I don’t know where this season of Fargo is going; I just know I feel like I’m in expert hands on the way there.
“Fargo” thoughts, Season Four, Episode Seven: “Lay Away”
STC on “Raised by Wolves” on Crazed by Wolves
I forgot to mention this, but I appeared on the Raised by Wolves podcast Crazed by Wolves to discuss the show’s wild first season. Enjoy!
“Fargo” thoughts, Season Four, Episode Six: “Camp Elegance”
I like art when it’s weirder than it needs to be. That historically has been one of the things I’ve liked best about Fargo: It’s weirder than it needs to be. Think of Lorne Malvo’s batshit extended flashback in Season One, or the prophetic dream soundtracked in part by Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” in Season Two, or V.M. Varga’s whole deal in Season Three. None of these things needed to be that way, but they were, because weirdness is where art lives.
Perhaps that’s why, in the least weird episode of Fargo Season Four to date, I keep thinking of the incredibly morose and shadowy birthday celebration (complete with creepy singing) that the Smutnys, fresh from the takeover of their family business by Loy Cannon, sing to their daughter Ethelrida. Happy birthday to you, kid! It’s really weird around here!
“The Third Day” thoughts, Season One, Episode Six: “Last Day – The Dark”
We’ll never know, and that’s the beauty of the thing. The Third Day is a show about the mysteries of faith that lets them remain mysterious. The point — aside from being scary, which the show frequently was — is to probe at our own feelings of exclusion and belonging, whether in a community or a family or both. What are we willing to sacrifice for that sense of belonging, and is it worth the sacrifice? The Third Day doesn’t answer that for us because it can’t. Only we know, and it’s up to us to tell our secrets; or to keep them until the day the world forces our hand.
I reviewed the finale of The Third Day for Vulture. This was really well-done folk horror, and Jude Law is tremendous.
STC on Crazed by Wolves
I appeared on the Crazed by Wolves podcast to discuss the first season of everyone’s new sci-fi fave Raised by Wolves—listen here or wherever you get your podcasts!
“Fargo” thoughts, Season Four, Episode Five: “The Birthplace of Civilization”
The first thing we should talk about when it comes to this week’s episode of Fargo (“The Birthplace of Civilization”) is the last thing that happens in it. As the lights flicker and fade around the dead body of Loy Cannon’s consigliere Doctor Senator, shot dead by Gaetano Fadda’s button man Constant Calamita, Jeff Russo’s grandiosely melancholy Fargo theme—absent from the entire season until now—comes roaring in on the soundtrack. It’s as if series creator and episode co-writer (with Francesca Sloane) Noah Hawley is sending us a signal: The real show is about to begin.
“Lovecraft Country” thoughts, Season One, Episode Ten: “Full Circle”
That “Sh-Boom” singalong is a solid stand-in for Lovecraft Country and its season finale, “Full Circle.” I see what they’re going for—in this case a moment of levity before the horror and desperation of the final battle sinks in. I get it, in theory. But the delivery is just a bit off: The smiles feel forced, the shared connection too neat, the scene too much of a scene instead of something that feels like it emerged organically from the characters involved. Similarly, I get what Lovecraft Country wants to do; I just don’t think it did it.
“The Third Day” thoughts, Season One, Episode Five: “Tuesday – The Daughter”
I’ve written before that Jude Law’s face is the real star of The Third Day. After tonight’s episode, it’s safe to say that Naomie Harris’s face shares top billing. Watch how director Philippa Lowthorpe’s camera holds a closeup as Harris’s character Helen learns that the baby she just delivered, for a woman she spent all night trying to locate and help, was fathered by her missing husband Sam—who’s still alive and well and living on the island of Osea, despite everything she’s heard to the contrary.
It’s subtle, but you can almost see the exact moment at which the tears of joy pooling in her eyes for the beauty of this mother-and-child tableau turn to tears of shock and sadness. You can just barely see her smile tighten, the love and happiness it connoted twisting around in her mind to betrayal and confusion and anger. But Helen has to keep it together, she has to maintain the serene and peaceful front. Even when Jess, the woman whose baby Helen helped bring into the world, tasks Helen with walking to the island’s “big house” and summoning Sam to see his new daughter, Helen doesn’t break. But you can see everything she’s holding back, written all over her face.
“Fargo” thoughts, Season Four, Episode Four: “The Pretend War”
This isn’t the first time Fargo the series has trafficked in the supernatural. Season Two was punctuated by alien vistations; Season Three gave us a character who was invisible to all electronic sensors, and another, played by Twin Peaks‘ Ray Wise, who can best be described as an avenging angel, meting out justice to the wicked. And there are precedents in the work of Joel and Ethan Coen, whose entire oeuvre is Fargo the TV show’s source material at least as much as Fargo the movie itself: Barton Fink, The Man Who Wasn’t There, The Hudsucker Proxy, and even The Big Lebowski—whose narrator, the Stranger played by Sam Elliott, shows up and interacts with the Dude before addressing the audience directly—all dabble in the paranormal, to name a few.
