The opening of "Waiting For Dutch" has two men standing in front of a massacre (staged for a movie) when one of the corpses/extras in the background belligerently asks for a blanket. Towards the end of the first episode, two men - Lou and Hank - stand in front of the very real Waffle Hut massacre, and in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment, one of the cops can be seen using a blanket to cover the waitress's body.
Early on, Rye attempts to intimidate a disgruntled associate into leaving Skip's typewriter shop by whistling at him. Later in the show, we see that this is the preferred intimidation technique of his brother Dodd - and as Rye is one of his most frequent victims, he's obviously picked it up from him.
While failing to intimidate Judge Munt, Rye splutters "This isn't one of those optional check "A" or "B" scenarios!". Later, when Hank questions Peggy on why she ran Rye over and didn't go to emergency services, she replies "You say it like these things happen in a vacuum — like it's a test. Check "A" or "B"...". Using the same justification, Rye tried to claim a situation was more simple than it looked, while Peggy later attempted to show that circumstances were more complicated thn they looked - and in both cases, they were clearly kidding themselves.
This reflects back on Ed's summary of Peggy's attitude as he dies: that she's someone who desperately wants life to be more complicated and exciting than it actually is.
As Floyd tells Otto about the family losing money, he mutters "My no good sons?" in German, in front of two of them (Dodd and Bear). The power jostling that happens later is more than likely caused by Otto abusively playing his sons against one another and treating them all as unworthy of his approval.
Otto barely manages to finish the line "I'll grind their bones to make my bread", a line attributed to Fairytale Giants, before having his stroke - an event filmed with his body filling the camera, and which is followed by a bird's-eye view of a gigantic crack in a frozen lake. Like the Giant, he has fallen - and broken the land around him as he falls.
Dodd derides Rye as "the comic in a stick of bubblegum!", in terms of his worth to the family and as a man. When Rye commits mass murder at the Waffle Hut, later, it's partly shot directly outside - where the diner's square windows eerily resemble the panels of a comic strip.
Lou reads Molly a story that seems overly gruesome for a children's book. Lou begins to question its appropriateness, but Molly seems unperturbed. Molly will eventually go on to become a canny cop.
In episode 7, Mike Milligan muses about how the word "revolution" has two meanings: either as an overthrow of authority, or a planet making a complete orbit around another celestial object. At first, it just seems like one of the usual nonsensical tangents Mike usually goes off on. However, come the final episode, the conversation is all-important to understanding Mike's final predicament. This whole time, Mike has been thinking his revolution against the Gerhardts will be the "overthrow" kind, when in reality it ends up being the "full-circle" kind. His success against them just leaves him back where he started: as an underappreciated employee for the Kansas City Mafia that's stuck doing a job he hates.
In an early episode, Skip tells an unimpressed Mike that electric typewriters are the technology of the future. In the end, Mike is told by his boss that the future in "the money-making business" is all about paperwork and crunching numbers. He gives Mike a lousy little office and a desk dominated by... an electric typewriter.
Mike Milligan's journey as a character is in the opposite direction of that of Jerry Lundegaard or Lester Nygaard: he goes from an exciting life of risk and crime to being trapped in corporate hell, filing papers behind the safety of a desk.
In the final episode it's revealed that Hanzee Dent will become Mr. Tripoli, the crime boss who appeared in Season 1. The fixer who arranges Hanzee's new identity looks and sounds similar to how Mr. Tripoli will appear - white, balding, bearded, overweight and with a gravelly voice. In this sense, coupled with his futile warning that all empires must eventually crumble, he could be taken to symbolically represent Hanzee's future self.
Hanzee's first act as Mr. Tripoli is to intervene in the early lives of his employees from Season 1, Mr. Wrench and Mr. Numbers - with the implication that he kills the two older boys bullying them. After a lifetime of working for the chaotic and egotistical Gerhardts, he's clearly decided that unruly meatheads have no place in his operation - which is evidenced in Season 1 by the methodical, professional attitude that Tripoli's gang takes to their business.
It's also possible the older boys bullying Wrench and Numbers were their brothers. Not only would this imply Hanzee is sceptical of a family-based operation and the resentments/rivalries that creates, but it also connects to the implication that he himself was a Gerhardt - evidenced by Dodd referring to him as a "half-breed" and mentions of "the kid Otto had with the maid". Killing off the boys' siblings not only traumatises them into being his loyal lackeys, it also reinforces that they should only depend on each other.
We never get closure on what happened to Rye Gerhardt's remains aftrr Ed ground them into mincemeat - though with his boss' line that "[wasting] meat's a crime - or it should be", there's a fair chance some of it was packaged up and sold the next day...
