Thanks.
We’re three days away from the end of the season, and I’m fascinated by the question of where showrunner Noah Hawley is going with this.
The movie that inspired the series was “about” (speaking only of my own opinion, of course) a man who turned out to be a very, very bad man, but who hadn’t been a professional bad man, so to speak. He decided to purchase a murder to solve his money problems (which had arisen through what you might call bad conduct), but he wasn’t a hitman himself. The hitmen he hired were certainly bad people, but they were also sort of…bumblers.
In the series, we have, again, a man who’d been living fairly quietly–though like Jerry from the movie, Lester was probably never what you’d call a good person. Both characters are, essentially solipsists. They don’t have any genuine feeling for anyone but themselves.
Lester gets to go a lot further in Being Bad than did Jerry–through the temptations provided him by his story’s hitman. This hitman differs from the focused-on-the-moment bad guys of the movie; he actually puts himself out in order to cause pain in others, which he clearly relishes. And he seems to take an interest in Lester that verges on the unnatural.
An example of what I mean: the instant that Lester put himself on Malvo’s hitlist–the moment in the elevator when Lester wouldn’t back down–is the same moment that Malvo could have checked off that very list-item. Bam! But Malvo chose not to do that. He chose to give Lester the chance to damn himself further by offering the wife as decoy.
What I’m getting at is that the Malvo character threatens to overshadow what I take to be the theme of both movie and television series: the choices we make, to be selfish and murderous (Jerry and Lester), or to be connected to people, as part of the community and its justice (Marge and Molly). Even if Malvo is ultimately explained as a person (rather than as a supernatural entity), his gleeful sadism…doesn’t seem to fit.
But maybe Hawley will surprise me and in the end it will all seem to fit. Either way, I can hardly wait until Tuesday night!
You might want to join the discussion we’re having in the E9 thread 
Heh. Yes, if I’d realized within the statutory five minutes that I’d posted in the wrong thread, I’ve had wiped that post clear and pasted it into E9. My face is red! (My excuse is that I’ve been away and keeping unusual hours, and brain no worky.)
MODERATOR COMMENT: If you want to repost in the E9 thread, please do so. No prob. We usually don’t like posting the same thing in different spots, but this is an exception for which you have my Moderator Permish.
Steve Buscemi buried the money on his way from Minneapolis to Brainerd (which isn’t too far to the NW). Most of the actual outdoor filming took place around Hallock, MN in the far NW corner of the state due to the need for snow.
There’s web pages devoted to the actual location where the original money was buried, but I can’t find them since: A. The TV series floods the hits B. Google has horribly destroyed their search function in Opera. I can no longer limit searches to older pages.:mad: (Did a search in Firefox, even with being able to do a range search, no luck.)
IIRC, the King was traveling north from Duluth to rendezvous with his son, which would have taken him well away from Brainerd.
And, yeah, that was a table of [del]hookers[/del] escorts.
Carl and Gaear were hired by Jerry to kidnap Jean, not kill her. Jerry planned to give the kidnappers $80,000 of the $1 million ransom and keep the rest. Gaear killing Jean was not part of the plan.
You’re right, but at the same time Jerry knew he was hiring criminals who might not necessarily confine themselves to kidnapping. After all, if the wife lived, she might present a danger to Jerry (for all he knew, the criminals could have let slip some piece of information that would have told her who it was that hired them).
Her safety was scarcely uppermost in Jerry’s mind.
That is kind of you*; I’ll do so!
or perhaps I should say ‘that’s yar’…