'Fargo' Season 4: Nurse Oraetta Mayflower related to Season 1's Lorne Malvo? Their similarities are uncanny
Season 4 of Noah Hawley’s anthology series ‘Fargo’ has been a chaotic one. While season 2 had a tonne of characters as well, this season somehow feels crowded. That’s, however, not to say that this season does not have some outstanding characters. And one of them is Oraetta Mayflower (Jessie Buckley), the malevolent but sweet-talking Minnesota nurse.
Nurse Mayflower initially seems like the archetype of smiles on the outside and malice on the inside, but she is so much more than that. In fact, she is by popular consensus one of the scariest and dangerous characters this season. She kills patients she cares for -- sometimes through asphyxiation, sometimes through drugs. She is unafraid of everyone. She is all smiles, even when she poisons a completely harmless family with Ipecac in their pie. She is malevolent without a cause. And that makes her so dangerous.
In the Dungeons & Dragons Alignment graph, Nurse Mayflower would fall into the intersection of chaotic and evil. And this characterization alone reminds us of someone we have already seen in ‘Fargo’. Billy Bob Thornton’s Lorne Malvo from Season 1 was an assassin and a bounty hunter of sorts. He was polite to people but he was malicious and his eyes gave it away. He caused chaos for no reason, and he lacked any perceivable conscience. He killed without hesitation and messed around with people for some kind of sadistic pleasure.
Now ‘Fargo’ has a tendency to repeat archetypes in many seasons but the similarities between Malvo and Nurse Mayflower are a little too hard to ignore. Which begs the question: Are they related? And if they are, then how?
A Reddit user had a probable suggestion. They wrote, “Don't know if it's been said but- Oraetta Mayflower and Josto Fadda being Lorne Malvo's parents or grandparents? This theory is based on Josto saying 'Aces' in the first episode, and also the obviously malicious and chaotic nature of Loretta plus the angst and aggression of Josto.”
“Aces”, of course, became almost memetic in the aftermath of ‘Fargo’ Season 1 because Malvo, while impersonating a fun-loving dentist, kept saying that to give off the aura of a genial man. But just going by that to connect him to Josto is a bit too much even if he and Nurse Mayflower are having a fling.
But the Malvo-Nurse Mayflower connect is still a strong one, especially because some fans pointed out some rather striking similarities. One fan wrote on Reddit, “When Ethelrida opened Mayflower's closet and discovered poisons and saw a box/briefcase containing obituaries and souvenirs that hints at mayflower's many killings. Isn't that briefcase similar to Malvo's briefcase that contained his victims' audiotapes that he also used to carry around and check from time to time? It seems to me that both of these characters enjoy what they do and like to keep something from their victims.”
While keeping trophies of kills is not an uncommon trait among sociopathic serial killers, the similarity of the boxes does beg further intrigue into this idea. And more than anything, both characters feel inhumanly evil. They are demonic in their natures. But visible similarities can’t be enough in Noah Hawley’s universe. Things have to be more concrete.
At the same time, one has to wonder if this connection should ever be made real by Hawley at some point. Malvo’s charm lay in his mysterious background. No one knows where he’s from. No one knows why he does what he does. And that only adds to the evilness. Similarly, with Nurse Mayflower, the lack of any background details makes her action appear to exist in a vacuum. Which makes her more formidable. Connecting the two might just take something away from either. Or both.
'Fargo' Season 4's new episodes air every Sunday at 10 pm ET on FX and can be streamed on Hulu.