The dashboard cam wouldn’t have done anything, if anything it would have hurt the case since all it would have done was capture the back of Malvo’s head. Malvo and “Peterson” dressed differently, “Peterson” had glasses, they spoke differently and they had different mannerisms. A grainy dashboard cam in low light with crappy audio probably would have helped show that the person Gus pulled over wasn’t the person he just arrested.
Come to think of it, the same thing happened with the photo that Molly gave them. They dismissed that as being him because it looked so different.
Oh Oh Oh, remember at the beginning of the thread I said they referenced another movie!!! I remember now!!! I knew I’d come up with it. The Usual Suspects. When they let Malvo go and he fixed his hair and got in the car, that was a direct reference to Verbal’s leg straightening out as Kobayashi picked him up (get over it, the movie is like 20 years old now). And like that…he’s gone.
BBT is the plumber - I’m pretty familiar with Glenn Howerton, so I recognized him every time. He’s the only person we’ve seen working with Malvo at all, albeit in several different costumes.
No, I think Glenn Howerton was the plumber, not Malvo/Billy Bob Thornton. ( I didn’t recognize Glenn Howerton as the plumber when I first watched the episode but watched it again yesterday for this reason.)
If it was Gus or Molly or someone who was suspicious of this guy, I would expect them to work harder to verify the alibi, doing something like you suggest and call the police chief, or look up the address of the church and who’s next to it and talk to the church neighbor.
But Gus doesn’t seem to be well respected in his precinct. People seem to think he’s the animal control guy since he’s filled in for them so many times. So to everyone else in the precinct, it just looks like this wannabe cop is either trying too hard to rise up in the precinct and get bigger cases, or is crazy and paranoid and arresting innocent citizens, or something else. And Frank Peterson doesn’t appear to be a dangerous crafty criminal who they need to work hard to prove his alibi is wrong, he just seems to be an innocent minister who was picked up by mistake. It doesn’t seem crazy at all that the cops didn’t work too hard at proving who Peterson/Malvo was.
Now of course Malvo couldn’t have known that for sure going in. I don’t think he could have known exactly how much Grimley is trusted, or if there were any real due-dilegence officers who would have worked harder to check “Frank Peterson’s” alibi. But Malvo has been shown to take other risks before that coulld have gotten him caught, but he’s skated by.
I don’t know why his fingerprints wouldn’t be in the system. It does seem like they should be. But like I said, he’s shown to have good luck and some sort of employer that helps facilitate alibis, it’s possible he’s been able to stay out of the system or clean up any times he’s been in the system.
Certain events are def in conflict with him being all that dumb.
NewChief certainly does seem to come up with pertinent questions very quickly. When Molly came to tell him she was going to drive to another town to sit in on the interview with Malvo, he quickly asked her, “Why did they phone you”?
He has done that sort of thing a few other times if memory serves me well. It’s not easy for a dummy to hone in on those kinds of questions.
But that brings me to something that has been bothering me for a while now. Many people here have been making excellent points about how realistic or unrealistic certain events have been. I think that this show if full of “dark humor” and as such, it just can’t be expected to be highly realistic.
Just consider BBT’s behavior when he was arrested. Several people have raised some good points about how certain things just don’t add up - like his fingerprints not being on the record. Well, I think that as this show goes forward, we will see lots more of stuff like that. The showrunner just seems to be willing to sacrifice a whole lot of realism in favor of dark humor.
It’s not like “The Americans” where I think the audience does indeed have the expectation of the facts to be realistic since that show deals with serious matters like espionage, murder and mayhem.
I’ve been on the fence about this show. I’m enjoying some of the performances, but I feel like they reach too far with some things and lay others on too thickly. The over-the-top Minnesota accents are quirky in a 2 hour movie, but they are getting old as the series goes on. The schtick with the signing is about the same (although not from the movie).
Note to the writer: I’ve never heard someone in the northern Mid-West use the term, “the cancer”. That’s a southern term in my experience.
I started a thread in the forum “About This Message Board” and I asked if it was necessary to have one thread for each episode and stated that I would prefer one thread for the entire show.
