The Prestige TV Podcast - ‘Fargo’ Season 5, Episodes 1-3 Recap

Episode Date: November 29, 2023

Joanna Robinson and Rob Mahoney reunite to break down the first three episodes of ‘Fargo’ Season 5. They give a brief overview on their relationships with past seasons of the series and the Coen brothers’ film it’s loosely based on, before then discussing why this time around feels like a return to form. Next, they unpack this season’s thematic through line that places the wives at the center of the story, walk through a taxonomy of the recurring ‘Fargo’ archetypes up until this point, and highlight their favorite needle drops from the episodes. Hosts: Joanna Robinson and Rob Mahoney Producer: Kai Grady Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What would you do if everyone said they heard your trailer a hundred times? You'd probably make a new one. I'm Justin Sales, the host of The Wedding Scammer, the ringer's first ever true crime pod. We've been hunting a con man for a few weeks now, and our hunt is coming to an end. Schemes, Heartbreak, How to Put On a Wire. We've covered all this and more, but there are still a few surprises left. Binge the Wedding Scammer wherever you get your podcasts. This kinds of hell is going to run me off just because she doesn't like the way I smell.

I want to tussle with me because nobody takes what's mine. Anywho, thanks for stopping by. Dinner, Sunday. Welcome back to the prestige TV podcast feed. I'm Joanna Robinson. Join me today. I don't know. He's Texas affable.

He's not quite Minnesota nice. It is Rob Mahoney. Hi, Rob. How are you doing? Hi, Joe. Well, you know, me and the Minnesota. have in common, apparently. We're all looking for home defense solutions, right?

We are known to welcome a firearm, apparently. I see, I see. We are here to talk to you about Fargo season five. Today we're going to cover roughly episodes one through three. Certainly not beyond that, but it's a lot to cover in a Presti-Sheby podcast. We were a little too late to hop on for this last week when they did the two-episode premiere drop. So we're catching up. So we'll be covering three episodes today, but going forward, it's going to be one episode a week,

a much more manageable chunk of Fargo goodness. So that's going on over here. Rob, anything else you were working on that you want to plug or tell the folks about what you're doing? Come check us out on the Ringer NBA show, if you're so inclined. I don't know what the Fargo NBA crossover is, but I hope it's robust. What's the best Midwest basketball team? Your Minnesota Timberwolves, Fargo-adjacent listeners and Joanna Robinson. I mean, you can claim them if you like.

They're a delightful team. Sure. You know, the Midwest is thriving in the NBA, is what I'm saying. Great. Love to hear it. Love to see it. Over on House of R, we're doing Doctor Who right now because the anniversary specials are cooking over there. So that is the thing that we were working on over there.

Yeah. How did you feel about your crossover event with Steve Spruill appearing in this season of Fargo? I know. He was just in the end. of the Jody Whitaker season that we just watched on House of Ar. It was so funny because I was just Sam Spruill. My apologies to Sam. That's okay. That's okay.

I think he'll get over and he seems like the kind of guy that these things just roll off the backup. Sam's role who's playing the truly terrifying. Is it Ola? Is that how you pronounce it? Munch. We'll just call him Munch, perhaps. The killing machine in this season of Fargo is in the last Jody Whitaker season. covered in a lot of wild makeup.

A lot of stuff. A lot of stuff. But it's funny because I was like, what are the odds that I just hit to Sam Spruill projects in a couple weeks? I know him best from a seriously ill-begotten FX show, which is the bastard executioner, which is what Kurt Sutter did like after Sons of Anarchy. Yeah.

Anyway, Sam Spruill is just like a real distinctive look to him. don't forget him once you see him. Let's do like a little mini overview of Fargo before we get into sort of what we're going to do today. So spoiler warning up through episode three. The first three episodes are called, and I just love a Fargo episode title, so we're just going to say them. The Tragedy of the Commons, written directed by the show's creator Noah Hawley, trials and tribulations written and directed by Noah Hawley, and the paradox of intermediate transactions written by Noah Hawley directed by Donald Murphy. But this is a show that loves a middleman and a movie that loves a middleman.

So lots of intermediate transactions happening across the board, I will say. But paradoxes as well, I mean, it's a lot to handle antecedently on Fargo. I thought that you and I might talk just very briefly about our history with the film Fargo, which I will hear forth call Fargo 96, and the Fargo TV franchise in general. Our producer on this episode, Kai Grady and I were just talking about the fact that the first season of Fargo dropped in 2014. So nearly a decade ago, Kai was literally a teenager.

And there have been, you know, we're on our fifth season. They are very, very loosely interconnected. They're mostly an anthology. You can find connections across those of characters if you want to, but you can also watch these seasons individually and not feel lost at all. Do you have a favorite season? What's your relationship with the film? What is it the root of this whole far?

That is appealing to you, Rob Mahoney. I adore the film. One of my favorite Cohen Brothers joints easily. As far as the seasons, you know, I find it very hard to pick between one and two in terms of the strongest season. But because of that, I feel so inclined to Cape for three pretty often, which I really like. I mean, honestly, the casts of every season are pretty staggering in terms of the kinds of talent you're able to get together. But Ewan McGregor plus Ewan McGregor plus Morgh, plus most importantly, our queen, Carrie Coon. Yeah.

That's a nice little formula for yours truly. So I really enjoyed season three. I would say disproportionately, apparently, to the Fargo fan base. But one and two, I'm accepting as the consensus picks. I think one and two, one maybe is forever a favorite just because it was so much better than I expected it to be. Because we were all like, Fargo is a perfect film, right? What do you mean you're going to make a TV series? What do you mean that Cohen's aren't really even involved in this at all?

It's such a particular film. too, right? This tonality is not something you can just throw a dart at at a board and hit, right? It's so precise. And Noah Hawley, who had made some shows before this, like I was aware of him, but didn't have this

reputation yet that he got after this, and then he made Legion, a comic book show that I think you and I both really enjoy. Maybe the single best superhero episode of television, season one. I want to say it's episode

episode seven, the full black and white pastiche Aubrey Plaza going nuts episode of Legion. I would put out there against anything we've seen from superhero TV so far. So if you haven't seen Legion, I mean, it goes off the tracks pretty hard in later seasons in my opinion, but season one, man,

it's a ride. Yeah, yes. Watch Legion. The highs are worth the lows. And that's true, Fargo as well, because you and I both did not really name season four, a season that nobody really liked you know, and a season that I think suffered because, you know, I read a couple of interviews

that Noah Hawley gave before this season premiered. And he was sort of addressing that season and also some of the other things that he has done like the Natalie Portman film Lucy in the Sky. There's just like a few things he did where he was like, I think I was trying to be someone else. And what I need to really just do is do the thing that I know I can do best or I like best. You know, he was supposed to do a Star Trek film. All of a sudden, he's going to be taking on the alien IP for FX going forward.

You know, there's like a lot of people want a piece of Noah Hawley. And for a while he was saying yes to everything. And now he's like, listen, maybe I should just do what I understand and what I could do best. And I thought that was really, like, exciting to hear because it really does feel like season five is a return to, I would say the highs of one and two. Three, the reason I'm mixed on three, though it has a lot going to. for it is controversially because I love this guy. The Ewe McGregor Act double act didn't like fully work for me.

