I didn’t quite understand why the trooper showed up at the ranch by himself. Especially if he has probable cause. Bring some backup, dammit! Then he sends the poor lawyer out there to do… what? You could pretty much see that it wasn’t going to end well.
Because, unlike the otherwise brilliant Danish Graves, we knew that Sheriff Tillman is a true believer who will act even against his own best interests to satisfy his warped worldview. A rational man would have taken Graves’s offer.
It makes me think of a Khan quite from King of the Hill: “In my experience a lot of people say that they are going to hit you, but not many actually do it.”. It may be pretty normal to threaten people, but you don’t find many people very quickly and casually elevating to murder.
Yeah, Graves is used to dealing with very different people than Roy.
BTW, I wondered about the handwritten ledger in the opening. It seemed odd that Lorraine, who supposedly operates a huge debt collection business, would keep records in a paper ledger like that, or that it would include the heights and weights of the people listed. Or was the ledger something that Danish Graves kept for other purposes?
I wondered that, too.
It took me longer than it should have to realize the ledger was used to find the fake Roys/get them to change their name/be candidates - they do that, Danish erases their debt.
Maybe it was Danish’s “off the books” type debt ledger specifically for those types of quid pro quo uses? Meaning, many people owe debt and are kept in the normal system, but these specific debtors can be called up for some dirty work and we don’t want that in our system.
I figured that ‘book’ is more story friendly than him using his computer to do the same thing.
Makes sense to me.
That was my take as well. This isn’t real life, it’s the Coenverse, where a hall of mirrors that would make Rey Skywalker blush can be created on stage at a debate for county Sheriff on mere hours notice (the whole season has spanned, what, a couple days? A week at most?).
I mean, how are you even going to get those guys on the ballot in time, let alone on stage for the debate. And are we to believe that, but for those alt-Roys, there was a debate scheduled with just Sheriff Roy and no one else scheduled to be on stage?
It doesn’t make any sense, except thematically (and frankly, even there I think it’s a bit weak—the line of Roys on stage, I mean).
It was kind of funny that a guy named Danish Graves was applying to the court for a name change…for other people.
There was a non-Roy on the far left of the stage.
What, the woman asking questions?
ETA: Found a screencap. You’re right!
And those three randoms being able to pull of that farce so well. It made me laugh though
I imagined all three pausing to slug the moderator on their way out.
You know, something just occurred to me. We’ve seen Wizard of Oz referenced in a Coen brothers film before. And it’s a film that, thus far, I don’t think has been touched on much by the series: O Brother, Where Art Thou?. Specifically, the scene where they have to rescue Tommy from the KKK. It’s a clear reference to the scene where Tin Man, Cowardly Lion, and Scarecrow beat up a trio of the witch’s castle guards, take their clothes, and impersonate them to enter the castle. Right down to the marching and the chanting:
Compared with:
That film is very very clearly based upon Odysseus. Not WoO. Even the filmmakers said so. He is the cyclops.
So a few things:
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Is the line “if you’re so clever why are you dead?” a line from another movie, a famous on? It sounds very familiar.
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Perhaps confirmation, or indeed, indication, that Dottie was not only in a dream, perhaps she was in a near death experience in a crashed car somewhere by the road, by the statement that Roy buried Linda. Of course, he is delusional, so perhaps he’s lying, and it’s a lie he’s told himself and believes.
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Why isn’t the FBI surrounding that ranch, with confirmation from a state trooper of a kidnapping? Fargo world, I guess.
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Third wife definitely seems jealous/broken/scared of what comes next if Dottie is back.
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I thought Dottie had Roy when on his back and the chain was stopping him smashing her against the wall, except the breaking of the chain seems unlikely…
In the ride back to the ranch from the debate, the way they kept showing the wife and daughters and then Roy’s angry face, plus the wife talking about the “curse,” I half expected Roy to kill her and the daughters. I figured that in his mind, Dot was the legit wife, and the new wife and kids were the fruits of his “sin,” and had to be eliminated. They were the real curse now.
My take is that the Trooper in his heart believes it’s a kidnapping, but that’s the extent of anything factual re: kidnapping. Dottie said she was going on her own free will, and there was nothing else to indicate to the Trooper it was actually a reportable kidnapping crime. Thus, no probable cause to get a warrant, bring back-up, inform the FBI to do the same, etc. A hunch is not enough. Again, just my read of it.
All the Trooper could do was drive to the ranch and ask to see Dottie**, and then later, by happenstance, to let the lawyer know about it at the gas station.
**The shot at the cop car at the ranch gates probably escalates this in some way in the real world.
The FBI doesnt want any more confrontations with a bunch of heavily armed assholes in a compound. And the state trooper cant even say it was a kidnapping for sure. Just that he thinks it was.