I did that because I accidently made a post into the wrong thread - the wrong episode.
Here is a link to that thread. If any of you would like to be heard on this issue, please feel free to express yourself here:
I’d prefer a separate thread for each episode, just pay attention to what thread you’re posting to and if you make a mistake just edit/delete your post or ask a mod to move it.
Certainly. But for whatever reason I can accept and chuckle at “Malvo drags a guy buy his tie all the way through an office building and out into the parking garage, and no one calls 911, and no one tries to stop him, and the security camera only catches him in profile”, but “two entire departments worth of cops are so ridiculously bad at their jobs that they don’t even notice that a suspect just stole one of their own officer’s glasses, and they do a worse job of checking his identity and alibi than I could do on Google in 15 minutes” rubbed me the wrong way.
He was a bit surprised by Grimley arresting him - when it started, he called his ride to pick him up in 2 hours. I do not think that aspect was planned.
I loved the part where he told Grimley that he (grimley) would be saying “you’re making a mistake”.
Him Messing with Grimley after the fact was just bonus.
That’s putting it mildly. He seems to be a joke there – they give him the dead dog calls. And yet, everything we’ve seen shows him to be a decent, conscientious guy, although not fearless.
And it’s really hard to believe they would keep him completely out of the process of questioning and then releasing Malvo. I mean, so what if someone managed to set up a phony ID for Malvo? The fact that he’s a preacher doesn’t make it impossible that he’s also a criminal.
I like this show, but it really helps not to think too hard about it, because some of the stuff is no more plausible than a goofy sitcom.
I understand the point of the phone call. But it’s also fairly obviously true that establishing a fake identity sufficient to withstand an even moderately determined attempt by professional law enforcement officers is extremely non-trivial.
As I said, what happens if the local chief of police calls up the chief of police in (whatever town the church is) and says “hey, I’m faxing over a picture of a man claiming to be a priest in your town… pretty sure he is who he says he is, but just making absolute sure here”. Even if we accept the premise that whoever was on the other end of the phone is an absolute expert in this kind of thing with tons of resources at his fingertips, there are any number of approaches which, should the cops choose to use them, would be nearly impossible to defeat. So sure they could set up a fake phone number for the fake church, and a fake website for the fake church, with photos of Rev. Peterson scattered all over them (I’m happy to ignore real life issues like how long it takes a new website’s DNS entries to propogate and so forth), but all of that depends on the cops being absolutely maximally predictable and lazy.
I’m not saying that no such plan could ever work. I’m saying that no such plan could be DEPENDED on to work. And that’s very different from previous instances of Malvo being nearly-supernaturally-confident. Suppose his confrontation with Gus had gone badly when he was initially stopped for speeding? Presumably he can kill Gus and leave. Suppose that while he’s traipsing confidently around in Stavros’s house, Stavros DOES turn the wrong way down the hall and finds him. He can likely talk his way out of it or kill Stavros or whatever. But once he’s handcuffed and in the middle of a police station, if the cop says “oh, yeah, my sister lives in this town, let me just make a quick phone call to her…”, then Malvo is either completely screwed, or needs to be able to summon up some Terminator-level ability to break out of handcuffs and elude dozens of cops, and will then instantly become the most wanted man in Minnesota, with his photo and fingerprints APB’d all over the place, which is clearly something he doesn’t want.
I guess I wanted him to do something really clever (but plausible) to get out of a seemingly inescapable situation, not just make a phone call to (effectively) a Wizard and depend on many implausibilities to pile up.
Malvo is The Devil incarnate. The only thing he has been wrong on or taken by surprise on so far is that Gus grew a spine and a conscience to do the right thing. Nothing short of supernatural could have allowed an leg breaker to drag the guy out by the tie through the whole office with no one stopping him. That is supernatural knowledge of the conscience of every sinner in the office in advance. I can think of no place I have ever worked where he wouldn’t have been stopped and cops called right away.
Lester’s conscience might not be eating him alive, but his festering wound soon will be. I’ve got to say he should have simply left that harpy years earlier.