Oh, it didn't work. And I think it comes down honestly to the accent situation because it was like a real tough one for him. And what's funny in this one is that Juno Temple, who I think is phenomenal in the season of Fargo, her accent, I was like, I'm fine with her accent being as cartoonish as it is at first because I was just sort of like, it's at least consistent.

This is the sandbox we're playing in here. She's British. She's going hard on this. It's similar to what Martin Freeman did in season one. Like, it's working for me. Then when we get the reveal that in episode two, that this is not her natural accent at all. And she has almost like a New York twang slightly to her,

like, you know, a more East-coasty vibe when she drops her act talking to Jennifer Jason Lee's character in episode two. then I was like, okay, I'm fully in. I'm all the way in. And now I understand that she's doing a bit, essentially, and so it's all good. I love this show with the exception of season four, and I am so excited that it's back to form.

Like, when Fargo's good, there's very few things that hit as well as it does. So, yeah. Absolutely. And it's, you know, I would say overall, like a shining example of how to build something off of existing IP. And by that, I mean,

it's a work of actual adaptation. It's not just, bring back Francis McDormand, get a next generation cast, lump them together, Fargo colon extinction with Josh Hutcherson and Rachel Ziegler.

I mean, I would watch that for one. You just made a hit, I think. I may have, but I appreciate that they kind of distill it down to its core elements and figure out what makes Fargo Fargo and what can we take from that. And in this season in particular,

how can we riff and iterate and subvert expectations. I think that reveal where dot drops her accent, and there's a couple of these dramatic reveals that aren't like big spoilers in the dramatic sense, but they're so twisty in the way this show tells its story that they're invigorating. It just supercharges the show. And a real pleasure for people who like really enjoy the art of adaptation in Fargo as a concept, I think, is the way that Noah Hawley is not only riffing on Fargo 96, but like the entire Coen brothers, filmography.

Oh, yeah. And so, you know, when you have a seat at the crossroads in season three take place inside a bowling alley or, you know, there's just like a million things that you can pluck from other Coen Brothers films that, again, it's just like, so what it becomes then is at this point a near decade-long study from a master storyteller of two of our master storytellers and like what makes, taking apart their storytelling beats and habits and practices, and then remixing them and repurposing them in a way that helps me better understand what the Coens did in the first place. So we're going to talk a little bit more specifically about Noah Holly's idea of what Fargo is,

but just more broadly today, because we're covering three episodes, we're going to do this as sort of like a taxonomy of character, almost archivalry, archetypes or concepts that are consistent to Fargo seasons and how they relate to the Cohen filmography. So this is sort of like an unusual. Usually we will do a more traditional sort of recap style, but we're doing something a little broader today. So quickly, Noel Holly said in a Hollywood reporter interview about Fargo in general is that

his idea of Fargo is related to sort of trying to understand America. So he says, I feel re-energized on the Fargo front. it's this crime genre with this absurdist element and philosophical streak that is also about basic human decency and an exploration of what it means to be an American and how we're all worse off for the forces of American capitalism that destroys so many. And I've yet to feel like I've tapped out of that world. And then he talks about other things that distracted him. So yeah, like this season coming out as it is set in 2019, that's the year that this story takes place, has like light traces of the Trump era in January 6th and stop the steel

like we got some militias going on like some some yeah we certainly do some discussion of just sort of like taking back what's ours all this sort of stuff I think one of the reasons that season four got so off the track for Noah Holly is that I think what he was trying to do was tackle racial and religious identity in America

which is always obvious on everyone's mind when that season came out But I think it was just like a little beyond Holly's scope. But I understand that he was trying to meet a moment. And I just don't know that he was the voice to meet the moment at that time. What do you think of this idea of Fargo as a way to analyze what it means to be an American at any given time? Well, it's always been about human nature, for sure, the darkness in us and the decency in us, as Holly said, too. I think what's interesting about this setup, and I wouldn't say it's particularly,

subtle, right? It's there in the lines of dialogue, basically from the opening of the show. Her daughter's math teacher grabs her. The thing that he's yelling is like, no one is listening to me. Right, exactly. You get this whole exchange in the car about like neighbor against neighbor. It's this theme that kind of comes up over and over in these episodes. And I would say if you were concerned about that framing being just like a general handwave to these troubled times, I think there's enough in these three episodes to assuage those concerns. For me, they're using that as a backdrop to examine how people in power navigate

these moments of division, the opportunism that comes from Jennifer Jason Lee's Lorraine character and like this sheriff character that John Hamm has brought to the table in Rex Tillman it's about how you can like those are not characters who are coming to this as true believers

who have a distinct philosophical point of view. Tillman knows how to work the system and get what he wants, but he's rolling his eyes. at the militia, right? And Lorraine knows how to get the Attorney General in her pocket, but she could give a shit about an actual cause. And so I think

the maneuvering in this world is what makes it interesting, not, oh, we're going to set up these political ideologies. It's these ideologies exist. How do people take advantage of them? How are people exploiting them for their own personal gain? Yeah, and I think one of the best visuals of that, two great visuals, I think,

in these early episodes, is John Hamm in front of his own billboard, right? Hard man for hard times. I'm just botching names all over the place. Roy Tillman. I apologize. God, actor name, character names. We're all over the place today. Sheriff Tillman will just say, I mean, just don't get Gator's name wrong.

That's the most important. Gator Tillman. Joe Curie is Gator Tilman. I was just like, there's a character named Gator. This is extraordinary. Hard Man for Hard Times. That billboard, to your point is like such a cynical exploitation of anxiety. And similarly, the giant name.

know behind Jennifer Jason Lee's character behind Lorraine in her office. It's just incredible. So these huge sideposts, no one is being subtle in what's going on here. But I love that point. And I think when I think about Holly trying in general in this show to dig into, put his finger on the pulse of, I don't know, American excellence and American ailments, I think of how he used like the crisis of, confidence speech and he's a dude like you know setting season two in the 70s and like really

trying to dig into like that moment of anxiety in america and what was going on then so it's not just like holly trying to like rip from the headlines of current america dig in you know he's he's trying to like throughout history figure out what we were anxious about and to your point who in power is taking advantage of that this season i'm like really fascinated by his premise for this season, which I didn't have a full grasp on until I read this interview, but he's calling this season, this is the, like, quote unquote, the wife season. And he said in sort of trying to reaccess what excited him about Fargo in the first place, I think after season four got off the plot a bit, he said, I went back to the original film. This is him talking to the Holly Reporter. He says,

quote, I found myself focused on Bill Macy's wife. It was such a great performance, but once the bag went over her head, that was it for her. I thought, what if the bag never goes over her the head. What if she's not kidnappable? And there's a backstory there. It opened me up to explore the concept of, quote, the wife. I found this great New York magazine piece from the 1970s where this one wrote this essay called, I want a wife. She wrote about all the things that she wanted a wife to do for her. I thought that was a really fun to play with as well. I thought that given that every year for the show, the show for me is primarily female and identity because the movie was Marge's story. When you think about it, that would be a really powerful place to land. You can read this essay

exists online, the I Want a Wife essay. It is from New York magazine, but it is actually, if you click over this, it exists on the cut, currently the New York Magazine sort of like female style-focused imprint. And it appeared in a New York Magazine

issue in 1971, but what it really, what that issue really was, was the sort of soft launch premiere of Miss Magazine Gloria Steinem's feminist magazine. So they like put 10 pages of that magazine in New York Magazine to sort of soft launch it. And the essay, which is really only, it's one page, is not that long, is kind of amazing.

