The year is ending and dozens of listings are added with the filters of the best of the last 12 months, among them, the best series arrive especially saturated and it ends up being impossible to check all of them for sure. Series premieres are counted by the dozen and in some cases the quality is increasing. However, this year, the magisterial season 4 by ‘Fargo’ (available at Movistar) it has disappeared amid a tsunami of launches.
Although there was already an analysis of the first impressions of it in Espinof, it is necessary to focus our attention on the brilliant final section of the series, and not only how it rounds all the edges and closes the plot with solutions full of ingenuity, but also on the spectacular episode 9.
SPOILERS del episodio y del final de la temporada
Secret origin story
Even if ‘East / West‘It is not the beginning of the third act of the series, whose starting point can be established in the also spectacular episode 8, it does mean a very important point to locate the true dimension of the season and properly direct its meaning. Although this, of course, we will not know even until the last minutes of the final chapter, after the first credits, which give meaning to everything previously seen.
We are not going to talk about the emptiness of this season of ‘Fargo’ in the cultural conversation, or if others deserve it less or more, but it is important to point out that the assessment of this particular story is somewhat unfair without having reached its coda , because it can only be seen as a whole, as a unit from beginning to end, and it is in those final moments that we realize that Satchel is Mike Milligan, the charismatic criminal from season 2 of Noah Hawley’s series.
This detail, which many could have guessed thanks to the online debate, clarifies many things that have been dancing in the series. On the one hand, it seems that it is about his father, Loy Cannon, but going back to the first minutes of the first episode, we know that in that tradition of interchange of roles where Rabbi is the protagonist, it now ends in Satchel, and indeed, The whole story is told to us from his memory, it does not even go from Ethelrida.
The best TV hour of 2020
That is why ‘East / West’ is a key episode, because it vertebrates and serves as a key point for the later development of the child, all the details that seem unimportant are building a personality that we already know, that we have seen in season 2 .
And for this he raises a great parallel with ‘The Wizard of Oz’, a fantastic film of an ideal rite of passage to tell how Satchel lives her transformation into a key location for the series, Kansas. And this brings us to that ominous storm that heralds disaster in the open plan of Rabbi’s car, to that shooting in the storm, that hurricane in the background.
Season 4 has had details of ‘The Untouchables’ from Horror noire, from ‘Misery’, from ‘Death among the flowers’ … but the East / West parallel with ‘The Wizard of Oz’ is a tribute full of hidden references, from black and white, the puppy, the dead with the feet like those of the witch, to the characters of the hotel. But the episode goes further to the shooting sequence, the staging of which sums up all the character of classical tragedy that permeates the FX series.
Full of class details, like that reflection of the end of Calamita in the glass of the shop window, subtly placed in front of the many elements of the choreography.
‘East / West’ isn’t the only display of obscene precision from season 4. All episodes have mind-blowing visual taste, a cinematic look other series mistake for lens filters. But its true beauty is not only aesthetic, but how it uses the baggage of the series so that it takes on a new meaning when you see it again.
Continuing the parallels with Oz, the fortune teller Dorothy encounters while on the run is replaced here by a billboard that reads “The Future is Now“which takes on a deeper and more ominous meaning at the end of the season. A television masterpiece which is also relevant in 2020 for many other reasons.