can't have somebody killed?" she called him "Bill." I wonder if he was meant to be Trump's attorney general at the time, Bill Barr. Some critics have described this season as a return to form for the series, but I'm honestly still not feeling it. The dialogue is somewhat sharper and the characters more vibrant than they've been in a while, but it's all in service of a plot that just has the overpopulated cast clanging together in different combinations and then scattering again. There's no real sense of momentum—certainly nothing as sharply defined as, say, Lester's slow moral descent in season 1.

I thought of another possible ending that's more ironic than depressing: Ed and Dev succeed in redirecting the meteor to Mars, but Ed takes the fall for it and is forced back to Earth to face the consequences—sort of a Martian Moses who leads his people to the promised land but will never get to see it. And because Mars is now way more important but everyone else in power there has proven they can't be trusted, Dani's tour of duty is extended and she doesn't get to return to Earth after all.

Ah, thanks, that makes a lot more sense. I knew I must've been getting something mixed up. Interestingly, the tech who tells them "You can't just bypass a regulator!" just before the explosion is the CIA guy, Mike Bishop. To me that suggests that his "Nick Jennings was a friend of mine. Did you know his suit melted into his flesh?" outburst to Miles is more interrogation technique than genuine righteous indignation.

It's also not a great omen for everyone else's storyline that the episode in which they all looked forward to some nice, reassuring future was titled after the fantasy of a positive future that Margo and Sergei will never get to see. An unrelated question: Was I misunderstanding (I'm not great at keeping track of all the tertiary characters involved in Dev and Ed's caper), or did Miles lead Commander Cho to the conspirators' lair by complete coincidence? Miles was summoned to the underbase by the CIA/KGB duo, who apparently just happened to set up their interrogation chamber a few doors down from the conspirators they were interrogating Miles to find. And then Cho followed Miles down there and happened to stumble on the conspirators instead. Unless I'm missing something, that seems pretty fussy.

Yeah, initially I thought I had figured out the writers' plans for the end of the season when we learned about the timeline of the asteroid mission, which had the M-7 aiming to be ready to alter Goldilocks's course within a couple months after the July 2023 summit. I was thinking we might see part of the asteroid slam into New York City on September 11, 2003. But then, of course, I realized that the asteroid would take more time than that to get to Earth after the mission fucked with its course, so that seems unlikely. But I still wonder if something 9/11-like is in the offing.

But then what would the writers do to show subsequent progress and changes in design preferences in future seasons? They can't just show current electric cars in 2003 and then have them remain exactly the same for twenty years, and they're not going to have any more leeway, budget-wise, to start filling the streets with more evolved fictional electric cars in season 5! Even beyond the motor vehicles, the scope of changes to the timeline probably should've altered the culture much more significantly than we've seen, leading to all-new fashions, musical trends, news events, etc. But the only way you can make a show like this on a streaming TV budget and schedule is to treat a lot of the background details the same way you would in a standard period piece. And I'm not even sure the show would have the same appeal if the writers cared more about extrapolating a probable alternate history than tweaking the history we all know in clever or insightful ways.

Yeah, it was definitely in her dream. One of the biggest clues that the whole plotline was a fantasy was the fact that she pulled the "Camp Utopia" name from one of the postcards in the diner. I was suckered by the twist, but I wonder how much of that has to do with the fact that plenty of the series' "real" plotlines have been just as fussy and contrived—going all the way back to what most viewers consider the high point of the series, season 2, when the story spends multiple episodes teasing the fact that Peggy will end up embroiled in the Sioux Falls Massacre because she's headed to a conference there, but eventually she gives up on going to the conference and ends up in Sioux Falls by complete random chance. Like, even in this episode, was the fantasy sequence all that much more contrived than the B story, in which Gator happens to catch up with Munch right after the old woman's son shows up and tries to extort him and he ends up killing him and using his body as a decoy? In fact, the slightly heightened weirdness of the Camp Utopia story just made me realize how much the show's usual contrivances bother me. The Coen brothers' films have a neo-noir sensibility that explores the inescapable logic of unintended consequences, but when you can see the hand of the writers too obviously nudging the consequences in a meaningful direction, the vibe changes from "neo-noir" to "morality play," which I find much less appealing.

Asteroids never get that close to Earth, do they? The whole reason why they're using Mars as a platform for their asteroid work is because of its proximity to the asteroid belt, right? This was by far my favorite episode of the season, hitting that sweet spot where the alt reality politics resonates with the personal stories instead of fighting them for prominence.