“Here We Go Again, Don’tcha Know?” FARGO Episode 1 Review- ‘The Crocodile’s Dilemma’

These opening paragraphs are safe from spoilers. A bright, blinking warning will arise before I do anything that will make any of you hate me.

There’s a poster on the wall of down-on-his-luck insurance salesman Lester Nygaard’s basement in FX’s new miniseries Fargo, obviously based off of the amazing movie of the same name. It’s a cookie cutter inspirational poster depicting a school of yellow fish swimming in one direction, and a single red fish in the middle swimming the opposite way. In bold type it says, “What If You’re Right, and They’re Wrong?” It’s exactly the sort of thing you’d find on the walls of a third grade classroom, next to a gorilla who tells you to read books and beneath the banner of cursive letters that stretches across the top of the classroom that you’d study religiously for weeks only to never use again. Lester (Martin Freeman in a damn fine performance) desperately wants to be the red fish, even if he is anything but. He wants the entire world that continues to beat him down to wake up to the fact that he is the red fish, who has been doing everything right. But he’s just another yellow fish that isn’t very good at anything.