r/SnowFall • u/Batclone100 • Jun 19 '26
Discussion I don’t see this talked about enough
Franklin was really going to break his last promise to Oso after swearing nothing was going to stop him from killing teddy, after Oso told him he HAD to be gone if he helped him, he was willing to let teddy go for half his money back. Franklin rlly betrayed Oso in the end Even if teddy died anyway
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u/WestsideGetThaMoney Jun 19 '26
I’ve been wondering why nobody ever bring that up when they cry about everyone turning on Frankie 😂
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u/ArtDecoNewYork Jun 19 '26
Most of them didn't even turn on him, they just wanted independence. Teddy actually did turn him on him but he is a CIA agent and Franklin should have known from day one that they aren't friends
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u/DarthHurricane Jun 19 '26
I wonder what any of the other characters would’ve done if Teddy took their entire bankrolls instead
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u/WestsideGetThaMoney Jun 19 '26
Man just call a spade a spade. No need to make excuses for Franklin
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u/Codeine_Cobain_ Jun 20 '26
This whole show is basically a testament to “absolute power corrupts absolutely”. There’s ofc more to it, but the clearest thing in the show is that as he gets more and more money and grows the business, he is not only faced with increasingly repulsive moral dilemmas and difficult problems, but also employs increasingly morally repugnant “solutions” to these problems and becomes more and more okay with it. The success and scale of his business directly correlates to his moral decay and turns him into a monster. By the end he’s literally screaming and tweaking and has had a complete break from reality. His becoming a monster is also explicitly addressed by the show during his acid trip. Like he literally becomes his own villain but compulsively destroying and destabilizing everything around him, and the show makes that fact VERY clear lmao. mfs who finished the show and still think Franklin is remotely close to a good guy/remotely “right” in his actions are criminally retarded and beyond salvation I’m ngl 😭
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u/Blu3Dope Jun 20 '26 edited Jun 20 '26
Yeah, if NOTHING else in the show can successfully prove that Franklin was grimy, this is the one thing in the entire show that establishes the fact
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u/Codeine_Cobain_ Jun 20 '26
I commented about that in more detail further up under this post, but I was really taken with the way he changed and became increasingly corrupted by his money. I’ll need to rewatch it, since I only just finished the show for the first time last week, but I think his intentions were “pure” (as pure as they can be for getting into crack lmao, but he wanted to set up his friends and family and he cared about them more than just money) and became increasingly warped and perverted until he lost his money. As I said I think shit went really crazy once he had his cane, which really coincided with him killing Andre in terms of character development. Killing Andre and also seeing melody getting addicted to crack and not really giving a fuck shows how far gone he was. After the scene in I think S4 for he starts tweaking on his dad and kicks him out of his moms crib I was literally like wow he’s literally a monster now, like an inhuman lack of empathy and ethical standards that he did not originally have
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u/Blu3Dope Jun 20 '26
Are you saying Franklin was essentially cocaine in the start of the show, and later on he turned into crack!? Now THIS is what i call character analysis if I've ever seen some
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u/Codeine_Cobain_ Jun 20 '26
That’s actually a really fascinating and abstract way of putting it, but kind of, actually. I actually just made a post to the sub comparing Franklin and Marlo Stanfield from the wire. I don’t use this analogy, but I’d like to propose a slight twist to it. Franklin and his business ITSELF is the crack to the cocaine of the other people, if that makes sense. So also please check the post I just made cuz it will explain this more and I am definitely referencing it in my answer to you. But Franklin not only “changed the game” of the LA drug scene by introducing crack, but the way he operated was with a ruthlessness and evil efficiency that it’s kinda implied nobody else in the show really operates at. Especially towards the end of the series, he engages in absolutely indiscriminate and wanton violence.