Because, like, you read it, you're like, I also want a wife. Like, just this idea of someone who will cater to your everything, this sort of regressive idea of wifedom and what it means here. And we get a few moments in these first three episodes where people are defining what a wife is. Sheriff Roy in episode two when he's talking to this woman who's being battered, right? he says, go home, fix a meal, pray on it before you take the first bite. Forgiveness, tend to his burns. Try to be deferential.

This is my favorite part. Cater to his knees is a man with your mouth in order to sew harmony. Great stuff from Sheriff Roy keeping the peace in his district. He certainly has a worldview. You can give him that. But I think the wives we have here, obviously, Dot, Lorraine. Lorraine's husband was, like, very peripheral. Just said dressing, really.

Was there in episode one. Indira, who is our sort of like our decent law figure in this series. And then Karen, who's Roy's new wife, who we meet in episode three, who, you know, has, like the way that she sort of like quickly flinches away from him in bed when he makes it clear he doesn't want to play. one of their many fantasies is troubling, I would say, to their dynamic. So, yeah. I thought that was such an interesting parallel. We get these kind of two scenes with Dot and Tillman,

where their partners try to engage with them in bed and how they, like, diffuse it. Yeah. Dot obviously, like, lets her husband wane down pretty easily when he wants to take a tumble. You know, she's explaining how she feels. She's letting him down softly. He gets to watch some blue blood, so everyone is happy.

I mean, if Tom Selleck is there, Is Tom's still on blue bloods? God, I hope so. He has to be, right? Isn't he the... How else would it be a show if he's not? Isn't he the bluest of the bloods? We all know that to be true.

Okay, great. But yeah, later, Tillman, with this scene with his new wife, Karen, who, I don't think we've heard her referred to by name in the show yet. That's how much she's just kind of like a piece of the background and accessory to his life at this stage in the story. You know, she is, you know, propositioning him with these role playoffers. As you said, laying on his chest playing with his nipple rings, which we're going have to have a 45-minute conversation about.

You know, when he raises his hand without saying a word, and you're right, she flinches, she turns, complete silence, the power dynamics could not be clear in terms of everything that's happening there. And then in Deer, we don't know the full story yet. We just have some, like, hints about her situation, but like, I'm going to call her husband, not even my name. I'm going to give him the care and treatment. Terrible golf husband is what I've just written in our notes here.

And she's got all these past due bills. and there's just a sort of indication that she's supporting everything, everything's on her shoulders. He is pursuing this golf dream without regard for the toll that is taking on her. I'm not a golfer myself, but having seen one back swing from this guy. Oh, it's a no for you? He's not as close as he thinks he is. I'll say that.

He doesn't have it? Okay. He doesn't have it. But look, we learned a lot in about two minutes with that character, who is in another kind of inversion of the Fargo formula, usually the police officer's husband is compassionate, is understanding,

is very supportive. This guy is a total chud. You know, three Imagine Dragons posters up on the wall, full man cave situation, not listening to a single word that she's saying, I like the inversion.

And I believe, that's where I'm having the most fun so far is in these places where they're taking what we know and twisting it. And there really is no more clear example of that than in the wife character in general, right? With Dot, with this kidnapping scene that plays out like such a clear echo

of what we see in the movie except for these fundamental differences being that this time Dot has a flamethrower. She knows how to use it. Rather than be knocked unconscious after falling down the stairs, she's concealing an ice skate to cut a guy's face open.

The wife is a little more formidable this time around in a way that has so much intrigue to this story. And again, I can just feel like my heart, racing at the possibility when you're doing those kinds of things narratively when, you know, I think it's one thing for a show like this to have all the Cohen Brothers Easter eggs.

And some of those are fun. And some of them you're like, okay, I get it. I get that you're citing your references. And it can be a little much at times. But when every time something like that pops up, you're not sure if it's going to stick to the script or if it's going to veer in the complete opposite direction, that's where it gets fun. I love that. I have a quick question for you. Just zoom back really quickly. How many Imagine Dragons posters is too many Imagine Dragons posters. One? Is it one?

All right. But certainly three different ones in the same room feels excessive, even if you're a devoted fan of Imagine Dragons, I would think. Right, right, right. Like, you might let one person, like, someone who, like, loves them, you might let them get away with one, but you would look askance. Yes. But two, and then certainly three is the reddest of flags.

So, you know, we got the bluest of bloods and the reddest of flags. All right. So we are going to go down this tax on. me that I have just randomly put together out of the goodness of my heart. But we're going to start sort of based on what you were just talking about when it comes to Dot, which is something

I'm calling steely female protagonist under a layer of Minnesota Nice. Is there a Texan version of Minnesota Nice? Do you guys have anything like that? You don't have the fun deep south like bless your heart stuff, right? No, there's some of that, you know? Okay.

There's, you know, it's certainly a welcoming spirit. it, I would say it's pretty similar ultimately to Minnesota Nice, right? There is the veneer of politeness. There is a certain decorum. There is a yes ma'am, no ma'am, y'all thank you. Yeah. And then underneath it all, as we said, there's a, you know, buying your gun at the store and standing your ground.

So there's a lot happening in the same way that, to me, Minnesota Nice in this show is a front door that is wide open and unlocked, and behind it, a sledgehammer is rigged to smash your head open. Love that. Love it. Perfect. Perfect. parallel. Yeah, I have one of my favorite Minnesota nice

stories. One of my favorite people, my best friends, is from Minnesota. And she talks about how, so their power goes out a lot where she's from because of the snow on account of the snow. And she says, you judge

your neighbors by whether or not they have a generator. Because if they have a generator, that means they as a family can't get along together by candle light and they need electricity to distract themselves. And so she's like, you know the like the families aren't doing well if they have a generator. And I was like, that is the most cold weather judgmental thing I've ever heard in my life.

And I just like, I really love that. I kind of want to, for the moment, if you have any Minnesota Night Stories or Fargo stories or anything, you want to send us, you can use the old house of our email Hobbits and Dragons at gmail.com. but I'm meant to set up something like you betcha at a Gmail.com or something like that. We'll see if I have Minnesota a nice email set up. This is also a story about mythical evil and creatures at the end of the day. So I think it can overlap. Yeah, exactly. But so to this archetype for the Coens in general, like Francis McDormon is Marge.

She won an Oscar for this. Like that's the originator here. But the TV show has given us these like, these law women in Alison Tolman's character in season one, Molly, I love that character so much. Or as you said, our queen Carrie Coon shows up in season three. And then we get the women on the other side of the law, Kirsta Duns in season two, and then another queen of my heart, Jesse Buckley, in season four. Again, season four doesn't really work, but Jesse Buckley plays like an angel of death nurse

who is like very chipper in Midwestern while like poisoning people. So, you know, it's a it's an interesting example. So here, yeah, we've got Juno Temple as Dot or Nadine, perhaps, as we learn in episode three.

