Discussion: FARGO on FX @10pm Update: Season 5 w/ John Hamm
- Thread starter playahaitian
- Start date
agreed
she was a truly horribly selfish perosn...
her husband was actually a "good" guy who just died loving her and trying to his DEATH to make HER happy.
That scene at the hotel with Swango and Varga was great. Had to laugh at the close-up of Varga chowing down on Rocky Road before meeting up with her, and acknowledging her strategic moves thus far and promising to add zeros to her salary.
agreed
she was a truly horribly selfish perosn...
her husband was actually a "good" guy who just died loving her and trying to his DEATH to make HER happy.
agreed
she was a truly horribly selfish perosn...
her husband was actually a "good" guy who just died loving her and trying to his DEATH to make HER happy.
wouldnt argue that she was a good person, but rather cunning and smarter than her male counterparts (her husband, the mafia and police)
other than the cold and midwest charm that seems to be theme of the show. strong, intelligent, component women that are overlooked, ignored or underestimated
Umm
Damn and a sip of tea could put you in a coma
Asian dancing stereotype *Bing
Why it seem like you a week behind? lol
http://www.rollingstone.com/tv/recaps/fargo-recap-true-confessions-w487683
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2017/06/15/fargo-aw-jeez-episode-nine-recap-aporia
https://www.geek.com/television/someone-finally-gets-one-over-on-varga-on-fargo-1703557/
http://www.slashfilm.com/fargo-aporia-review/
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/14/arts/television/fargo-recap-aporia.html
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/fien-print/fargo-aporia-keith-gordon-interview-1013696
http://ew.com/tv/2017/06/15/fargo-actress-teases-season-finale-you-do-not-know-what-to-expect/
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2017/06/15/fargo-aw-jeez-episode-nine-recap-aporia
https://www.geek.com/television/someone-finally-gets-one-over-on-varga-on-fargo-1703557/
http://www.slashfilm.com/fargo-aporia-review/
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/14/arts/television/fargo-recap-aporia.html
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/fien-print/fargo-aporia-keith-gordon-interview-1013696
http://ew.com/tv/2017/06/15/fargo-actress-teases-season-finale-you-do-not-know-what-to-expect/
The grenade sequence was the smartest shit ive seen on TV this year.
Bitch got one over on VM , in the meeting, both was playing chess like a mother fucker.
Bitch got one over on VM , in the meeting, both was playing chess like a mother fucker.
thing is she wasn't smarter than the mafia or police - the out of jurisdiction cop was on point and so was Hamzee!
both tracked her down not once, but 2x... if it was only the rest of the crew and cops then yeah - but you can't sell those 2 short
shit Hamzee used her 2x to settle scores
I keep hearing that the season finale may be the series finale 
At a panel in the ATX Television Festival in Austin, Hawley admitted (via Entertainment Weekly) that the current third season may be the final one for the anthology series.I keep hearing that the season finale may be the series finale
"There's only a certain amount of storytelling you can tell in that vein. And I love telling stories in this vein, but I don't have another one yet. So watch the 10th hour [of season 3] because it might be the last," he said.
However, that does not necessarily close the door on a fourth season for good. Hawley told the audience at the panel there is still hope for a next installment, so long as a good story comes to him.
"If an idea comes, we will do another one," Hawley added (via Variety). "I am certainly aware of the danger of overstaying your welcome or repeating yourself."
Loved the ending.
"We don't have to say no more , otherwise we both just be wasting breath"
And we never know who was coming to the door.
That bitch should have just shot stussy instead of praying. He still got it , just off the respect def dude had for her.
"We don't have to say no more , otherwise we both just be wasting breath"
And we never know who was coming to the door.
That bitch should have just shot stussy instead of praying. He still got it , just off the respect def dude had for her.
Loved the ending.
"We don't have to say no more , otherwise we both just be wasting breath"
And we never know who was coming to the door.
That bitch should have just shot stussy instead of praying. He still got it , just off the respect def dude had for her.
a few things....
that was an outstanding episode in an outstanding series.
Loved how THE STAMP, the damn SOURCE of all this?
was just thrown away...
the whole warehouse set up was fantastic (is the Asian man ALIVE!?!?!?)
and I KNEW that woman was with Varga...
it bothered the HELL out of me that Varga knew EVERYTHING and I mean EVERYTHING and would let the partner he HATED negotiate all that right out tin the open like that???
I hated that Swango felt compelled to talk so much before she killed him
but I think there was something DEEPER there.
The Black officer just the look and color of his uniform
and her willingness to essentially KILL an innocent (also we KNEW they weren't gonna let her kill a black cop like that and live)
and the prayer...its like she BROKE the covenant...the agreement.
and
the imagine of the dead black cop and the dead white woman all basically killed cause of this COWARDLY white man.
(LOVED how Emit was a f*cking greedy cowardly hypocrite till the end)
And the Popsicle talk with Gloria and her son?
I felt it was connected to the final scene...
lets first SALUTE the music the editing the cinematography the lighting on that scene...
cause they ACTUALLY made about 40 seconds FEEL like 5 minutes.
now
I feel it COULD have gone either way
the Popsicle scene she is telling the son to not rush to adulthood cause the REALITY the VIOLENCE of the REAL WORLD is coming
and essentially that is what Varga is telling her...
yeah OK DHS and everything is nice
but in the REAL world?
I'm gonna get away AGAIN.
