Some Thoughts on Lilyhammer

I only have time for the briefest of posts. My wife arrived home last night around 12:40 a.m., and although she did go out on errands a couple of times today, she did not have to work, and so she has been largely home.

In other words, I have had limited blogging time.

I don't think there is any trace now of the bit of snow that fell yesterday.

My younger brother was expecting one of the guys he sometimes drinks with to come by midday or so to check out the roof of our backyard toolshed ─ it recently sprang a leak. Apparently this guy suggested he could repair it for a couple of hundred dollars or so.

But although I sat with my brother from just after 10 a.m. until 2 p.m. watching T.V., the guy never showed up. But at least we finally watched the final two episodes of Lilyhammer. 

We liked the series, but the main Mob character as played by Steven Van Zandt seemed to take a considerably heavier turn. I think everyone always knew that the guy was essentially a hardened criminal, but he seemed to have a reasonably good heart. He did not indiscriminately hurt people. 

Yet in those two final episodes we saw him lead his gang to brutally beat an innocent man because his main henchman, bumbling Torgeir, misidentified the victim's car as being the one to have killed the father (a hit-and-run accident) of Frank-the-gangster's former Norwegian sweetheart Sigrid (with whom he had twins, I believe). 

It seems that Torgeir is colourblind and could not tell that the car he believed to have been the killing machine was actually red and not green like the model he was supposed to be looking for.

So they badly put the boots to a rather small, innocent man, leaving him lying motionless on the ground before it was realized that his car was red and not green.

I expect that from there the gang just took off and never made any attempts at reparation with the poor soul they badly kicked and beat into unconsciousness or even worse.

Then toward the end of the final episode, Frank-the-gangster has his 'boys' kill sex addict Jan, who was really quite disgusting. I can't say that it was any kind of loss, but it was still an execution / murder that Frank ordered and then left his men to commit. 

That was not the Frank of earlier episodes. He would never have laid that kind of deadly responsibility upon his crew.

One of the final scenes of that last episode was of Torgeir ─ who was prone to delusions as a result of a cerebral blood clot, and who had gone away with his pregnant girlfriend to try their hands at being alpaca farmers ─ having a 'vision' of some grey-haired guy reading something aloud. 

I think the actor playing the grey-haired person in the delusion was Alan Ford, but I remember nothing of the character he played earlier in the series (someone known as 'Uncle Terry').

Torgeir's previous 'visions' had always been of a sleazy and extremely violent English gangster played by the same actor (Paul Kaye) who was the kooky wizard in the T.V. series Zapped. (My brother and I also remember the actor as having had a role in Game of Thrones where he was also far less comedic than he was in Zapped.)  

But we have no idea why this last figment of Torgeir's blood-clotted brain would suddenly be cropping up or materializing into Torgeir's imagination.

A lot was left hanging in the finale that had no explanation as to outcome. Things like this tend to detract from a series overall, but obviously it was not the fault of those involved in producing it. They all did not just decide to drop everything and quit the series.

I've got to stop for today ─ I am out of time.