But she says this thing to Wayne, her lovely husband, who I just really adore, says, I know you think I'm this kind of perfect woman, wife, mother, but you know even I got a breaking point is something that she says. I mean she sure

does. She is a silver dollar pancake away from a nervous breakdown at some points in these episodes. How much nutritional vitamin value is in Bisquick? That's my question. Zero. And plus the way she is whisking that thing, it is glue by the end of that

session. So I'm a little concerned about what Scotty's nutritional intake is. It's got to rest entirely on that OJ, I guess. You know, the Shopping list didn't have a lot of vegetables on it. I'll put it that way. I hope there's a lot of pulp in that OJ for Scotty.

I do love when Munch is describing her and he's like, you say housewife, she is for real a tiger. It's something that he says, and I'm just like obsessed with that. There's also like an interesting animal theme threaded through this, right? For sure. The lion family, Gator Tillman. She's referred to as a tiger like multiple times. The head of the militia was also talking about them as lions as well,

a pack of lions. So, you know, just some real, as, you know, very Fargo-esque sort of, the wildness of nature is just, like, right under the surface here, that sort of feral existence right under that layer of decency. That line about how Dot is for real a tiger. To me, it's kind of what I'm talking about. Like, that's directed as much to us as anybody else, right? This is not just the housewife from Fargo, the movie.

This is a different beast. This is a different kind of character. And we really see that in her confrontation with Lorraine later, this kind of dual interrogation thing that Lorraine and her lawyer have set up, where, as you said, she drops the veneer. Everything comes all the way down, and we see the real dot or the real Nadine or whatever her name is, the real person for the first time.

And to be honest, I didn't know Juno Temple had this in her. This is an incredible performance. I would say Jennifer Jason Lee's is probably my favorite on the show, so far just on pure daffiness, but that you can put these two characters across a table from one another and she's not only holding her own, but feeling formidable in her own right.

And it also gets to play hilarious lines, also gets to be over-the-top Midwestern, also gets to be in the Hooskow. I just think she's crushing this part so far. In the Huskow. I think that this idea, to go back to these various

traps she set up, like the mallet above the door, the sledgehammer above the door, But everything she does during the home invasion or in the gas station standoff, there is that sort of subversion of the type that is really fun. But then it's just fun to watch terribly violent grown-up home alone. Like that's just fun for us as viewers. So we're excited to find out if and when that sledgehammer gets dropped on someone. Who's going to get to get that?

the zombie killer. That's what I want to know. Who's going to get electrocuted by a windowsill? Who's going to get, you know, like what's going to happen with all these little traps that she's set up? And I love the montage of her and Scotty, like, putting it all together, where they're just like stripping wire and eating

veggies. To Grand Funk Railroad of all things. Exactly. Just incredible shit. I found myself wondering like what the verb, like the verb form of Home Alone is. Is she homeloning her house? I settled on McAllisterizing her house. Ooh, I was going to say McAllister Ring, but I like Ising.

That's great. I think any variation thereof, but everything that she's doing to this point, right? Like, obviously there's the carrying on as a housewife and mother and trying to make the bisquick. But so many of her gut reactions to things really make you wonder, like, what the hell happened to this woman? Right. The way she picks up a gun, the way she knows how immediately to strip the wire to set up like the electrical traps in her home. The way she knows how to pick up a bag of ice and use it as a blunt object. right? Like there's a reason why she's turning into this combo Rambo-Magyver figure,

as we're told that she is. Yeah. And it's incredible to see that kind of characterization slow build, right? Just through these little habits on screen where we, even before she tells us, we know, this is not her first getaway. This is not the first time that she's done this. Right. The perfect example of show, don't tell, right?

But yeah, yeah, when she has that moment where she breaks character when talking to Lorraine, And she talks about how hard she worked to scrabble her position here. Yeah. And she hasn't really talked much about her affection for Wayne. She's like, your son loves me. But she doesn't say, like, I love him. But I feel like she is affectionate towards him, just sort of in the way that you're affectionate towards, like, a pet or your other child or something like that.

And I think she values this safety that she is found for herself. and she's going to tooth and nail fight to keep it, which is interesting for us. I'm going to skip down then to this section I've talked about like the innocence worth protecting in an evil and violent world. We're going to go back to that evil and violent world, I promise. But like this idea of domesticity worth defending, the visual, the best visual example in Fargo 96 is Marge and her husband,

played by John Carroll Lynch, like in bed together. Right? Like that's a thing worth protecting. Just side by side, reading, being cozy and safe together.

Exactly. And then in season one of Fargo, you have this tender little love story between the Molly character and Colin Hanks' character. And that whole family winds up on the couch together. And that's just an echo of that

of like this is worth defending and protecting. Mallory Reuben and I talk about this a lot. on House of R in terms of fantasy stories, it's often very important to show the thing worth slaying the dragon for. Absolutely. Like when you spend time in the shire

before you go off in the adventure, you need to know about the shire and why that's worth protecting. Rob Mahoney would say maybe in the extended edition we spend too much time in the shire. I would perhaps. But that's his own issue

and not something we need to discuss here now. It's a take for a different day. But the way in which Wayne and Scotty, Wayne even more so than Scottie, because Scottie has like a slight edge to her, Wayne Lion, David Rizzle's character, who just wants to play floor hockey in his socks and watch Real Housewives. Who among us does not, Joe? I mean, this sweet man, I'm just like also, I just think David Rizel is so funny in this role. and like such a steenstealer when they're at the gun show

and the guy pervade like first of all there's like the eye patch mishap where he's like oh I just walked right into that one but like when the guy's like you can't put a price on safety and he's like seems like you just did right like stuff like that is just like he's so

wide eyed but then he also has these little like comments that are you know on account of the two types of blood they felt like all this sort of stuff is just like really really charming He's wonderful. And, too, you see such a contrast between him and Dot, obviously. Like, right, when someone breaks into their home,

Dot grabs the flamethrower hairspray. Yeah. And Wayne grabs a decent-sized bell that is sitting on his shelf. And it's like, I'm hopefully going to club someone with his bell. You can see the difference in experience level with exactly this kind of foul play going on. But he's been essential to the balance of this show so far. And, like, again, that's so hard to do.

with an episodic television, especially a show that can get grisly and dark, as we've already seen, and pretty violent, to have these, like, counterbalances in the dark comedy, like, arena. He's so good at balancing those things out, and the absurdity of Dots' claims without undermining her. Right? He's being supportive of his wife, but also, like, why are we building a zombie killer?

Yeah. He's like, I don't believe you, obviously, but if I have to say I believe you in order for, us to keep this happy home a home, then that is what I will say. And that's worth protecting. Also, this, this, like, good, decent law person, which is complicated in this season by the fact that we have Sheriff Tillman and his son as the shady side of the law. You know what I mean? I don't think we've, I really do need to rewatch all of the Fargo TV seasons, but when will

I have a chance to do that? I don't know. but I think for the most part we were dealing with, you know, the law is represented as good and noble and the criminal element plus the like, I don't know, newly formed criminals that we get in Fargo all the time. Like someone who's just out of taste and they're like, oh, violence. Okay. Talk about that in a second. This is, I think, the first time where, I think, because our conversation around, you know, cops and the law has changed so much that No Holly's like, okay, let's, let's complicate this a bit this season. But we still have in characters like Indira and wit, we still have that sort of like, I stand for something that matters in this cruel and violent world, which is always interesting to watch. Well, especially when it seems like the characters who have the most contempt for that kind of policing, right, that straightforward, hardworking kind of policing are Tillman, are Lorraine. You know, I think Lorraine's speech about like being a gatekeepers.