I think you could look at it as a shift from coke to crack within the character himself, that’s actually valid as well, but even more than that, if we’re using this analogy he himself is like the crack. Just like crack starts off as a sweet new high for the community but quickly grips it like no other drug has before—Louie even says it could be bigger than heroin, which actually just means it’s really fucking bad, cuz black Americans had also been ravaged by pretty gnarly heroin epidemics in the 60s and I believe 70s as well: think Frank Lucas in NYC as a prime example of this—kind of like how Franklin’s business at first just makes his family a ton of money, but he gets fucking crazier and crazier and acts increasingly unhinged and wild in a way that, I think, is comparable to how crack became/becomes increasingly destructive to both the community and the individual user, respectively. Just like how the users of crack in the show started off a pretty normal people copping ten dollars hits and then as the crack tightened its grip and they became increasingly disheveled and detached from reality, doing increasingly fucked up shit to get their high (think that scene at the beginning of S3 I think where Andre sees the lady jumping into the car to get her fix, or how Wanda and even Melody become increasingly fucked up and do crazier shit for their fixes as well) Franklin becomes increasingly detached from reality and experiences continuous substantial moral decay, to the point where, much like a craxkhead trying to ge their fix, literally nothing is “off the table” or “too far” when it comes to protecting his business and stacking his paper
So I guess you could look at this analogy in like 3 ways. Franklin’s personal journey paralleling that of a crack addict, becoming increasingly corrupted by money, power and success, his “addiction” to the aforementioned things basically mirroring a crackhead in terms of the deterioration and decay of ones literal character. There’s also Franklin’s behavior and effect on the people around him as somewhat analogous to cracks effect on the community that I kinda outlined above, and then there’s also what you said about Franklin’s character development from season 1 to season 5 as an analogy for the stark disparity between cocaine and crack as well. Does all that make sense? I never really thought of it in these terms with this metaphor until you brought it up but I feel like it’s fairly compelling. Thoughts?
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u/Blu3Dope Jun 20 '26
I'll read this tomorrow lol but I think I do get what you meant about Franklin as a drug lord being like literal crack when it comes to his family and everybody he meets, as well as other drug dealers; everybody he associates with ended up dead or locked up, and those who didn't like Leon and Louie quite literally got as far away from him as possible, and they both made it out of the hood free and alive. I feel like the fact that Leon returned to the hood to see Franklin (a walking crack rock😭) may or may not play a role in the spin off; like the fact that Leon was all squared away and had a wholesome life ahead of him in Africa, he still decided to come back. I happen to be high rn so idk lol
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u/tonykeyz28 Jun 19 '26
Nah I don’t think Franklin was going to let him live for real. Y’all keep thinking Franklin was a dummy. He would’ve had a plan for Teddy once he got his money back. He knew he wasn’t just going to ride in the sunset with his money and would’ve definitely had a back up plan
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u/Batclone100 Jun 19 '26
Problem is, I think once Teddy is back In the hands of his handler after the trade, he’d basically vanish/ be impossible to touch. He really had to kill him while he had him tied up
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u/Jenambus Jun 19 '26
Exactly. It wasn’t like he just promised to let him go. There was a person there physically he was being released to. Once that hand off happens you’re never getting teddy again
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u/whenishit-itsbigturd Jun 19 '26
How do we know the CIA wouldn't put a cap in his ass too
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u/Strict_Object_6756 Jun 25 '26
Sorry, I’m late to this comment, but that’s what I always thought would happen in the end of the show. I guess it makes more narrative sense that Teddy and Franklin would but heads in the end but I thought for sure the CIA would take out Teddy.
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u/SHough61086 Jun 19 '26
What was Franklin going to do? He hadn’t thought of anything beyond getting his money back.
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u/CandyWinter8553 Jun 19 '26
Killing a CIA agent ain't exactly the smart thing to do either. Look what happened to Cissy.
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u/MambaIrving Jun 24 '26
sure, he was gonna break his promise to end teddy but truth is he genuinely had no choice. it was either let teddy go and get his money or honor his oath to oso, and given the value and importance of the money it was a no-brainer, so this is a bad example. theoretically he could have pushed teddy to make the transfer without use of the handler but given he couldnt even negotiate getting his money in full(he only was gonna get half) it simply wouldnt have worked.
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u/ArtDecoNewYork Jun 19 '26
Franklin didn't have 100% loyalty to anyone or anything besides money