Noah Hawley talks tonight’s motel massacre and that jaw-dropping moment.
Warning:This post contains spoilers about Monday’s ninth episode ofFargo.
Tonight’s episode, “The Castle,” paid off both running story threads, rather spectacularly.
Credit: FX
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY:You’ve been teasing “The Massacre at Sioux Falls” since season one.
Part of the fun of figuring out the second year was deciding when that was going to happen.
We wanted to do it in an organic way that would bring these characters into collision.
He’s just phenomenal in the role.
He owns the screen without ever saying that much.
I’m very attracted to the idea of unpredictability.
I knew from the first day of shooting with him that he was bringing something extraordinary to the role.
It was always envisioned being a fun role.
I told Bokeem that Mike is the one character who knows what movie he’s in.
There’s a little bit of Malvo in him that way.
I had hoped the audience would spark to him the way they did.
Everybody rose to the occasion.
Did you always intend on keeping Milligan around through the finale or did that shift?
I didfor reasons that will become clear when you see the finale.
One of the things I’m attracted to is creating empathy for all the characters.
I don’t think violence should ever be fun.
What can you tell us about the cold open with the book of true crime?
And that narrator somebody we know?
Yeah, it’sMartin Freeman.
Was him killing Dodd premeditated?
When did he decide to turn on the rest of the family?
Anton Chigurh was easier to understand because he was after the money.
This is a little more complicated because it requires Hanzee to bite the hand that feeds him.
That was something that occurred to me while prepping to shoot this hour.
They were all children once, and this is how it ends.
Her abrupt line in the car, “I miss them all,” was heartbreaking despite her sins.
In this case, it’s nobody’s fault but their own.
It’s the problem with the desire for conquest.
None of those people ever get to grow old.
He was surprisingly looking pretty clear-eyed in that last scene despite his gunshot wound.
Is he out of the woods or should we be worried about him?
He’s not dead yet.
And look, if Jon Snow could be alive, I wouldn’t rule anything out.
The only reason to kill him would be if it’s important to the story.
We’re not cruel people.
Next: Yes, this next page is pretty much all about the UFO.
You finally paid off the UFO teases with, yes, a massive hovering UFO.
What are you prepared to tell us about this?
Noah Hawley: I haven’t prepared anything.
There are going to be people who will smack the TV and go, “Come on!”
and that’s a great reaction.
Everybody is entitled to their reaction.
I haven’t seen or heard any of the responses yet, so I’d be responding to phantoms.
There’s a couple things that felt right about it.
There was aMinnesota UFO encounter[in 1979] involving a state trooper.
It was certainly in the air at the time.
And I thought it was funny.
But obviously, it affects the story in a very real way.
It’s not just a background element.
I’m just picturing you in the writer’s room at some point going: “You know what?
Nobody expectedFargoto be about any of those things in the second year.
The Zapruder film captured the JFK assassination, and we still don’t know what happened.
What was FX’s reaction?
Nobody said, “Don’t do it.”
Look, there was a lot of conversation as we were prepping to shoot.
“Can we see some pre-visualization?
What’s really going on with the UFO?
Is itreallya UFO or is it a weather balloon?”
So going into that, they find that balloon in the second hour.
My feeling was always, “No, it’s a UFO.
It is what it is.”
We put a lot of references to it, maybe too many references.
But it pays off, obviously.
I worried about him, and then this happened.
Then afterward you have Peggy (Kirsten Dunst) with that great dismissive line.
It’s almost like you don’t know how to feel and need to process it.
I like your “I don’t know, I need to think about it” reaction.
So much storytelling, especially on television, is a spoon-fed experience with clarity of all things.
I think those elements in a story are really exciting because we’re so unused to having them.
We usually separate our genres more neatly.
To suddenly have a genre element come into a dramatic story is exciting.
What do you want to say about next week’s finale?
I really don’t want to give anything away.
We have Peggy out there, Hanzee in pursuit, and Lou after them.
And how are we going to wrap it up, and what’s the takeaway going to be?
We can’t repeat ourselves, but I’d like to be somebody who’s good at ending things.
I seeFargoas a tragedy with a happy ending, and those elements have to be there.
And just because that the story is over doesn’t mean these characters aren’t still going on.
Check out Kevin Sullivan’s recap of the episodehere.