But neither the show nor the body of cinematic work that inspired it has, to my recollection, presented us with so pure a figure of horror as Mr. Snowman (played by Will Clinger, according to FX’s press notes on the season). With his blackened, frostbitten fingertips, his missing nose, his pale gray skin, and his ability to change the atmosphere surrounding him, he’s more like a White Walker or one of their wights than anything we’ve seen on the show before. Why series creator and episode co-writer (with Stefani Robinson) Noah Hawley decided to veer so hard and so far in a horror direction with this entity is a mystery, at least for now.
I reviewed last night’s episode of Fargo, which was a doozy, for Decider.
“Lovecraft Country” thoughts, Season One, Episode Nine: “Rewind 1921”
There’s something in the zeitgeist. 2020 has been…well, let’s say a difficult year, and now not one but two effects-heavy science-fantasy HBO shows have tapped into an antecedent for so much of the trouble we’re now in: the Tulsa Race Massacre, the violent slaughter of hundreds of Black people and the destruction of their prosperous town-within-a-town by white attackers in 1921. First Watchmen used it as a retconned origin story for Hooded Justice, the first masked vigilante in the show’s universe. Now, Lovecraft Country returns to the atrocity as part of a time-travel storyline. I wish I could say the journey was worth it.
I reviewed last night’s episode of Lovecraft Country for Decider.
“The Third Day” thoughts, Season One, Episode Four: “Monday – The Mother”
One thing that is clear? The Third Day has not missed a step despite the creative changeover. (Series co-creator Dennis Kelly remains aboard, it should be noted, co-writing the episode with Kit de Waal and Dean O’Loughlin.) The causeway is still an evocative visual signature for the show. John Dagleish’s Larry is still an intimidating heavy; somehow he’s even scarier being friendly than he is being surly. The Martins remain maddening and menacing despite their surface friendliness and their ability to explain away every weird thing that happens—your missing car? Stolen, not towed! The screaming woman? She’s gone into labor! The abandoned house with a fully equipped operating theater? It’s for the birth, since the woman refuses to go to the mainland! The frightening iconography you see everywhere you look? “We’ve had our customs for years,” says Mrs. Martin; “They ain’t pretty, but I’m not fucking apologizing for them.” See? There’s a too-perfectly logical explanation for everything!
I reviewed last night’s episode of The Third Day for Vulture. A fine start for the folk-horror series’ second half.
The Boiled Leather Audio Hour Episode 117!
Who taught Sansa and Arya Stark to do what they do? Stefan Sasse and I examine this question in the first part of our series on the teachers of Ice and Fire in the latest Boiled Leather Audio Hour episode—available here or wherever you get your podcasts!
“Lovecraft Country” thoughts, Season One, Episode Eight: “Jig-a-Bobo”
I don’t know. I just don’t know. Lovecraft Country used Emmett Till’s murder as an in-story plot motivator and I…I just don’t know.
I reviewed last night’s episode of Lovecraft Country for Decider. I really struggled with it.
“Fargo” thoughts, Season Four, Episode Three: “Raddoppiarlo”
I believe it was Chekhov who said that if you put an apple pie loaded with ipecac syrup on the table in the first act, you’d better use it to give a stickup artist uncontrollable vomiting and diarrhea in the second.
I reviewed last night’s eventful, scatalogical episode of Fargo for Decider.
“Raised by Wolves” thoughts, Season One, Episode Ten: “The Beginning”
Primarily, though, I’m grateful for a show that was so consistently surprising—the biggest surprise of all being that it was a good show in the first place. Raised by Wolves is the best American science-fiction show I’ve seen in years—asking big but not boring questions, using tried-and-true sci-fi devices in unexpected ways, constantly unfolding its dark mysteries before our eyes. With so little resolved in the finale, it is admittedly possible that the show will return for Season 2 only for us to discover it’s bitten off more than it can chew. But I’m all for a show that errs on the side of ambition. In that sense, Raised by Wolves‘s mission is accomplished.
I reviewed the wild season finale of Raised by Wolves for Decider. What an unexpected pleasure this show turned out to be.
“The Third Day” thoughts, Season One, Episode Three: “Sunday – The Ghost”
Moreover, what I said in my review of the series premiere remains true: Jude Law’s face alone tells the story. His pores are choked by dirt and grime. His temple is caked with blood, both dry and wet. His cheeks are streaked with tears for himself and, eventually, for his son. There’s something … I dunno, almost thrilling about seeing a handsome male actor subjected to the final-girl indignities of Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley in Aliens or Marilyn Burns’s Sally in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre or Florence Pugh’s Dani in Midsommar. To watch someone so beautiful be physically and emotionally broken down is like witnessing a human sacrifice of a sort.
