#fargo analysis

He was freshly blinded in a way that didnt even offer him vague light perception (on account of his eyes literally being gouged out) with no experience or tools on how to navigate with a disability like that, led to and dumped alone in a vast empty area with no landmarks to guide him and without being told where he was or if there was even anything around at all. He was unmoored, disoriented, in excruciating pain, struggling to walk straight and reeling from his whole purpose being swept out from under him moments ago and yet? Somehow steered himself right into a tiny VERY EASILY MISSABLE door that led him exactly where he needed to be to play his eventual essential part in taking down his father for good.

And Gator, as a character, we know is literally DEFINED by bad luck and failures. From the moment he's born he is branded as a flop by his father and spends ALL his screentime having his plans (all centered around being like his father of course) go awry. His already dismal odds are never stacked against him MORE than in the scene in field and somehow, in this moment he experiences the cosmic equivalent of finding a needle in a haystack. Like unfathomable levels of good luck, on the FIRST TRY. Not only that but it's quite literally the first time in the show something goes his way and it only happens the SECOND he stops trying to be Roy which i think is intentional and symbolic.

It's as if every time he made an effort to be what Roy wanted, the universe, through NOT letting him succeed, was telling him that this was not what he was meant to do and not who he was built to be. Because the second that dream shatters around him and his pursuit ends and he has no choice but to switch gears to the opposite, to actively rejecting and fighting AGAINST his father, do his efforts begin SUCCEEDING and he's cosmically rewarded with help in an impossible situation. A metaphorical light in his literal dark.

Really, there are so many cliches that spring to mind when you consider the character of Lester Nygaard in Fargo. Dead Man Walking. Dead Inside. Beaten and Broken. I can’t think of a character who has better embodied defeated. This is a man who listens to his wife systematically dismantle every aspect of his character and does nothing but smile into his soup. A man who still so desperately wants her approval he misses the social faus pax of describing graphic death to a couple expecting a child. A man so terrified by his demons that when forced to face the bully from high school, even though he’s in a public place surrounded by witnesses, he flinches away from a perceived blow so violently that he does Sam’s job for him and smashes his own nose into a window (and then self consciously lies about it to almost everyone that asks).

In fact, the only person he does open up to is a man he’s never met.  He doesn’t call his wife, or his brother, or anyone else when he winds up in the hospital. Sitting alone in the ER, Lester spills his heart to the only person who will listen, someone who doesn’t know him, because his experience is that those who do won’t care. It’s no wonder he falls prey to Lorne’s games; at this point he’s so damaged that he makes the perfect patsy. He get’s sucked in, even if it’s unintentional at first, and pushed until he reaches his breaking point.

And even the breaking point is pathetic! When Lester finally snaps, when his wife says “What you gonna do?” in that tone, and Lester has had enough, yet the outpouring of anger and rage is subdued to the extreme. Yes, he hits her over and over again, but while he’s doing it, there’s no screaming or cries of anguish; all he does is almost whisper, “Oh dear, I’m sorry” over and over again. It is his lack of emotion, his lack of willpower that makes this scene hard to watch, not the brutality of it. If not for the blood, you wouldn’t necessarily realize anything awful was happening. Lester’s emotion(less) breakdown is one of the most devastating parts of the show.