Fargo’s storytelling is crisp and beautiful
DAVID BASCKIN
is a ruined piece of junk, while the stamp collection is hugely valuable.
It follows that each of the brothers live different lives. One is rich and living large, the other a parole officer of extremely limited income.
Immediately, we assume that the rich stamp-owner brother is bad in some way, while the parole officer brother, occupant of the lowest professional rank in the Justice system, is good. What’s missing from this binary assessment is emotion based almost entirely on conflicting flavours of baroque resentment. There’s lots of chilli in the mix.
So far, so very good. With a palate like this, Fargo gives us characters of complexity, chaos and often unintentional humour. For me, it’s the chaos that wins every time.
The episode is laden with incident – a highlight of which is the deep desire, the overwhelming need of the parole officer to reclaim at least some of the bad deal he got from the will, so long ago.
The rich brother declines. Need turns to rage and rage festers. Contracting one of the helpless crooks on his parole case list, the parole officer bribes him to burgle his rich brother and steal the stamp collection.
The crook, stoned, stupid and prodigiously fractionated in all dimensions, fails to get this right. There’s a menacing stand-off with the parole officer (naked in a bath with his girlfriend, but this is truly a side issue), a gun is drawn, the crook demands payment and having threatened, leaves the little block of flats in which the bathing action already mentioned is taking place.
What follows is the violent elimination of the crook as he leaves the building, in a hit so surreal, so marvellous, so very very funny that one can only marvel at the imagination that planned, wrote and performed it.
Unusually, Fargo is a show that leaves this hack standing up in front his television set loudly clapping and shouting for more. Join me next week for episode 2…