That is the Reality that is already written
And when we see EVERYTHING from her POV
(loved how it got dark when Varga closed his eyes)
we ANTICIPATING...
all we KNOW is based off of Gloria's reaction, facial expression
and we see her face (great ACTING!)
and we assume cause we see that smile?
Oh Varga got his.
BUT
what if it is some MAN (like they have shown us thru the ENTIRE SEASON) that walked in to save Varga?
I think she may also smile
not happy not triumphant
just someone who has been HARDENED and SURVIVED
seeing the same sh*t but now KNOWING...
and can DEAL with it.
It aint gonna STOP HER from doing what she wants and needs to do.
I want to BELIEVE Varga goes to Rikers...
but I feel like even if he DOESN'T?
She still gonna go to the fair with her son and guess a pig's weight while eating a deep fried snickers bar.
expand Quote Playa
the reason thought he MAY be alive is cause they didn't cover his face and only cover like his bloody waist area
and that LOOK when he realized Varga betrayed him?
damn
I have NO IDEA why I never trusted the rich chick...
it just seemed she was moving WAY to easily.
Vargas tossed the damn lawyer out a parking garage for just googling him!!!!!
Yet she over here having PUBLIC dinners and investigating the company?
the damn IRS couldn't even investigate the company!!!!
nah...Emit is a sh*tbag...he was actually REALLY looking remorseful and ashamed and seeking absolution and REALLY to pay the price
(perhaps THAT is what REALLY caused Swango to hesitate?)
And then the MINUTE he had a chance?
He tried to get the cop to get Swango...he KNEW SOMEONE was gonna diue.
he was a scumbag through and through and JUST wanted to win and have his life back
which as we say on the fridge door?
He did.
there are SO many quotables
"The past is unpredictable"
Varga got away with it fam....He got to be pushing close to a billion in assets. Ain't no billionaire going to prison in real life. Remember this is supposed to be based on a TRUE story.
If he got sent away, surely they would have written that into the ending. Nope, I think he told her exactly what would happen and it did. Maybe a little bit longer than 5 minutes but he ends up walking out the door
well
its based on a true story...STORY
Right, right....but also TRUE
I think the lady sheriff is smiling because she doesn't feel like that little robot anymore. Like she's free now
I wanted them to expand on the little robot theme..
and machines never "seeing" her
http://www.avclub.com/article/it-doesnt-matter-whether-or-not-fargo-door-opens-257198
Note: This post discusses plot details from the most recent seasons of Fargo and The Leftovers.
Information about the most recent season of FX’s Fargo—which concluded Wednesday—was kept tightly under wraps in the months leading up to its premiere. By the time the cable channel was bringing journalists to Calgary to meet the cast and crew and glimpse the newest and most modern Midwestern environs for Noah Hawley’s Coen brothers pastiche, the only concrete facts involved 1) who those stars were and 2) whom one of them, Ewan McGregor, would be playing: two brothers of opposite fortunes.
The production’s obfuscation game was strong: By the time the show aired, I was shocked to learn we’d been present for the production of the episode in which one of those brothers, probation officer Ray Stussy, is accidentally killed while tussling with his brother, Emmit, over the very item that led to Emmit’s outrageous wealth. We were none the wiser that this was a story Fargo would tell in its third year. McGregor conducted interviews in Ray’s scraggly mane and prosthetic double chin, and much ado was made of the cast and crew’s affection for the character—which, in retrospect, comes across as preemptive mourning.
Such was the emphasis on the Stussy sibling rivalry and the thin amount of information available about anyone else on the show that I found myself at a bit of a loss while sitting across the table from Carrie Coon, who’d be stepping into the well-insulated boots that Allison Tolman, Colin Hanks, Patrick Wilson, and Ted Danson previously wore as the show’s representatives for law and order. So I defaulted to one of my favorite TV subjects from the past few years: The Leftovers, in which Coon made her first major foray into the medium, playing a woman whose entire family disappeared (along with 2 percent of the world’s population) in a mysterious event referred to as The Sudden Departure. Beyond the Stussy feud, press materials for Fargo’s third season revealed that the season’s snowballing caper would begin with the mistaken-identity murder of Eden Valley Police Chief Gloria Burgle’s stepfather. So I made a connection between the two characters’ losses and Coon provided a great sound bite—“I suppose I’ve become the ‘it’ girl for grief and loss, which maybe is good. At least I have some jobs”—and the conversation moved on to thematic material and ironic character names and the other things that pass for substance in a press junket interview.
But, as is ever the case on Fargo, the complete truth of the matter was still waiting to be uncovered. The overlap between Gloria and Coon’s Leftovers character, Nora Durst, doesn’t end with the grieving process. In a cosmic coincidence that’s sure to delight the creators of both series (assuming they’re not cursing one another’s parallel thinking), the season finale of Fargo and the series finale of The Leftovers drop Coon into conversations that test the limits of unreliable narration on television. At the end of The Leftovers’ “The Book Of Nora,” her character gives an extended monologue about how she crossed over to whatever afterlife realm/parallel universe/alternate dimension sucked up her loved ones on October 14, 2011. At the end of Fargo’s “Somebody To Love,” Coon listens as someone else details the circumstances of their impending disappearance. Both scenes act as the epilogues to their particular stories. Both scenes leave it up to the viewer to determine the truth. (Did Nora cross over and then return to the world she left behind? Will “a man you can’t argue with” enter the interrogation room and tell the villainous V.M. Varga he’s free to go?) Most crucially, both scenes cap television programs that pose huge questions about the nature of truth, and the certainty of uncertainty.
