Once he was presented with Donald Woo and the carefully-placed samples of evidence, there was nothing else for Chief Dammik to do but book the ex-con and accept the gleeful back slaps from his colleagues. Recognising that most cops want a straightforward solution to a case, he provided one, means, motive and miscreant all.

His method for freeing Emmit from jail bore all the hallmarks of cleverness and audacity that we’ve come to expect from him. Not least because he is himself a rather clever man. It’s tempting to consider that this was all part of Varga’s calculations. Denied the opportunity to absolve himself, he’s more trapped now than he was when he handed himself in. For him, this absence of punishment is ‘punishment’. You don’t have to agree with him to sympathise.Įmmit was freed from jail and returned to the ‘custody’ of VM Varga in the manner of a man making the opposite journey to jail. That death was, strictly speaking, an accident. The constant, accusing presence of the Corvette, and Emmit’s traumatised response to seeing it after his brother’s death. The desperation of Ray to acquire the stamp and his insistence on the ‘justice’ of winning it back. Emmit’s testimony set several of the season’s previous events in a more emotional, biographical context. He even made Ray think it was his idea all along. Like a Minnesotan Prometheus, his original sin was cleverness preying on his tubby younger brother’s anxieties to convince him to take the Corvette in place of the far more valuable (and business-igniting) stamp collection. ‘I’d been killing him for thirty years,’ he says, weakly, ‘this was just when he fell’.

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