Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

Cast: Billy Bob Thornton, Allison Tolman, Colin Hanks, Martin Freeman, Bob Odenkirk, Keith Carradine, Joey King, Susan Park, Gary Valentine, Keegan-Michael Key, Jordan Peele, Chantel Perron, Andrew Neil McKenzie, Amanda Guenther.

There is always one television series that stands out each year and Fargo could well be it for 2014. If they never make another series then the writer, the Coen brothers and the actors who have been associated with this terrific endeavour will have more than amply done their jobs.

The final episode of Fargo, Morton’s Fork, revealed as much as there was to reveal, with the extra delicious caveat of not telling the viewer the answer to the riddle set by Lorne Malvo to Gus Grimly all the way back in episode one. Some answers never really need explaining though, not truly and not if you can work out the clue for yourself. What was revealed was the fact that when it all boiled down to it, Lorne Malvo was just a man, an extraordinary and boundlessly manipulative man but none the less a man who can bleed when a trap is set, who can bust a leg and who can be shot.

Lester Nygaard on the other hand, can run and run, has learned the art of manipulation and deceit but in an ending worthy of being pulled down to Hell to join Lorne Malvo, it seems he has go through water first to get there, in the end for all that he has learnt it still comes down the very basic mistake, if you deal with the Devil, make sure he isn’t taping the conversation first.

This excellent series would arguably have been possibly underwhelming without its two lead men, the sublime Billy Bob Thornton and the craft of British actor Martin Freeman but it also would have suffered with many of its surrounding players such as the divine Allison Tolman as Molly Solverson, who has carries the drama for large chunks of the ten episodes, Colin Hanks as her fellow police officer and later husband Gus Grimly and Bob Odenkirk as Chief of Police Bill Oswalt. This incredible story which has had viewers gripped since the opening moments of episode one has been a creative high as it has shown that the art of adapting a complex plot from a major film can be carried off with aplomb.

So many times that the two genres cross over and are left as lacking as a one armed man looking for his wife’s killer that at points you wonder what you let your life in for entrusting many hours of your life in, not Fargo, not Lorne Malvo and Lester Nygaard, genius from start to finish.

Ian D. Hall