Maybe a little much, maybe a little too on the nose for what I would want out of this show. But I loved Tillman's confrontation with the two FBI officers who show up at his house, meeting him in his cedar hot tub, fully nude, nipple rams. Nipple rings out. Like, I just, everything about that scene, I think, played so well. In particular, just this, like, clear contempt he has for the idea of enforcing that kind of law. And you get this incredible shot when he's telling them, like, maybe you're not paying attention, but I'm the law around here. And his cowboy hat is literally blotting out the sun as he says it. There's just a sense that basically no one in this show at this point knows what to do with Tillman, like knows how to handle him.

He's just this larger than life figure, with the exception being dot. She clearly understands, I need to run as far and as fast as I can away from this man because he's not only dangerous, but he has a lot of power. And we see that when the police pull over her kidnappers, she doesn't run to the police. She runs straight past the police. She is getting the hell out of there as soon as possible. She just kept going into the night. Something I always try to ask when I am in the middle of a season where I'm trying to,

not predict where things are going, but like understand the arc of something. I always try to nail down what is the morality of this world? Is this a show that punishes we were talking about this? I guess I don't need to spoil

the ending of Station 11 for people who haven't watched that masterpiece yet. But you and I were talking about this the other day where it's like, when we were watching Station 11 and you get to the ending and you really want this thing to happen, you're like, what kind of show am I watching?

And I'm watching the kind of show that's going to give me the emotional catharsis that I, and closure that I want, or am I watching a cruel show that is going to hurt me? You know, both of those could be interesting, but you don't always know sort of like what world you're in. And oftentimes, to your point that you made to me the other day, like, that unpredictability is so exciting that you don't know what it's going to give to you. And I think, so I'm about to say something about the Cohen's approach to this, but I don't think, I think what is so,

interesting about the Cohen's idea of morality is that this is a fundamentally unsafe world. And so whether you are quote unquote good or quote unquote bad doesn't necessarily mean you're safe. So at the 1984 New York Film Festival, Ethan Cohen was talking about his aesthetic sense and he quoted Sam Ramey's three laws of horror pictures. Joel Cohen got to start working on the Evil Dad with Sam Ramey. So, like, Ramey really bleeds into early Cohen stuff. These are the three laws. One, the innocent must suffer.

Two, the guilty must be punished. And three, you must taste blood to be a man, which is to say that the hero must achieve catharsis through bloodshed. That's a really interesting series of events. And I think the first one, the innocent must suffer. it's like there are good guys who will survive

and give you hope often at the end of one of these stories but not all of them will just because you are you know so like I was

I remember in season one I was so worried for Colin Hanks's character like I was just like please there was a there was a sequence that is forever drilled

in my brain of him like in the woods in danger and I was like if something happens to this man that's how I feel about way

If something happens to Wayne, I'm going to be so upset. I'm really upset. Well, they both certainly profile as exactly the kind of character who might die in one of these stories. But I think that is so important in terms of not knowing exactly what kind of show you're watching in terms of setting up that unpredictability. And it's what makes the Cohen's filmography so juicy, right?

Because sometimes it's very clear, this is farce, or this is drama, this is thriller. Sometimes it's not, exactly clear where we are in that spectrum, or it's veering kind of back and forth over the course of the story. And we've seen some, like, very comedy-heavy sequences so far. We've also seen, for my money,

some of the best, like, action set pieces we've seen on TV this year, in terms of the kidnapping sequence, in terms of the showdown at the service station, the way you're building tension in those scenes, and they can be really funny, too, and they can be really dramatic. Like, the way that the setup at the service station goes,

like the most interesting thing you can show in that scene is the glass door with a void outside of it, and you don't know where Munch is. Like, you have no idea what's coming, where he's going to be coming from. And then as it plays out, you get kind of a, like, zombie movie Dawn of the Dead vibe where what's available in the store becomes the trappings of that encounter, right? Like, he's grabbing the convex mirror off the shelf and using it to, like, peer around corners while Dodd is grabbing the bags of ice.

Bags of Ice! I love that kind of resourcefulness. in terms of the way it sets this stuff up. But it creates that unpredictability where it's like, is this a slapstick fight or is this dot is going to be murdered in cold blood in episode one and we're figuring out what happened to her. Like, there's no way of knowing.

I think the moment where the non-munch kidnapper slips on the ice, which is a Looney Tunes. Yes. Sam Ramey, Raising Arizona moment. But then he breaks the bowl of the toilet with his head and then it's just blood everywhere. and you're just like, oh, God, this can happen in this world. Like, you can sort of, like, Wiley Coyote scrabble on some ice,

and then, like, your entire head gets caved in. And similarly, like, when Munch shows up back at the service station to kill the guy riding a shotgun with Jokiri with Gator and the car, and, like, you stabs him up through the neck, and it's just brutal. It's brutal. In a way that it doesn't like, I'm not repulsed by it

because the violence in this world always seems not gratuitous, even though it is like extreme and horrifying, it is trying to say something, again, about the dark world that we live in. Well, and there's a lot of discussion about debt, right? Like the sign that much puts on that deputy is you owe me.

And there's this idea of the debts that cannot be paid with money, that in this case can only be paid with blood, that in Tillman's case, like, the reason he's after Dot, like, what he incurs as like interest owed is not something that Dot can ever repay to him. Like, he can only kidnap her. That is his only resolution to the fact that she has fled. And clearly, he's holding on to a lot.

Like, there's pictures of their wedding in his home to his second wife, which is a choice. Actively up, yeah. Yeah. So clearly, a lot of people owe each other a lot of things in their estimation. Based on the respective ages of the actor Joe Kiri and Juno Temple, our understanding is that she's his stepmom. She would have been his stepmom, right? She's not Gator's mom.

There was like a wife before her, probably. That would be my best guess. Or dalliance. We certainly don't have any indication from Gator that this is a person he cares about in any way. And maybe that'll be a revelation later in some way, like, oh, he's had to become cold and distant from his mom. But age-wise, it doesn't, it doesn't, white add up, I don't think.

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So this archetype exists all across the Cohen filmography, right? Peter St. Romer's character in Fargo, aka the one who puts Steve Bishemi in the Woodchipper, is a good example of it. There's Leonard Smalls is the Hells Angels Biker in Raising Arizona, who is, again, this, like, larger than life, almost Looney Tunes-esque, but like horrifically violent character. John Goodman and Barton Fink, you've, if you've never seen that movie,

you've certainly seen the shot. of him just like wreathed in flames laughing maniacally. Or I think maybe the best example is Javier Bardem as Anton Chigar in No Country for Old Men. This evil that is sort of elemental and yet relentless, just like never stops. In the TV show arena, Billy Bob Thornton is Lorne Malvo,

was this sort of like Old Testament biblical, like, sort of version of that in season one of Fargo. David Thulis, as Varga in season three, is this feral. They use, like, Peter and the Wolf throughout that season. Slimy or a little bit, I would say. Yeah, just, like, really exploiting the poor dental care in the UK to, like, show us, like, the full scariness of Thulis. So good.

