Antecedently, in the Fargo thread...

[GoGo Yubari]

fell down a music hole just listening to music from the show. I think overall I'm wrestling with whether 4 or 3 was the least satisfying season to actually watch, but I will say that 4's score was fucking exceptional and the take on "Caravan" that opens the season is probably series-best work from Jeff Russo outside of "Wrench & Numbers" from season 1.

Spoiler

though, awesomely, that leitmotif is so undeniably great that he throws it into the middle of this one for a little bit, seemingly just because.

 

[Josh]

Season 5 will be the last.

[Adam]

Season 4 is airing over here and I've just watched through it all on All 4. I have to say, my least favourite season of Fargo by some distance sadly and I'm not sure I even want a 5th.

Spoiler

It just felt like Noah Hawley and/or the people making it started believing their own hype, not unlike Moffatt & Gatiss did with BBC's Sherlock. The cinematography was incredible, some of the monologues were great, the entire black and white episode could have been its own self-contained little masterpiece, but I felt that the story, pacing, characters and basically everything else that gives a TV series substance was either lacking or had some serious misfires.

I get it, "cannon" "fadda" and it's all futile in this world etc. etc. but it just didn't work for me. The season started slow and confusing, finally got good in the middle then when they started killing everybody off one after the other it was like the air came out of the balloon and what was left was rather unsatisfying.

I don't feel like I gained much from watching it, it wasn't fun and quirky in the same way Fargo usually is and it was the most disconnected from the spirit of the film and the Coen brothers of the four seasons, which is really what I mean at the heart of saying that the showrunners started believing their own hype.

Ethelrida was wasted, the Josto/Gaetano dynamic got good then they offed the big lad straight away, Chris Rock struggled to really bring the necessary emotion and gravitas to Loy Cannon, the ghost/curse stuff was too on the nose and Ben Wishaw was wasted in all but the episode that Rabbi died in.

The saving grace of the season for me was Satchel, which makes sense because the season purely panned out into being his origin story. Which is fine because I love Mike Milligan and Bokeem Woodbine was amazing in Season 2, but I didn't need an entire season of television to essentially do that without leaving enough of a mark in its own right.

Also

On 05/10/2020 at 22:15, Adam said:

I love the show, briefly saw his face in the trailer and thought "of course he's in this". Knows where his strengths lie does Tim!

I'm not sure when or where the new season will air in the UK but I can't wait for it.

I totally forgot I ever saw the trailer or said this so when they did the slow face reveal at the start of the episode Olyphant debuted in, I popped all over again.

[livid]

 

[GoGo Yubari]

Season's set in 2019, continuing the trend of alternating present-day(ish) seasons with past seasons.

[Josh]

I can get down with that. I assume we’re gonna end up with a lot more casting announcements later, featuring a handful of oddballs.

[livid]

 

Papa Steve 

[GoGo Yubari]

Oh hey, been a minute. Season 5 starts tonight! Reviews are pretty favorable! Trailer's here:

 

[Mx. Canadian Destroyer]

Episode 1 was incredible.

[GoGo Yubari]

Yeah, I haven't watched 2 yet because I needed to get up a little earlier to do some Thanksgiving shopping but 1 was a hell of a start. They also did a good job starting to inform you which flavor of Coen Brothers this is going to be by...

Spoiler

Setting up the convenience store worker with the air horn, letting you start to think that maybe that was going to come back as like a "good citizen provides valuable distraction at just the right time" thing, and then he stands up like an idiot and the air horn barely makes a worthwhile noise and he's shot dead having contributed nothing. So, you know. It's one of those.

 

[GoGo Yubari]

Midway through episode 2. Jennifer Jason Leigh just dusting off her Mid-Atlantic accent from Hudsucker Proxy and talking slow with it instead of talking fast is one of my favorite acting choices anyone has made in this entire series.

[GoGo Yubari]

*FARGO INTENSIFIES*

[Gongsun Zan]

Spoiler

That has got to be the stupidest decision made by a character in the entire series.

Episode 8.

[GoGo Yubari]

 

4 hours ago, Gongsun Zan said:

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That has got to be the stupidest decision made by a character in the entire series.