There are similarities, but it’s the differences that count here, in terms of how effectively the third seasons of The Leftovers and Fargo use uncertainty as a storytelling device, and the impact that brings to their conclusions. It’s what’s underpinning that sense of being kept on your toes—that feeling that you can never know conclusively if the departure machine worked for Nora or if the door opens for Varga. For The Leftovers, it’s a very human thing, a component of storytelling that’s been around for as long as humans have been telling stories: It’s a metaphor for faith, a theme that runs throughout The Leftovers, but becomes especially pronounced as the characters convince themselves that the world is about to end (again). There’s some thematic material running through Fargo’s unanswered questions, but it’s almost entirely academic—questions that exist for the sake of asking questions.
Back in Calgary, I got a knot in my stomach when the publicists informed us that season three would take a good, hard look at the disclaimer that opens Joel and Ethan Coen’s Fargo, and every episode of the FX series that it inspired: “This is a true story.” It struck me as an opportunity for Fargo to disappear up its own ass. Truth and fact are always going to come up in a crime drama, but stretch them out too much and you run the risk of invalidating the crime or the drama. Noah Hawley had already manipulated reality extensively this broadcast season in his X-Men-adjacent series Legion, a psychedelic mindfuck of a superhero story that could, at any moment, wave away the events of entire episodes. Fine for something set in an unreality of mutants, free-form-jazz-odyssey astral planes, and yellow-eyed Aubrey Plazas, but do this too frequently and you wind up setting a narrative trap like Westworld’s, where each resulting pull of the rug has less impact than the one before. It felt like more than the snow-bloodying allegory of Fargo could bear.
Call it confirmation bias, but my fears were realized by V.M. Varga (David Thewlis), the latest (and potentially final?) evolution of the Fargo philosopher-criminal. Prototyped by Billy Bob Thornton in season one and perfected by Bokeem Woodbine in season two, this Tarantino-esque figure is reduced to an aphorism-spouting shell in season three. Varga lives to invalidate that which the rest of the world takes for granted, sowing doubt with a tiresome soliloquy about the Moon landing, or scotching Gloria’s investigation into her stepfather’s death by turning what looks like several coincidentally interconnected crimes into a tidy serial-killer narrative. He’s a living representation of the logical fallacy that because anything can be true, nothing is true. And that nihilistic viewpoint garbles whatever Fargo’s third season wants to say about The Truth.
He’s a symbol, but every character on Fargo is a symbol. That’s what kept the show at arm’s length for me in seasons one and three; there’s some fascinating alchemy going on in season two that I’m going to be puzzling over for the rest of my natural life. (I think it mostly has to do with the uniformly high quality of the performances.) That second round had its own unanswered riddles and red herrings in the UFO and Hank Larsson’s “universal language,” but they were more ornamental than Vargas’ assault on the official record. And the thing is, season three actually pulled off some meaningful tricks along these lines: Just before he’s executed in the kitchen of his new home, Emmit Stussy reflects on his life’s story in photographs—none of which contain Ray. It’s a gut punch, because it has nothing to do with numbers in an offshore account or Varga finding another way to slip through the cracks. It’s Emmit erasing the existence of his brother, nullifying the relationship that was once all we knew about season three.
It’s a clever decision to have Varga and Gloria face off in the waning minutes of the finale, two symbols in a face-off of undetermined outcome. But it’s clever like the mirror behind them is clever, an optical illusion that casts their reflections into infinity and repeats a motif previously staged with Gloria and Emmit. And it just doesn’t mean as much as Nora Durst’s exchange with her ex, Kevin Garvey (Justin Theroux), at the end of The Leftovers. That finale plays its own mind games: Following a version of Nora who’s much older than the last time we saw her—and calling back to a surprising twist from the season premiere—“The Book Of Nora” is hazy about what became of the character after she was bathed in goo and blasted with potentially lethal amounts of radiation. Are her current Australian digs proof that she backed out at the last minute, or are we seeing the life she built after crossing over to the other side? If it’s the latter, where are the kids and husband with whom she intended to reunite? Kevin’s arrival nudges the perception toward “definitely crossed over,” as he speaks as if he and Nora had never dated, never moved to Jarden, Texas, never broke up in a Melbourne hotel room that went up in flames that were nowhere near as fiery as the argument that led to their split. Like Ray missing from Emmit’s mementos, the absence is felt.
And so it’s all the more devastating when Kevin drops the ruse and cops to spending years of vacation time combing Australia for Nora. And that lays the emotional groundwork for Nora’s story, a tale of arriving in a dimension where The Sudden Departure occurred in reverse, where all the people who remained in her world were the ones who disappeared. There is no feint toward corroborating either story. As in the Fargo finale, all we have to go on are the words Nora and Kevin give one another. As in the Fargo finale, it doesn’t really matter who’s telling the truth. The fact of the matter is that these two people have been through so much together, have seen such unbelievable things in their time on Earth(s), that they take one another on faith.