And then, yeah, good old munch here is, I told you this already, but this is shocking to me, So we get this 500 years ago flashback, which is a reference to the prologue from a serious man. And then we find out that Munch is, to quote, someone I know who works for FX, they gave me this quote, a quote, timeless creature. We're not dealing with a man.

We're dealing with a timeless creature. We meet him as a sin eater. He calls himself a nihilist, which is not only a Big Lobowski reference, but it's also like scary. I believe in nothing. but getting what's owed to me? Yeah.

What do you make of this archetype and how it's presented here? I take your intel in good faith. I think for me, I'm still interpreting this as informing the character, as to whether it's like wholly literal that this is a guy and a being who existed 500 years ago. I almost don't care so much as I care that he believes it, right? I care that he envisions himself as having this divine purpose, as having like a spiritual history, as being a sin-eater, right? Like, that is important.

And the way that manifests. And frankly, like, the performance has been awesome so far, right? In particular, you know, the exchange that Sam Spruill has with John Hamm in the barn where they're kind of debriefing how the kidnapping went wrong. And, right, he's saying about how Dodd is a tiger. A real tiger. Yeah. You know, John Hamm is so good at holding the screen.

You give him anything to say, and he is going to be in complete command of your attention every second. He's on it. But then that you're flashing to Spruill, who's. terrifying and bizarre and incredibly watchable and doing this weird third-person Yoda-speak almost kind of affectation. I think it really brings a lot to that character, and it certainly brings a lot of unpredictability, but he is, without a doubt, falling into the genre of character that you've laid out, right? This primordial evil, this kind of, you know, not just a hitman, not just a hired gun,

but a guy's going to cover himself in goat blood and walk into somebody's home doing, who knows what, that's like the kind of chaos that Tillman has invited into this world, right? Like he is a person with, as a sheriff, with like a certain measure of control. But clearly he's tapped into something he did not have the full measure of here in terms of what Munch was capable of. And so the idea that you have these evil men who at certain points in the story don't really feel like evil men. They do feel unstoppable. They do feel inhuman. They feel like, you know, we see the state trooper take a clean shot at him and just inexplicably misses.

You know, Dot hits him with a shovel and he gets up and keeps going. you think you have him cornered, but you never, ever, ever do. And those are fascinating characters to watch over the course of a season of television, especially when they're also wandering into old ladies' homes who may or may not be their mother and just like, I'm claiming this bedroom as my own now. I live here now. I live here now. To be fair, she didn't seem that daunted.

Like went right back to pounding beers and watching women's tennis, which there are worse ways to pass a winter in Minnesota. Oh, it's very, it might remind me of Wind Duffy. Oh, yeah. Kindred souls, these two. And what's fascinating, what I love about the show is that we're just like with her for a while before we understand why we're with her. We just like watch her carry your groceries in and get her her six pack out and just sort of settle yourself in before we're like, how is this connected? What are we doing here?

If you haven't watched all of the Cohen films and you're like trying to, you really want to feel more connected to sort of what Fargo is doing. I mean, first of all, watch all the Cohen Brothers films. But if you don't have the time, our pal, a colleague. Sean Fantasy in 2018 did his definitive ranking of Cohen Brothers Films on the ringer.com What a great website. And talking about

no car and due for old men and Anton Schigur he, this is what he said, quote, what could have been a movie about Satan in the form of the bolt stunner wielding Anton Schoger feels more like Frankenstein

or jaws. Movies about unstoppable killing machines, moving through the world, tearing apart our very idea of existence. It's haunting in the way a car crash. can be. But I think what's important about Munch or what's additive about Munch is that he's not just, I mean, Anton Chigar is an iconic. Legendary. Cinematic figure. I am not knocking any choice

that Javier Bardem made in that role. He's fantastic. But he does this too. There's like a charisma to him. When he's talking about, you said she was a housewife. She's a tiger for real. Like, that's like, it's like kind of funny. And he has like this respect for Dot. And that's just sort of interesting. You know, he's not just like mechanical in the way. He might not believe in anything, but he's not like emotionless entirely. It's really interesting portrayal.

We already talked about this a little bit, but just really quickly, the archetype or thing that I'm calling the big boss, aka the system, is there often like politicians, literal bosses, crime bosses. On the film front, you have, like, one of my all-time favorites. Charles Durning is Papio, Daniel, and O'Brother, Where Art Thou? You have Paul Newman in the Hudson Hutziker proxy. David Huddleston as the titular Big Lobowski and the Big Lobosky, oftentimes they're like these literal big men, like these really huge imposing men, and there are ways in which John Hamm is shot in the show. He carries the screen no matter what, but as Roy Tillman, to your point,

He is often sort of shot from a low angle to make him look even bigger. And so yeah, we've got Jennifer Jason, Leah's Lorraine, and John Hamm is Sheriff Roy Tillman, as you pointed out, these are like the two twin pillars of the system. Her industry, by the way, in case it wasn't like super clear, she works in the debt collecting industry. Okay, that's potentially very interesting.

Very villainous, I would say. There's that Lauren Bobert reference with the guns on the holiday card in the first episode. I was just like, oh my God, we're doing Bober right now. It's amazing. Just clap and your servants will bring out multi-colored assault rifles.

What a life. And just in case you want to talk about the nipple ring some more. I do. I just need to repeat this line from the iconic hot tub scene, which is, does my discussing matters of state in

moist repose bother you. What all do you want to say about the nipple rings? Anything else about the hot tub scene? When he calls Agent Joaquin Joe Queen

and Mr. and Mrs. Jo Queen? Jesus Christ. Anything else you want to say about the nipple rings? I mean to know whose decision they were. Was this John Hamm

showing up on set and being like, I have decided this character wears nipple rings? Or was this something that was in the script? Was this, you know, a particular

costume designers call. I need to know the origin story of the nipple rings, but I have to say, in terms of the character, like, I can understand why some people would bump up against a seemingly

pretty conservative sheriff in North Dakota, not necessarily being a nipple ring guy. But to me, he's a lot more than that. And in particular, he's like, this reeks a lot more of like a certain kind of libertarianism to me, right?

And there's nothing more libertarian than I am a sheriff in North Dakota, but yeah, I've got two nipple rings. Deal with it. There is a singularity to that kind of detail that I can really appreciate. I mean, I think it speaks to a past

that is kind of interesting and that little glimpse we get into like his sexual proclivities with his current wife is interesting to me. You know, and in addition, like I think it's interesting that these two figures

both have what I would term fail sons and I love one of them, Wayne, I've already said. I'm a big, protect Wayne at all costs. But then we have Gator. Joe Kiry in like a terrible cut off his signature

Stranger Things locks for a terrible haircut and a vape and is just sort of I love this for Joe Kiry. This is like if you only know Joe Kiry from Stranger Things getting to see him do this is so delightful. Similarly to if you only know Juno Temple from Ted Lasso getting to see her do this is really delightful. I think this is a great choice for him

to sort of try to continue to, because when you do something like play Steve Harrington and Stranger Things, you can get kind of locked into that for the rest of your life. So I think Joe Curie is really wanting to push around Robert Pattinson's and eyes himself so that he gets to do whatever he wants in the future. Anything you want to say about Gator and his vape and his cast?

