Fargo (spoilers)

Last night the first season of Fargo ended. I really, really enjoyed the show, despite several imperfections. In part because I'm such a Coen brothers fan, I found the whole thing inherently interesting. Possibly the best cinematography I've seen on TV.
But, to the complaints. The last episode had a structural flaw that left a bad taste in my mouth. The opening sequence where they say "This is a true story" went like this: Fade from black. The camera moves languidly along tread marks in the snow. Fade out. Fade back in. A toppled snowmobile. Fade out, fade in. A vast stretch of snow, dramatic, jagged mountains in the background. Fade out, fade in. There is a rough hole in the ice, large cracks radiate from all its sides. The camera descends toward the dark water of the hole and fades to black. When it fades back in, we find Lester Nygaard where we left him last episode, in a very different time and place from the ominous snowfield. What was that mysterious opening sequence? Then the events of the episode happen, blah blah, Lester fights with Malvo and survives, Malvo is killed by Gus, and Molly hears the tape of when Lester called Malvo, which means she finally has him dead to rights. Show's basically over. Slowly fade to the indistinct blue-white of snowy ground, and, what's that sound? A whining motor. The camera pans up from the ground and hurtles along from the perspective of a speeding snowmobile. A title tells us we're in Glacier Park, Montana, two weeks later. Cut to: Lester on the snowmobile.
Goodbye all tension or surprise regarding the conclusion of the show and the fate of the main character. I watched the following two minutes not in a state of thoughtful and emotional engagement, but with frustration and disappointment. The problem is this: Lester is not an interesting character. We don't care about him, nor are we supposed to, except with a kind of detached curiosity. Because of his sins (and the fate of his alter ego Jerry Lundegaard in the movie), punishment is a foregone conclusion, death being the most obvious possibility. So the fact that he dies carries no weight in itself. At best, the way he dies could end the show with a bizarre or ironic commentary; but all thought was stultified by the spoiler opening. With no thought and no emotion, what you have is a flat ending to an otherwise great show.
The technique of spoiling the end is not an inherently bad one, but it requires a situation with more emotional involvement. Imagine this: the show begins the same way, with the cryptic sequence of snowmobile and hole in ice. The episode plays out. Fade to white snow, sound of snowmobile, camera hurtles through Glacier Park. Cut to: Molly on the snowmobile. What? No! That can't be! We saw the crashed snowmobile already, the person-sized hole in the ice...is Molly going to die? No! Now, whatever happens, we watch it rapt, saying no no no! This works because we like Molly and we can't believe she dies until we see it.
Even a similar thing would work if the character who died wasn't a good guy and their death wasn't tragic in the moral sense. Consider the death of Gus in Breaking Bad. Gus was the enemy and had to die. Yet Gus was such a fantastic character that you could basically spoil the fact of his death and it served to engage the audience even more. As Gus walked from his car to the retirement home to meet Hector, he was filmed in slow-motion, close-ups, to music appropriate for a climatic Western gunfight. That sequence was nothing except a goodbye to a character we love, not because he's good but because he's a great character. We didn't know for certain, plotwise, how things would turn out for him, but with that cinematic salvo as he literally did nothing but walk into a retirement home, we knew.
I have more to say about Fargo. I'll try to come back and say some good things about it.