And The Leftovers makes the moment matter, because these aren’t two symbols speaking in abstracts. They’re people, beautifully realized by Coon and Theroux, who have experienced chaos and unpredictability firsthand—not characters expressing a writer’s competing ideas about chaos and unpredictability. It really doesn’t matter if that door behind Varga opens, and it doesn’t matter if it stays closed either. Because it’s just a door. And Varga is just an invention. And any conclusion that you draw about the final scene of the finale is just a conclusion. Fargo’s third season is a curious exercise in postmodern storytelling, which did some things that worked (the emergence of Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s Nikki Swango as an avenging hero, Coon’s essaying of “background girl” Gloria, that episode where Gloria goes to Hollywood to investigate her stepdad’s past as a sci-fi writer, and an animated robot says, “I can help!” a lot) and some things that did not (almost everything having to do with Varga with the exception of his Mobile Command Unit Action Playset—Yuri and Meemo figures sold separately). Because we have witnessed it, “It’s happening becomes as the rocks and the rivers,” as Varga says in the finale. But the questions left hanging in that final scene are shallow rivers, indeed.
Note: This post discusses plot details from the most recent seasons of Fargo and The Leftovers.
Information about the most recent season of FX’s Fargo—which concluded Wednesday—was kept tightly under wraps in the months leading up to its premiere. By the time the cable channel was bringing journalists to Calgary to meet the cast and crew and glimpse the newest and most modern Midwestern environs for Noah Hawley’s Coen brothers pastiche, the only concrete facts involved 1) who those stars were and 2) whom one of them, Ewan McGregor, would be playing: two brothers of opposite fortunes.
The production’s obfuscation game was strong: By the time the show aired, I was shocked to learn we’d been present for the production of the episode in which one of those brothers, probation officer Ray Stussy, is accidentally killed while tussling with his brother, Emmit, over the very item that led to Emmit’s outrageous wealth. We were none the wiser that this was a story Fargo would tell in its third year. McGregor conducted interviews in Ray’s scraggly mane and prosthetic double chin, and much ado was made of the cast and crew’s affection for the character—which, in retrospect, comes across as preemptive mourning.
Such was the emphasis on the Stussy sibling rivalry and the thin amount of information available about anyone else on the show that I found myself at a bit of a loss while sitting across the table from Carrie Coon, who’d be stepping into the well-insulated boots that Allison Tolman, Colin Hanks, Patrick Wilson, and Ted Danson previously wore as the show’s representatives for law and order. So I defaulted to one of my favorite TV subjects from the past few years: The Leftovers, in which Coon made her first major foray into the medium, playing a woman whose entire family disappeared (along with 2 percent of the world’s population) in a mysterious event referred to as The Sudden Departure. Beyond the Stussy feud, press materials for Fargo’s third season revealed that the season’s snowballing caper would begin with the mistaken-identity murder of Eden Valley Police Chief Gloria Burgle’s stepfather. So I made a connection between the two characters’ losses and Coon provided a great sound bite—“I suppose I’ve become the ‘it’ girl for grief and loss, which maybe is good. At least I have some jobs”—and the conversation moved on to thematic material and ironic character names and the other things that pass for substance in a press junket interview.
But, as is ever the case on Fargo, the complete truth of the matter was still waiting to be uncovered. The overlap between Gloria and Coon’s Leftovers character, Nora Durst, doesn’t end with the grieving process. In a cosmic coincidence that’s sure to delight the creators of both series (assuming they’re not cursing one another’s parallel thinking), the season finale of Fargo and the series finale of The Leftovers drop Coon into conversations that test the limits of unreliable narration on television. At the end of The Leftovers’ “The Book Of Nora,” her character gives an extended monologue about how she crossed over to whatever afterlife realm/parallel universe/alternate dimension sucked up her loved ones on October 14, 2011. At the end of Fargo’s “Somebody To Love,” Coon listens as someone else details the circumstances of their impending disappearance. Both scenes act as the epilogues to their particular stories. Both scenes leave it up to the viewer to determine the truth. (Did Nora cross over and then return to the world she left behind? Will “a man you can’t argue with” enter the interrogation room and tell the villainous V.M. Varga he’s free to go?) Most crucially, both scenes cap television programs that pose huge questions about the nature of truth, and the certainty of uncertainty.
There are similarities, but it’s the differences that count here, in terms of how effectively the third seasons of The Leftovers and Fargo use uncertainty as a storytelling device, and the impact that brings to their conclusions. It’s what’s underpinning that sense of being kept on your toes—that feeling that you can never know conclusively if the departure machine worked for Nora or if the door opens for Varga. For The Leftovers, it’s a very human thing, a component of storytelling that’s been around for as long as humans have been telling stories: It’s a metaphor for faith, a theme that runs throughout The Leftovers, but becomes especially pronounced as the characters convince themselves that the world is about to end (again). There’s some thematic material running through Fargo’s unanswered questions, but it’s almost entirely academic—questions that exist for the sake of asking questions.
Back in Calgary, I got a knot in my stomach when the publicists informed us that season three would take a good, hard look at the disclaimer that opens Joel and Ethan Coen’s Fargo, and every episode of the FX series that it inspired: “This is a true story.” It struck me as an opportunity for Fargo to disappear up its own ass. Truth and fact are always going to come up in a crime drama, but stretch them out too much and you run the risk of invalidating the crime or the drama. Noah Hawley had already manipulated reality extensively this broadcast season in his X-Men-adjacent series Legion, a psychedelic mindfuck of a superhero story that could, at any moment, wave away the events of entire episodes. Fine for something set in an unreality of mutants, free-form-jazz-odyssey astral planes, and yellow-eyed Aubrey Plazas, but do this too frequently and you wind up setting a narrative trap like Westworld’s, where each resulting pull of the rug has less impact than the one before. It felt like more than the snow-bloodying allegory of Fargo could bear.