Again, just another character that has such great instant characterization. When he shows up in that restaurant where Tillman is kind of like reconciling the abusive husband and wife shows up in his full riot gear sunglasses on the back of his head. I know exactly who this person is. And in particular, one fun game

over these first three episodes, what can you learn from a boy's room? Tell me about the posters. Oh, yeah. Lars Olm said we've talked about the Imagine Dragons in his man cave. We know all that. Munch we see sleeping with a kitchen knife,

a Bible, which he starts eating pages out of, several local newspapers, a lit cigarette, a police radio, just a good Midwestern boy, as far as I can tell. Gator, we get the don't tread on me Confederate flag. We get a bunch of bikini-clad models. We get a taxidermied wolfhead, some size mounted on the wall, posters of Metallica, as far as I can tell, the Dodge Challenger,

and leather face from Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and he is standing in the middle of his room, again in a bulletproof vest, screaming, I'm a winner, I'm a winner, I'm a winner, I'm a winner. You can't do character in a minute better than that. I'm sorry. Yeah, 10 out of 10 for the set deck team. I hope they went home early that day. The Don't Tread on Me flag was so interesting

because obviously I've seen that wonder, that snakey wonder. I don't know that I've ever seen one that was also a Confederate flag. Yeah, dual purpose. I was just like, wow, it's a two-fer. That's incredible. All right, I want to talk about something

that I'm calling crazed by violence, a.k. Going Blood Simple. This is something that you raised to me the other day. There's a quote for the movie Blood Simple. If you've never seen this, Cohn Brothers, this is like their first. This is like, baby Francis McDormand is here. It is very bloody. Yes.

Sick movie, though. Just a wonder. So good. And you can see the most Sam Ramey influence on their stuff, I think, is in that movie. But you've been thinking about, in that movie, there's a quote you've been thinking about it so much is driving you simple and uh apparently there's a book that i need to get called the new partridge dictionary of slang and unconventional english why don't i own that rob i don't know it's a great question but it defines what simple is crazed by violence

um and it comes from like a various you know film noir or noir short stories except etc uh the caper went blood simple from a james l really short story guard snuffed stray bullets flying so this idea of a character that gets a taste for violence or even vengeance and how it can infect them. And you think of characters like Martin Freeman in, Martin Freeman's character in season one of Fargo, Jesse Plemons in season two. That was more, that's like a more double-act complex, reluctant, you know, sort of thing. Mary Elizabeth Winstead's character in season three is sort of infected by that idea of vengeance, and that's ultimately her downfall in season three. It might be why Joel Cohen made Macbeth.

And no one has ever gone more blood simple, I think, than Macbeth. Do you feel like this theme is present here in this season? If so, where would you put it? I don't know yet. Yeah. And some of it, you know, this is kind of more of a slow burning theme in their stuff usually, and there's a tipping point, as you said, where characters kind of get infected by it. Yeah.

You could see maybe some of it happening to Dot if the plot goes a particular direction where she starts to get more and more violent, more and more aggressive. Like, she's already building these traps and these weapons and taking her defense so seriously. There's a tipping point in that kind of behavior, for sure. And in particular, like, the way the Juno Temple is playing that character right now, which is, like, perpetually frazzled,

but also completely undaunted by what's happening, I think Lends itself. The wheels are just always turning. They're always turning. And sometimes they're turning way, way too fast in ways that could be concerning. But you, I mean, look, you can see by the way she's filling her shopping cart at the gun shop. And then her panic.

Her panic about the waiting period. And then she's like, okay, let's look at the pepper spray, right? Like, all right. What can we get today? Yeah, yeah. Oh, my gosh. I love that whole scene. The whole gun show scene was fascinating.

Yeah, I don't know if this is something we're going to be dealing with the season. But it almost feels like if you go back to season, Mary Elizabeth Winston's character in that season, who is, you know, first of all, incredible Fargo name, Nikki Swango, one of my favorite Fargo names of all time, is one of those characters who's like not on the right side of the law, but you're kind of rooting for her to figure it out and get out of there. And then she doesn't.

She just gets pulled back in by her need for vengeance. I know you hate theorizing. I'm not trying to like theorize or predict anything. I just guess I guess I'm thinking about a path forward. What's the path forward for Dot? Does she get her happily ever after? Does she get to stay in the safety of the, like, does she get to play for hockey and watch Desperate Housewives and Blue Bloods

if she wants to? She loves her daughter, like obviously loves her daughter. Like, that's what I want. Yes. I want Dot to be safe, fight her way free. from whatever trap is closing in on her that Roy is working on setting up, you know? And, but I think that might, to her, come down to a choice

and a reason why I think that is, we see that moment of conflict for her in season one when she has the gun on Munch and unlike with the bag of ice where she's actively fighting for her life, in that moment when she has the gun on him, she has a choice. Yeah.

And she makes the choice. choice to not kill him right then and there. But is that the choice she will always, is that a choice she can even make if she's confronted with like literally John Hamm, Roy Tillman? And is, is that even a choice she makes in that moment because she doesn't want to do it or because she thinks it's going to lead to her getting further ensnared in this whole situation, right? Like she tries to run away from the service station thinking she can just go back to her life and pretend that she had a walkabout and think. And no, she was never kidnapped. in the first place. And now if there's

another dead man on the floor and she's the one who did it, maybe it's harder to just walk back in that life as if nothing happened. But I think for Dot, freedom is such an interesting thing because there's the version of freedom that is her into the wind, starting again with Tillman maybe or maybe

not dead or at least some good distance between them. Yeah. But does that freedom mean anything if Scotty isn't with her? If Wayne isn't with, like if Wayne is alive or dead. Sorry to push on a sore nerve for you, Joe, but like... Protect him.

It's so hard, but this is what's fun about this version of this show. It's like, it's so hard to anticipate what's next for Dot because we're so used to the characters in the center of the frame of Fargo either being good law-abiding police officers doing their best or clear criminals who have done

something wrong, or usually it's like a comedy of errors that have led to a cover-up than they are trying to continue as they go. As far as we can tell, Dot is just kind of a victim of her circumstances with Tillman, maybe more will be revealed as far as some great evil that she's done.

But most of what she's done so far is run. And for a character like that, I don't think we have a lot of precedent in Cohen's lore to know what becomes of them or what the morality of this world would make of a character like that. Excellent points.

I like the uncertainty to your earlier point. Two more performances. I just want to shout out. I don't have a clear category. I mean, I already mentioned Witt Far and the sort of like decent lawman role.