Episode 8.

 

Spoiler

Yeah. They kind of try to set it up a couple different times (Roy making the most obvious threat in the world in the other time those two characters meet and Danish not getting it, Danish needing to show his ID to the very guard he pays) but for the life of me I just don't really buy it as a full series of decisions a character who's not been depicted as that foolhardy to this point would make. Specifically not calling Lorraine or taking her call, the only reasonable justification I've seen of which boils down to "Danish doesn't think Lorraine would want him to do anything about it" but I don't know how much I believe they'd set up Danish to have any real pull to save Dot that urgently.

Maybe if we'd spent more time with Danish or gotten a little more sense of who he is rather than what he does for a living I'd have bought it more. Like if it were simply a matter of this powerless, buttoned-up guy getting a taste of power by fucking Roy over at the debate and getting too drunk on it (which is probably what they wanted it to be) but in the moment I didn't really fully believe that it represented that as much as it represented "we need a way to keep Roy from killing Dot."

(also, I hated that "Toxic" cover. This show is typically so good at needle drops and that felt like something you'd have heard in a bad movie trailer.)

Some really superb acting in that episode, though. Juno Temple and Joe Keery's scene together was tremendous.

[Lint]

Just started watching this last week, up to S3E2, but I realized something while watching S1

Despite loving the Coen Brothers and watching a good bit of their filmography, I've never watched the Fargo movie..think I'm gonna get around to that when I get caught up on the series

[Gongsun Zan]

On 08/01/2024 at 02:15, GoGo Yubari said:

 

 

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Yeah. They kind of try to set it up a couple different times (Roy making the most obvious threat in the world in the other time those two characters meet and Danish not getting it, Danish needing to show his ID to the very guard he pays) but for the life of me I just don't really buy it as a full series of decisions a character who's not been depicted as that foolhardy to this point would make. Specifically not calling Lorraine or taking her call, the only reasonable justification I've seen of which boils down to "Danish doesn't think Lorraine would want him to do anything about it" but I don't know how much I believe they'd set up Danish to have any real pull to save Dot that urgently.

Maybe if we'd spent more time with Danish or gotten a little more sense of who he is rather than what he does for a living I'd have bought it more. Like if it were simply a matter of this powerless, buttoned-up guy getting a taste of power by fucking Roy over at the debate and getting too drunk on it (which is probably what they wanted it to be) but in the moment I didn't really fully believe that it represented that as much as it represented "we need a way to keep Roy from killing Dot."

(also, I hated that "Toxic" cover. This show is typically so good at needle drops and that felt like something you'd have heard in a bad movie trailer.)

Some really superb acting in that episode, though. Juno Temple and Joe Keery's scene together was tremendous.

I think this season suffers a bit from having too many side characters with not enough time to develop all of them.

[GoGo Yubari]

I'm not sure I agree with that, because I don't think there are more side characters here than there were in season two. I think it's more been an allocation of time/how they use their time thing, and maybe being a little less effective at setting characters up to make the decisions they make. The core of the season's really strong but I don't think the minor characters are as strong as the first two seasons, maybe not even season three. Like, Lars Olmstead might be my least-favorite character the show's ever put out. I'm supposed to hate him, and I do, but he's so cartoonishly worthless (and not in a fun way, like the typewriter salesman from S2) that I don't even buy that he wouldn't have been kicked out of his own house ages ago.

(In spite of all of that I'd still say there's a really strong case for this being my third-favorite season behind S2 and S1. The actual core of what's going on is good stuff, and the main actors are all knocking it out of the park.)

[GoGo Yubari]

Well fuck, okay, they're gonna end strong then.

[FLiam]

Episode 8 spoilers:

Spoiler

Gator is going to get fuuuuucked up

Also, Jon Hamm is a very, very good villain.

 

[GoGo Yubari]

I remember there was a general sense that this was probably the last season of Fargo and if so I can't think of a better way to end it. Of all the Coen Brothers scene allusions...

Spoiler

A version of the standoff between Anton Chigurh and Llewellyn Moss' wife where the Chigurh figure makes the opposite choice is a great way to end things.