Call it confirmation bias, but my fears were realized by V.M. Varga (David Thewlis), the latest (and potentially final?) evolution of the Fargo philosopher-criminal. Prototyped by Billy Bob Thornton in season one and perfected by Bokeem Woodbine in season two, this Tarantino-esque figure is reduced to an aphorism-spouting shell in season three. Varga lives to invalidate that which the rest of the world takes for granted, sowing doubt with a tiresome soliloquy about the Moon landing, or scotching Gloria’s investigation into her stepfather’s death by turning what looks like several coincidentally interconnected crimes into a tidy serial-killer narrative. He’s a living representation of the logical fallacy that because anything can be true, nothing is true. And that nihilistic viewpoint garbles whatever Fargo’s third season wants to say about The Truth.
He’s a symbol, but every character on Fargo is a symbol. That’s what kept the show at arm’s length for me in seasons one and three; there’s some fascinating alchemy going on in season two that I’m going to be puzzling over for the rest of my natural life. (I think it mostly has to do with the uniformly high quality of the performances.) That second round had its own unanswered riddles and red herrings in the UFO and Hank Larsson’s “universal language,” but they were more ornamental than Vargas’ assault on the official record. And the thing is, season three actually pulled off some meaningful tricks along these lines: Just before he’s executed in the kitchen of his new home, Emmit Stussy reflects on his life’s story in photographs—none of which contain Ray. It’s a gut punch, because it has nothing to do with numbers in an offshore account or Varga finding another way to slip through the cracks. It’s Emmit erasing the existence of his brother, nullifying the relationship that was once all we knew about season three.
It’s a clever decision to have Varga and Gloria face off in the waning minutes of the finale, two symbols in a face-off of undetermined outcome. But it’s clever like the mirror behind them is clever, an optical illusion that casts their reflections into infinity and repeats a motif previously staged with Gloria and Emmit. And it just doesn’t mean as much as Nora Durst’s exchange with her ex, Kevin Garvey (Justin Theroux), at the end of The Leftovers. That finale plays its own mind games: Following a version of Nora who’s much older than the last time we saw her—and calling back to a surprising twist from the season premiere—“The Book Of Nora” is hazy about what became of the character after she was bathed in goo and blasted with potentially lethal amounts of radiation. Are her current Australian digs proof that she backed out at the last minute, or are we seeing the life she built after crossing over to the other side? If it’s the latter, where are the kids and husband with whom she intended to reunite? Kevin’s arrival nudges the perception toward “definitely crossed over,” as he speaks as if he and Nora had never dated, never moved to Jarden, Texas, never broke up in a Melbourne hotel room that went up in flames that were nowhere near as fiery as the argument that led to their split. Like Ray missing from Emmit’s mementos, the absence is felt.
And so it’s all the more devastating when Kevin drops the ruse and cops to spending years of vacation time combing Australia for Nora. And that lays the emotional groundwork for Nora’s story, a tale of arriving in a dimension where The Sudden Departure occurred in reverse, where all the people who remained in her world were the ones who disappeared. There is no feint toward corroborating either story. As in the Fargo finale, all we have to go on are the words Nora and Kevin give one another. As in the Fargo finale, it doesn’t really matter who’s telling the truth. The fact of the matter is that these two people have been through so much together, have seen such unbelievable things in their time on Earth(s), that they take one another on faith.
And The Leftovers makes the moment matter, because these aren’t two symbols speaking in abstracts. They’re people, beautifully realized by Coon and Theroux, who have experienced chaos and unpredictability firsthand—not characters expressing a writer’s competing ideas about chaos and unpredictability. It really doesn’t matter if that door behind Varga opens, and it doesn’t matter if it stays closed either. Because it’s just a door. And Varga is just an invention. And any conclusion that you draw about the final scene of the finale is just a conclusion. Fargo’s third season is a curious exercise in postmodern storytelling, which did some things that worked (the emergence of Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s Nikki Swango as an avenging hero, Coon’s essaying of “background girl” Gloria, that episode where Gloria goes to Hollywood to investigate her stepdad’s past as a sci-fi writer, and an animated robot says, “I can help!” a lot) and some things that did not (almost everything having to do with Varga with the exception of his Mobile Command Unit Action Playset—Yuri and Meemo figures sold separately). Because we have witnessed it, “It’s happening becomes as the rocks and the rivers,” as Varga says in the finale. But the questions left hanging in that final scene are shallow rivers, indeed.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikka...until-that-terrible-cliffhanger/#3db0ed504ed4
seems some hated the ending
seems some hated the ending
"Are you familiar with the Russian saying, ‘The past is unpredictable?’ Which of us can say with certainty what has occurred, actually occurred, and what is simply rumor, opinion, misinformation? We see what we believe, not the other way around.”
~VM Varga, Fargo Season 3
http://deadline.com/2017/06/fargo-season-3-finale-spoilers-noah-hawley-future-shows-1202117731/
Fargo’ EP Noah Hawley On Open-Ended Finale, Potential Season 4 & ‘Cat’s Cradle’
by Anthony D'Alessandro
June 21, 2017 8:15pm
SPOILER ALERT: This story contains details of tonight’s Fargo Season 3 finale.