“Lovecraft Country” thoughts, Season One, Episode Seven: “I Am”
Lovecraft Country, I’d now venture to say, is pretty good. Which is not to say I don’t have problems with it still. The CGI effects are still often shockingly poor—there’s an outrageously fake-looking digital blood-spread across a decapitated Confederate’s shirt that’s particularly egregious; meanwhile, imagine how much more impressive last week’s episode would have been if Ji-ah’s tentacular tails had been practical effects a la John Carpenter’s The Thing and weep for what might have been. And there’s an innate corniness to some of the proceedings, like the math equations superimposed over Hippolyta as she crunches the multidimensional numbers; how has this particular device survived years of ruthless memeification?
But it should hardly need saying that a mainline injection of Afrofuturism in the form of Seraphina and her world-warping technology—not to mention a Sun Ra voiceover describing Black people as living myths, or the massacre of the Confederacy’s protofascist infantry by Black women with swords—is something of a balm in these troubled times. Aunjanue Ellis, meanwhile, is expected to dance like Josephine Baker and swordfight like Wonder Woman in the space of a single episode, which she does with fearless aplomb.
I still don’t find Lovecraft Country scary, except insofar as it chronicles racist realities, rather than horrific fantasies; the two have yet to properly meld. But I do find it engaging, for three episodes in a row now. It’s a start.
I reviewed last night’s episode of Lovecraft Country for Decider.
“Fargo” thoughts, Season Four, Episode Two: “The Land of Taking and Killing”
Writer-director-creator Noah Hawley gets a lot of grief for reasons that don’t entirely make sense to me—look, I didn’t like Legion at all, but the dude’s not the devil—yet he has a knack for the little narrative filigrees that the almighty Coen Brothers weave into and out of their films, particularly the crime films with a darkly comedic edge. He also shares the Coens’ affinity for couples so odd it’s like they’re speaking a different language; cf. the Mutt-and-Jeff physicality of Gaetano and Josto, or the contrast between Gateano’s fiery youth and Doctor Senator’s smooth and serious experience, or Nurse Mayflower’s chatty but hard-edged relationship with the quietly sharp Ethelrida. And he’s certainly not above throwing in the occasional overt homage, like the cattle gun used by the slaughterhouse workers, a shoutout to Anton Chigurh’s modus operandi in No Country for Old Men.
But the Coen-ness of such details is just gravy, not the main course, which is the show’s deliberate pacing and slow ratcheting-up of stakes in anticipation of an eventual explosion. And language itself is often a pleasure on this show. Witness the brief exchange Loy Cannon and Rabbi Milligan have, when the latter tells the former he’s teaching his son that “dog eat dog” is the way the world works: “That’s how dogs work,” Cannon replies. “Men are more complicated.”
“Not in my experience,” Milligan counters.
Fargo feels like a roller coaster slowly cranking its way up an incline, waiting for the drop to come.
I reviewed the back half of Fargo‘s two-episode season premiere for Decider.
“Fargo” thoughts, Season Four, Episode One: “Welcome to the Alternate Economy”
Ah, that Fargo feeling. A chill in the air and in the blood. An assemblage of eccentrics, drawn together by someone’s elaborate criminal scheme. A sense of time and place that does more than provide context, but traps the characters in amber, allowing for dispassionate observation of the fate they’re unable to escape. A shootout between fact and fiction, fake and real, the stories we tell ourselves and the true stories that underlie them. And split screens—lots of split screens.
Last sighted during the opening months of the Trump regime—a regime it anticipated and echoed with its grotesquely greedy modern-day gangster V.M. Varga—and returning now for, god willing, that regime’s final days, Noah Hawley’s Fargo is back, baby. And for a show that has fallen in and out of critical vogue so fast you can feel a slight breeze, it seems blithely unconcerned with being anything but Noah Hawley’s Fargo. It’s a loving tribute to the crime films of Joel and Ethan Coen, writing a melody in their signature key while improvising notes all its own. I’m thrilled to have it back. Aren’t you?
I’m covering Fargo for Decider this season, starting with my review of its fine season premiere.
“Raised by Wolves” thoughts, Season One, Episode Nine: “Umbilical”
We’re deep in the weirdness now. The penultimate episode of Raised by Wolves‘ remarkable first season takes the show’s characters and the world they inhabit in increasingly strange directions. Body horror, splatstick comedy, visions of some unimagined past replete with mysteries—the austerity of the early episodes has been replaced by something far messier, but in its way, just as interesting.
I reviewed the penultimate episode of Raised by Wolves‘ first season for Decider.