But I just, I like that Lamar Morris is here. I think his, his, like, two confrontations with Gator. And also this just sort of, like, it's this really interesting thing where it's like, on the one hand, he's a lawman. So this idea of, like, helping Indira get to the bottom of what's going on with Dot

is of interest to him. But also, like, he's grateful to her. Yeah. Right? She saved him. So that complicates things. in an interesting way. Well, as she's running around

the service station, putting up all these traps, he's just kind of like in aisle three groaning as he bandages up his wound, right? Like, she is the agent of action. Yeah, and she, and she bandages, like, I would not know how to do

that thing with the spoon that she does to make sure it isn't bleed out from a femoral artery wound. And then Canadian treasure, Dave Foley, is here. And it's just pretty extraordinary as Danish Graves, the lawyer for the live family. They know how to pick him on this show.

I'm a big Foley fan. I'm so delighted he's here, so, you know. Maybe no better moment of Fargo season five so far than Lorraine telling Danish Graves to slap Wayne over speakerphone in his office. And him doing it. Actually did it. Incredible shit.

We fucking love it. We love it. All right, the show's so good. All right, the last thing we want to do, the last thing that you can expect from a Cohen film and from a season of Fargo is an irresistible needle drop. Rob Mahoney,

you've already brought us great insight from Imagine Dragon posters. What do you want to say on the needle drop front of the music that we've heard so far? I feel like my entire life has been building up to this is Halloween needle drop in this movie, in this show got, but borrowing from that movie.

And honestly, like the extended nightmare before Christmas allusions and masks and references, wild stuff I did not anticipate. But as a lover of that movie, I'm very appreciative. And there's such a fascinating thing happening where in putting the masks on the kidnappers, when Gator and his cronies show up,

really a mirror of the actual plot of the nightmare before Christmas in terms of going to kidnap Santa Claus, except Gator, in this case, envisions himself as Jack Skellington versus one of the cronies, which is kind of the middleman problem to begin with. I love the needle drop though I love that the first time we get it I'm wondering like is

Gator just listening to this in his truck like is this a diagetic music cue but I'm fine with it either way I'm thrilled that it's here and on this podcast we hail to the pumpkin king Joe it is bizarre I'm still trying to figure out why they dropped that song

before they showed us the mess yeah like well we had seen it in a flick before. One of the things we haven't really talked about is a lot of times Dot will be by herself in her bedroom and we get these like fade-ins of Tillman on a horse, kind of looming over her.

This kind of almost like hitchcocky, like slow first person Zoom, this like spectral vision of like voyeuristically looking at her. And one of the flashes we do see when Tillman is like in prayer at his beautiful outdoor dinner table is of the three kidnappers

in their mass. So we get like at least that drop I think we get like an inflatable Jack Skellington at some point before that. The Jack Skellington decor is definitely a play on their street, like outside of the houses and stuff like that. To taste the season. For sure. I guess it speaks to Fargo being slightly unexpected because you would expect to hear that when the three kidnappers put the masks on and stuff like that. Yes. The fact that you get it instead just on a random drive down the dark road.

also wild to have a Halloween show happening in late November but here we are on the needle drop front I have to shout out I've seen all good people by yes which is what plays during the school board meeting

the taser fight at the beginning which is on the almost famous soundtrack so I was like immediately like thrilled to see it there we go Glory Land by Ralph Stanley I don't know that song but I know Ralph Stanley's voice

because he's on the O Brother Where Art thou soundtrack, singing Oh, Death? And I was just like, oh, Ralph Stanley's here. It's serious now. And then smack my bitch up by the prodigy.

Oh, my God. It's just extraordinary stuff. Really, really extraordinary stuff. Tillman being in prayer in his own chapel as he sends his son to kidnap his ex-wife while Smack My Bitch Up plays. Yeah. That's art.

I'm sorry. That's art. I don't know what to tell you. And on that sort of like what she sees, those moments where she has these visions almost, there's also the corresponding moment when Roy's in bed having rejected his current wife. Yeah.

And he's sort of staring up at the ceiling and then he says, I see you. And then we cut to external of Dot's house and sort of like push in. So like this idea. There's also like a carryover of like, his, I think he's smoking a join in that scene or some kind of cigarette at least,

like a puff of smoke kind of waltz into Dot's living room behind her. Oh, yeah, yeah, I didn't notice that. It's fascinating. Like, and those, unlike the Munch thing, which I am taking literally, and I support you not taking it literally, this idea of him is a timeless creature.

I think that that, to me, speaks more to this idea of instinct, which is something Munch mentions in that, barn scene where Roy Tillman's like can she be gotten? He's like there are things I know about where people go. It's an instinct, right?

And similarly when Dot is like there's a bathroom in the back and there's going to be a window there and someone's probably going to come in there or whatever. This idea of like predicting other people's movements and specifically these two characters, Roy and Dot

or Nadine if you prefer and who clearly have previously played as too playful a word, you know, like survived some previous conflict, right? Which required them knowing each other, making moves and counter moves, sort of thing. I love when he calls her on the phone too, and you get kind of their first brush up against each other,

at least as close as we've seen so far, and sing or at least, you know, not a pure needle drop, but quote some of the Chuck Barry song, Nadine to her, which if you're not familiar, I would say from one point of view is about a guy pursuing Nadine, and from another point of view is about a guy stalking Nadine everywhere she goes. I would say a light stalking is definitely what's happening there.

That's certainly how it reads. Yeah. What's so funny about the way that he performed that is it reminded me, are you an audiobook listener at all? Not usually, no. What's hilarious about audiobooks is like if there's a song, inside of the book. In theory, the narrator is supposed to sing it, but they almost never do either for copyright reasons or because these people don't have good enough voices. I don't know what it is.

So they usually do what he does there, which is a sort of like talking, but in a rhythmic way that you're supposed to understand it's a song. That's all right. Back made a career out of it. It's fine. It's very creepy, very effective. There's some great horror, like straight up horror movie. This is a very horrific episode watching Munch smear himself in Goat's Blood and And also on the scorefront I don't think it's unique to this season

I think the horns and the piano that we hear I would say specifically during the Munch Home Invasion in episode one I wrote down John Carpenter Halloween score Is what it sounded like to me But I think it's also like a Fargo score sound, but it sounded just extra Halloween in a way that setting this at Halloween makes me feel

like is intentional as well. The score's been really fun. Even when it's just like snaps or claps, like just kind of a rhythmic tension building, they've been so good about setting up that slow burn sensibility. It makes things really eerie, really creepy, feel really dangerous in a lot of these scenes. I'm here for all of it.

So in short, Fargo, it's great. We love it. Rob was like, this is the best show we've ever covered together. And I think I agree with love and respect to justified in poker face and all the other things that we've ever covered. This is so good. I mean, do those shows have Jennifer Jason Lee on another planet on them? Have you seen, you've seen Hudsucker proxy, right? Oh, I love the Hudsucker Proxy.

Yeah, this is definitely Hudsucker proxy at 0.75 times speed maybe. Yeah, she's doing her like Hudsucker proxy mid-Atlantic accent. Yes. Catherine Hepburn on Xanax, maybe. Yeah, exactly. And it does not at all fit with the Midwestern access that people are doing around her. Not a bit.

It doesn't matter to me. Don't care at all. Don't care at all. That's great. So remember, do not put up more than one Imagine Dragons poster or Rob Mahoney will judge you. Yes. And please remember to thank our producer on this episode,

Kai Grady, because he's the best. And we'll be back next week with a more traditional rundown of episode four of Fargo. Can't wait. See you then. Bye.