Related
'Legion' EP Noah Hawley On Tonight's Finale, Season 2 & Patrick Stewart
“Please don’t tell people this is the end,” says Fargo series creator Noah Hawleyabout the recent news that there may never be another season of the FX show. “Right now, I just can’t point to (a production start) date on the calendar.”
Hawley is a busy guy. He’s currently breaking story on the second season of FX/Marvel’s Legion, which goes into production in September and lasts through the first quarter of next year. Then there’s two movies in line for him to direct: Fox Searchlight’s Reese Witherspoon female astronaut movie Pale Blue Dot and the feature adaptation of Hawley’s plane crash novel Before The Fall. And we haven’t even started talking about his limited series adaptation of the Kurt Vonnegut novel Cat’s Cradle for FX.
“I always agreed with FX that the only reason to do another Fargo is if the creative is there,” says Hawley, who at the moment is drawing a blank in regards to what Season 4 would center around.
“It took 15 months to get Season 2 off the ground, and 18 months to get Season 3 on the air. I have to turn my attention to the second season of Legion and a film potentially the winter after next. We’re looking at three years from now,” the EP about a rough timeline for a Fargo Season 4.
Hawley told audiences at the ATX Television Festival to enjoy tonight’s final hour of Fargo, “Somebody To Love,” which he wrote and Keith Gordon directed. Let’s just say tonight’s Season 3 ender had as much high-octane action as the Season 3 finale of HBO’s Boardwalk Empire, “Margate Sands,” in which Jack Huston’s half-faced Richard Harrow shoots up a whorehouse Tarantino-style to rescue his late best friend Jimmy Darmody’s orphaned son. On Fargo, we had Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s Nikki Swango (and Russell Harvard’s Mr. Wrench) raining bullets on those who physically beat her up a few episodes ago: the henchmen of David Thewelis’ V.M. Varga.
FX
At the onset of the episode, parking lot czar Emmit Stussy (Ewan McGregor) finds the confidence to stand up to the bully Varga, but he’s knocked out by his men. While Swango and Wrench clean up in an abandoned building, they send Varga packing. She then sets her sights on killing her late beau Ray’s killer, his brother Emmit. She finds Emmit broken down at the side of the road. “Are you as low as you can go?” she asks Emmit with the gun pointed at him.
Nikki’s death wish for Emmit is interrupted by a police officer who stops by. Nikki and the officer end in a quick draw which takes both their lives. Jump five years, Emmit, bankrupted by Varga, has reconciled with his wife and seems to have family life and his personal wealth on the round — that is until Wrench shows up and shoots Stussy in the back of the head. Three months later, we see that former Eden Valley police chief Gloria Burgle (Carrie Coon) has moved up in the world as a Homeland Security Officer. And she’s captured the guy we’ve all been waiting to go down: Varga. She tells Varga that three agents will enter the room and take him away to Rikers Island. Varga says that’s not so: He’ll be set free by Burgle’s supervisor.
FX
And so the Season 3 finale of Fargo ends in a complete standstill without a resolution, with a semi-half smile on Burgle’s face as the lights fade to black.
Hawley said it was always his intention to leave the ending open-ended for us to decide. Typically the tragedies in Fargo have happy endings: Marge gets in bed with her husband in the movie, Molly (Allison Tolman) gets to be police chief at the end of Season 1, and Patrick Wilson’s Lou Solverson takes his daughter (the younger Molly) fishing. But for Hawley, the cliffhanger ending tonight stems from “Our living in a complicated moment in time,” he says, referring to the President Donald Trump era.
“If I present you with a choice, you have to decide how that door is going to open and if it’s going to end well. It still has a happy ending if you’re an optimist. It just becomes a more active process. It’s an allegory to the conversation we’re having at this moment. How will we treat each other? Is it American carnage?” adds the EP.
But poor Nikki. Did she really have to die? “There was a degree of playing that by ear,” explains Hawley. “I wanted to save her, but I also didn’t want it to feel like a movie twist. At the end of the day, Fargo is a tragedy.”
FX
In regards to Emmit, he’s a standard Fargo archetype; the guy in the middle, a la Martin Freeman’s Lester or William H. Macy’s Jerry, who always has to choose between right and wrong. The accidental murder of Emmit’s criminal-like brother Ray (also portrayed by McGregor) early on urged viewers to have an ironic respect for Emmit. We only sympathize with him further as the underdog as he remains under Varga’s thumb. But with Nikki dead, Hawley relied on Mr. Wrench, a deaf henchman from Season 1, “as the final arbiter of justice. He’s not in their story, he’s an outsider, and he can dispense the cosmic justice that Nikki tried and failed.”
“There aren’t any real heroes and villains, especially if I can make you empathize with these people,” Hawley says of his storytelling technique. “It complicates the violence that’s going to come, and I don’t want people cheering for the violence.”
If tonight’s finalereflects our current fractured political society, Hawley will hopefully explore these issues further in a limited-series adaptation of Vonnegut’s 1963 satirical sci-fi novel Cat’s Cradle. The novel tells the story of a young writer’s quest to research the history of the atomic bomb, thus leading him through a bizarre political soap opera and apocalyptic showdown on the shores of a seedy Caribbean banana republic. Hawley says, “We’re negotiating an extra year on FX’s option of the book.”
