Fargo, The Muddy Road. Television Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 81/2/10

Cast: Billy Bob Thornton, Martin Freeman, Allison Tolman, Colin Hanks, Bob Odenkirk, Oliver Platt, Keith Carradine, Kate Walsh, Joshua Close, Adam Goldberg, Russell Harvard, Glen Howerton, Joey King, Tom Musgrave, Susan Park, Barry Flatman, Peter Brietmayer.

It is the ethos of those who perhaps understand Human behaviour better than the rest of us, who say with certain straight melancholy, that the so called Zombie Apocalypse surely wouldn’t be any worse than what we deal with now. They have a point when the devilish Lorne Malvo can be both cruelly charming and disarmingly brutal, an individual who surely would draw inspiration from the evil spirits that fester alongside and within Christopher Marlow’s Faustus.

A man who gets results and possibly a certain degree of sadistic glee by, not just bending the rules of his profession, but by getting out a laptop, rewriting the rules and then locking the old rules in trunk and letting them freeze to death in the American Mid-West winter.

As a viewer you cannot help but be drawn to Lorne Malvo, played by Billy Bob Thornton, his actions in this episode alone make him one of television’s greatest proficient and possibly genius like psychopaths. The latest episode of Fargo, The Muddy Road, delves more into the man behind the good one liners and disturbing social charm and draws a greater line around the relationship between a man who is happy enough to kill a dog as he is to entertain himself by taking over a blackmail scam and the man whose life he irrevocably changed and the police woman, played by Allison Tolman who is being just as underhand and sneaky in her trap laying. The rules of decency are bent, misshaped and forced into positions that anybody who bumps in Lorne Malvo might find themselves being corrupted by the faintest presence of the man.

The Muddy Road less travelled is one that Lester Nygaard, Martin Freeman, is becoming very accustomed to and whilst dealing with his own inner demon that he let loose in a moment on which the worm didn’t just turn, he picked up a hammer and beat the mole to death with; he is finding more reasons in which to let the evil live a little, especially if it means self-preservation at the outside forces aiming to take him down.

Perhaps shadowing the events in the film Blue Ruin that was released this last week, watching a rather meek, somewhat timid man turn slowly into someone, who through tough circumstances, start to embrace the American gun culture that is far too prevalent for many to understand; is a shocking indictment on the way to solve a problem. The final few seconds of the episode were of one in which the squeeze of the trigger echoed Roger Water’s question in Amused To Death, “Old man, what you going to kill next?” A scene so powerful and in one that really encapsulates the title of the episode! Not just a muddy road it seems but a murky one and one that Lester Nygaard is wading too far out of his depth too.

Fargo continues next Sunday.

Ian D. Hall