The creepiest thing is that this is basically just the honest version of the bullshit respectability politics kick he's been on for the past few decades. No wonder he's so into telling kids they should pull their pants up and not use AAVE — being "respectable" is what allowed him to get away with being a serial rapist…

That would certainly be an appropriate character type for our times, but I feel like part of the problem is that the writers are trying to have it both ways — on the one hand Varga is that loud, uncouth bully who preys on the average person's stupidity, cynicism, and greed, but on the other hand he's a shadowy elitist…

True, but the ending loses some of its power if the choice is not between cynicism and decency as much as between "Ugh, I don't buy that" and "OK, it does make sense if you look at it that way."

The only real connection i picked up on was Mr. Wrench, who was a member of the Fargo mafia.

"Marzipan, look — this is Dogface. I have a dog for a face. Like, not that I have a dog's head for a face, or that my head is a dog's head — like, my face is an entire dog. So, anyways, I was calling you ups 'cause I wanted to join your Dogface Club!"

I think the main reason I found this season less compelling than the first two is that I could never really get behind Varga as the villain. After season 1 set up a charismatic antagonist who purported to be some primal force of abstract evil only to be gunned down like an ordinary man, and season 2 established that…

I think the fact that the ending was a foregone conclusion was part of the point, though. It's the dark mirror of the "Chuck is patient and deliberate" / "Jimmy is impatient and reckless" dichotomy explored earlier in the season. Whereas earlier episodes showed how Jimmy was constantly fucking up by charging into one…

I'd only consider it an unrealistic expectation if no TV series ever met it, but the best series certainly have. Sometimes it's because the series was meticulously planned out in advance, but more often it's because the writers mastered the unique TV writing skill of crafting compelling new work that joins seamlessly…

Ugh, that fucking documentary. At one point I was willing to concede that regardless of Polanski's guilt or innocence, the film at least highlighted some disturbing misconduct on the part of the judge in the case. But then I realized how badly the film was putting its thumb on the scale for a fucking child rapist.

Yep, and it's a continuation of what he was doing with the Good Samaritan. He can make sure that poor guy's family finds out what happens to him, but he won't be able to dig up his own body if he gets disappeared. The only thing he can do is make sure his family gets the proceeds of the work that got him killed, so…

Anita's husband has been missing for eight years, so it's definitely not him. But it's still connected — when Anita was telling Mike about how awful it was to live with never knowing what happened to her husband, he realized that he couldn't let that happen to the Good Samaritan's family on his account, and that's why…

Kim took on the new client once she gave Howard the check but before Howard ripped it up, assuming that she'd need the extra money. After Howard insisted on forgiving the debt, she was prepared to quickly pawn the guy off on someone else, but then Jimmy started giving off weird vibes, so she got nervous about relying…

That's a tybo.

The missing P is for PYOPP.

To me, Minority Report is a fun, mind-bending sci-fi film but a pretty crappy action movie. It's the opposite of the Bourne series in a lot of ways: where the action in Bourne is stripped-down and ferocious, Minority Report is all silly, elaborate setpieces — jetpack chases, and your amputated eyeballs rolling down…

Agreed. I feel like the second-to-last season gets lumped in with the last when people talk about the show going off the rails, but I thought it was doing some great stuff that year, actually letting the characters develop in interesting new ways: Dan growing a conscience, Christine struggling with divorce and single…

It was a frustrating combination of not caring enough about character logic and caring too much about character relationships, so we got more and more focus on forbidden love and obsession and quests of revenge that made less and less sense. The Will/Hannibal pseudo-romance was the worst offender; it started out as…

Yeah, that definitely seemed to be his main concern, and I understand why he didn't want to go there. The problem is that he seems to have arrived at that decision fairly late in development, so you have scenes in the immediately previous episodes that make a point of Will's festering resentment toward Freddie that…

I guess I'm less apt than you to see those two views of the character as contradictory. Sure, Glover's Mr. World represents globalism and corporatism, but only in a very specific sense. He doesn't embody competition and innovation (that's more the Technical Kid), or brand identity and the reach of industry into…

It's definitely clearer in the book, and I can't say for sure that I would've immediately drawn the same conclusion if I weren't familiar with the source material, but I think the implication is still there. After all, this Mr. World represents all our worst fears about surveillance state at the very least,…