At one point, Hawley was running among three writers rooms: Legion, Fargo and Cat’s Cradle. “The idea is to make seven to eight hours. I don’t have a timeline when Cat’s Cradle will happen because I need the scripts first. I worked with two writers over a couple of weeks to figure out how many hours we’re going to do. I need to put a filmmaker’s hat on and figure out what’s the most cinematic version is for this story,” says the EP. Hawley will go into production on one or both of his movies before Cat’s Cradle; Pale Blue Dot being the likely candidate due to Witherspoon’s schedule.
Until then, it’s all about Legion.
“It’s not easy to go back into that show; from the more grounded, more literal Fargo to the ‘everything-you-can-think-you-can-do’ Legion,” Hawley says.
“It’s hard to come up with the complexity of themes and how everything comes together and how it pays off,” says Hawley about building a perfect Fargo season.“You can’t mass produce this stuff.”
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Fargo’ EP Noah Hawley On Open-Ended Finale, Potential Season 4 & ‘Cat’s Cradle’
by Anthony D'Alessandro
June 21, 2017 8:15pm
SPOILER ALERT: This story contains details of tonight’s Fargo Season 3 finale.
Related
'Legion' EP Noah Hawley On Tonight's Finale, Season 2 & Patrick Stewart
“Please don’t tell people this is the end,” says Fargo series creator Noah Hawleyabout the recent news that there may never be another season of the FX show. “Right now, I just can’t point to (a production start) date on the calendar.”
Hawley is a busy guy. He’s currently breaking story on the second season of FX/Marvel’s Legion, which goes into production in September and lasts through the first quarter of next year. Then there’s two movies in line for him to direct: Fox Searchlight’s Reese Witherspoon female astronaut movie Pale Blue Dot and the feature adaptation of Hawley’s plane crash novel Before The Fall. And we haven’t even started talking about his limited series adaptation of the Kurt Vonnegut novel Cat’s Cradle for FX.
“I always agreed with FX that the only reason to do another Fargo is if the creative is there,” says Hawley, who at the moment is drawing a blank in regards to what Season 4 would center around.
“It took 15 months to get Season 2 off the ground, and 18 months to get Season 3 on the air. I have to turn my attention to the second season of Legion and a film potentially the winter after next. We’re looking at three years from now,” the EP about a rough timeline for a Fargo Season 4.
Hawley told audiences at the ATX Television Festival to enjoy tonight’s final hour of Fargo, “Somebody To Love,” which he wrote and Keith Gordon directed. Let’s just say tonight’s Season 3 ender had as much high-octane action as the Season 3 finale of HBO’s Boardwalk Empire, “Margate Sands,” in which Jack Huston’s half-faced Richard Harrow shoots up a whorehouse Tarantino-style to rescue his late best friend Jimmy Darmody’s orphaned son. On Fargo, we had Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s Nikki Swango (and Russell Harvard’s Mr. Wrench) raining bullets on those who physically beat her up a few episodes ago: the henchmen of David Thewelis’ V.M. Varga.
FX
At the onset of the episode, parking lot czar Emmit Stussy (Ewan McGregor) finds the confidence to stand up to the bully Varga, but he’s knocked out by his men. While Swango and Wrench clean up in an abandoned building, they send Varga packing. She then sets her sights on killing her late beau Ray’s killer, his brother Emmit. She finds Emmit broken down at the side of the road. “Are you as low as you can go?” she asks Emmit with the gun pointed at him.
Nikki’s death wish for Emmit is interrupted by a police officer who stops by. Nikki and the officer end in a quick draw which takes both their lives. Jump five years, Emmit, bankrupted by Varga, has reconciled with his wife and seems to have family life and his personal wealth on the round — that is until Wrench shows up and shoots Stussy in the back of the head. Three months later, we see that former Eden Valley police chief Gloria Burgle (Carrie Coon) has moved up in the world as a Homeland Security Officer. And she’s captured the guy we’ve all been waiting to go down: Varga. She tells Varga that three agents will enter the room and take him away to Rikers Island. Varga says that’s not so: He’ll be set free by Burgle’s supervisor.
FX
And so the Season 3 finale of Fargo ends in a complete standstill without a resolution, with a semi-half smile on Burgle’s face as the lights fade to black.
Hawley said it was always his intention to leave the ending open-ended for us to decide. Typically the tragedies in Fargo have happy endings: Marge gets in bed with her husband in the movie, Molly (Allison Tolman) gets to be police chief at the end of Season 1, and Patrick Wilson’s Lou Solverson takes his daughter (the younger Molly) fishing. But for Hawley, the cliffhanger ending tonight stems from “Our living in a complicated moment in time,” he says, referring to the President Donald Trump era.
“If I present you with a choice, you have to decide how that door is going to open and if it’s going to end well. It still has a happy ending if you’re an optimist. It just becomes a more active process. It’s an allegory to the conversation we’re having at this moment. How will we treat each other? Is it American carnage?” adds the EP.
But poor Nikki. Did she really have to die? “There was a degree of playing that by ear,” explains Hawley. “I wanted to save her, but I also didn’t want it to feel like a movie twist. At the end of the day, Fargo is a tragedy.”
