These Box Set deconstructions contain spoilers and should be read after you’ve watched the episode.
There was one unmistakable, overriding theme to “The Tender Trap” and it was this:
Things are about to get ugly.
The interpersonal wars are about to get inevitably bloody and violent but what writer and creator Noah Hawley did in this episode was very clearly mark Roy Tillman (Jon Hamm) as a man who must go down hard. The slap to his current wife and the photos of abuse to his former/current wife, Nadine/Dorothy (Juno Temple) that Lorraine (Jennifer Jason Leigh) witnessed — with a rare but notable look of humanity and empathy — means there can be no other way.
Roy said he thought he’d buried Nadine figuratively; thought he’d broken her like tons of other women in his past, but, he said, she’s someone that needs to be burned or suffocated. She’s hard to beat.
There is no shading in that writing. Plus Roy murdered a man.
Which, if you’re investing as much in Ole’s internal calculations as I am, makes his statement to Roy all the more meaningful, even if Roy thinks it means something else:
“When a man digs a grave he has to fill it. Otherwise it’s just a hole.”
Having paid “the bogeyman” off and, in his mind, rehired Ole, Roy probably thinks that metaphorical grave is for Nadine.
I’m not so sure.
After all: “Meat is meat.”
Ole (Sam Spruell) has a certain way with words (words he says he’s running out of — which possibly means he needs to do some more sin eating to stay alive — maybe for Lorraine?). To clueless Gator (Joe Keery), who has no idea of the enormity of the bear he’s poking, getting in Ole’s face is a way to feel good about himself after Roy, his father, thinks so poorly of him.
It doesn’t go well.
“You don’t yell at the boulder for being a rock,” Ole tells Gator.
I’m assuming the grave is big enough for two.
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