FX
In regards to Emmit, he’s a standard Fargo archetype; the guy in the middle, a la Martin Freeman’s Lester or William H. Macy’s Jerry, who always has to choose between right and wrong. The accidental murder of Emmit’s criminal-like brother Ray (also portrayed by McGregor) early on urged viewers to have an ironic respect for Emmit. We only sympathize with him further as the underdog as he remains under Varga’s thumb. But with Nikki dead, Hawley relied on Mr. Wrench, a deaf henchman from Season 1, “as the final arbiter of justice. He’s not in their story, he’s an outsider, and he can dispense the cosmic justice that Nikki tried and failed.”
“There aren’t any real heroes and villains, especially if I can make you empathize with these people,” Hawley says of his storytelling technique. “It complicates the violence that’s going to come, and I don’t want people cheering for the violence.”
If tonight’s finalereflects our current fractured political society, Hawley will hopefully explore these issues further in a limited-series adaptation of Vonnegut’s 1963 satirical sci-fi novel Cat’s Cradle. The novel tells the story of a young writer’s quest to research the history of the atomic bomb, thus leading him through a bizarre political soap opera and apocalyptic showdown on the shores of a seedy Caribbean banana republic. Hawley says, “We’re negotiating an extra year on FX’s option of the book.”
At one point, Hawley was running among three writers rooms: Legion, Fargo and Cat’s Cradle. “The idea is to make seven to eight hours. I don’t have a timeline when Cat’s Cradle will happen because I need the scripts first. I worked with two writers over a couple of weeks to figure out how many hours we’re going to do. I need to put a filmmaker’s hat on and figure out what’s the most cinematic version is for this story,” says the EP. Hawley will go into production on one or both of his movies before Cat’s Cradle; Pale Blue Dot being the likely candidate due to Witherspoon’s schedule.
Until then, it’s all about Legion.
“It’s not easy to go back into that show; from the more grounded, more literal Fargo to the ‘everything-you-can-think-you-can-do’ Legion,” Hawley says.
“It’s hard to come up with the complexity of themes and how everything comes together and how it pays off,” says Hawley about building a perfect Fargo season.“You can’t mass produce this stuff.”
Subscribe to Deadline Breaking News Alerts and keep your inbox happy
https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikka...until-that-terrible-cliffhanger/#3db0ed504ed4
seems some hated the ending
The end reminds me of something totally different from this type of series. It reminds me of Deadwood (which ended prematurely) where the super rich guy gets humbled, but still gets to ride off into the sunset and leave behind everybody he fucked over.
I always hated that ending.
http://deadline.com/2017/06/fargo-season-3-finale-spoilers-noah-hawley-future-shows-1202117731/
*the ending was based on the Trump presidency?
And so the Season 3 finale of Fargo ends in a complete standstill without a resolution, with a semi-half smile on Burgle’s face as the lights fade to black.
Hawley said it was always his intention to leave the ending open-ended for us to decide. Typically the tragedies in Fargo have happy endings: Marge gets in bed with her husband in the movie, Molly (Allison Tolman) gets to be police chief at the end of Season 1, and Patrick Wilson’s Lou Solverson takes his daughter (the younger Molly) fishing. But for Hawley, the cliffhanger ending tonight stems from “Our living in a complicated moment in time,” he says, referring to the President Donald Trump era.
“If I present you with a choice, you have to decide how that door is going to open and if it’s going to end well. It still has a happy ending if you’re an optimist. It just becomes a more active process. It’s an allegory to the conversation we’re having at this moment. How will we treat each other? Is it American carnage?” adds the EP.
An Open Door
https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikka...until-that-terrible-cliffhanger/#3db0ed504ed4
"If I present you with a choice," show creator Noah Hawley told Deadline of the cliffhanger, "you have to decide how that door is going to open and if it’s going to end well. It still has a happy ending if you’re an optimist. It just becomes a more active process. It’s an allegory to the conversation we’re having at this moment. How will we treat each other? Is it American carnage?"
The decision to leave this open-ended was due to "Our living in a complicated moment in time,” according to Hawley, who is referencing the "post-truth" era under President Trump. And there are certainly many echoes of the Trump era in this season of the show. It largely comes down to Varga's statement at the top of this article: "We see what we believe, not the other way around.”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikka...until-that-terrible-cliffhanger/#3db0ed504ed4
"If I present you with a choice," show creator Noah Hawley told Deadline of the cliffhanger, "you have to decide how that door is going to open and if it’s going to end well. It still has a happy ending if you’re an optimist. It just becomes a more active process. It’s an allegory to the conversation we’re having at this moment. How will we treat each other? Is it American carnage?"
The decision to leave this open-ended was due to "Our living in a complicated moment in time,” according to Hawley, who is referencing the "post-truth" era under President Trump. And there are certainly many echoes of the Trump era in this season of the show. It largely comes down to Varga's statement at the top of this article: "We see what we believe, not the other way around.”
Am I the only who finds the lead cop fuckable,something about her find the bish sexy
At least Mary gave viewers a good look at her workout results
Kind of weird that the actress's last name is "Coon"
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At least Mary gave viewers a good look at her workout results
Kind of weird that the actress's last name is "Coon"
that white girl is VERY VERY proud of her new found booty!
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Enjoyed the finale. Always fun to read the discussion thread, and check out what reviewers/podcasters thought too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrie_Coon#Filmography
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrie_Coon
2014–2017 The Leftovers Nora Durst 23 episodes
2017 Fargo Gloria Burgle 10 episodes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrie_Coon
2014–2017 The Leftovers Nora Durst 23 episodes
2017 Fargo Gloria Burgle 10 episodes
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