The truly amazing thing about this week’s episode of Fargo was that, somehow, against almost insurmountable odds, despite everything that happened pointing toward the alternative, we didn’t see anyone die. Actually, that’s not true. The truly amazing thing about this week’s episode of Fargo was every single thing Nick Offerman said and did. But the lack of killing was notable, too, especially considering the episode contained three different bloodthirsty posses (Bear and his crew at the jail, Dodd at his crew at the Blumquists, Mike and his crew at the Gerhardts), three different tense standoffs (Dodd/Hank, Bear/Lou, Bear/Karl), and three instances of people getting rendered unconscious with deadly weapons (Hank — Butt of Hanzee’s gun, Dodd — Taser, Gerhardt henchman — Sink). The fact that anyone — let alone all of them — made it out alive was a minor miracle, even if it’s one that probably won’t last very long.
But how did we get to all that? Well, it all started at the Gerhardt compound, where three fuses were lit early on in the episode, and then sent off scooting toward their respective piles of dynamite. (Which is kind of the same pile, really, or at least will eventually be.) Let’s address these one by one.
The first fuse sent Dodd and Hanzee on the hunt for Ed Blumquist, the notorious Butcher of Laverne. But with Ed in jail, it meant the crew instead rolled up on Sheriff Hank and Peggy, who had just finished having a lovely conversation about maximizing your personal potential and whether Peggy was totally insane. (“You’re a little touched, aren’t ya?”) After the aforementioned Hank/Dodd standoff and the Hank/Hanzee gun-butting, Dodd went down to look for Peggy in her basement, which was a bad idea. In a season filled with direct references to the Vietnam War, this may have been both the most subtle and most on-the-nose yet. A powerful fighting force loses its advantage over a weaker adversary when the adversary has a mastery of the terrain, be it the jungles of Southeast Asia or a basement filled with just a completely ridiculous amount of travel and beauty magazines
The second fuse sent Bear and the rest of the Gerhardts to the county jail to spring young Charlie, who was being held for his role in the butcher shop fiasco from last week. This led to two important developments.
- The revelation that Nick Offerman’s eloquent drunk of a character, Karl Weathers, is also the town’s only lawyer. This entire performance was spellbinding, from the moment he entered the station mid-rant, to his conversation with Ed (“G or NG”), to his final diversion/sense-talking with Bear out front — which he may have done with soiled trousers — while Lou snuck Ed out the back window.
- Ed running off into the wilderness to try to get to Peggy, and Hanzee emerging from the woods hot on his tail. The funny thing about this is that we’re meant to infer that Ed is in deep crap because Hanzee is a trained killer, but let’s also keep in mind that Ed has killed two people and ground one of them into sausage in the past week alone. Don’t let the stammering and aw shucksing fool you. Ed is a stone cold killer now. Kind of.
Finally, the third fuse, which will probably end up leading to the biggest boom of all, involved young Simone Gerhardt calling Mike Milligan and tipping him off to her dad’s location, in the hopes that Mike would kill him. (And tell him to kiss her grits.) This isn’t all that unreasonable a request, really, when you consider the years of abuse and threats, and the uplifting “whores get stubbed out like cigarettes” father-daughter chat they had moments earlier. Unfortunately for Simone, when she said “My dad and uncle and all their boys are headed to Minnesota,” what Mike heard was “Me and my grandparents are all alone at our unguarded compound in Fargo,” and well, Mike did that math pretty quickly, chose business over pleasure, and drove to North Dakota to spray the building with bullets. Poor Simone. Girl can’t catch a break.
We don’t get any resolution on this last development, as our last image of it was Mike smiling with a machine gun in his hands, but given what we know about Dodd and his mommy issues and Bear just being a good boy who loves his parents, in general, one has to assume this assault on the family home won’t go over too well. This is, as they say, a bit of an understatement.
Ohhhhh, I just remembered. Some random Gerhardt henchman got gunned down outside the house, and another died in Peggy’s basement. So, I guess strike that thing about nobody dying. R.I.P. Faceless Henchmen. You will be missed.
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Selected quotes from Karl Weathers’ drunken whirlwind appearance at the police station, from the moment he entered until just after he spotted the Gerhardt mob:
“Greetings and salutations. I have made the pilgrimage from the Hall of Veterans, as George Washington once forded the Delaware, steely in my resolve, prepared to battle until my dying breath for the rights of free men. Rights that were squeezed from British oppression like water from a stone. That all men are created equal, free from the jackboot tyranny and gulag magic tricks of nameless, faceless committees.”
“Hey, Denise.”
“Don’t dictate terms to me, you rogue.”
“Excuse the obvious death penalty snafu. I’m slightly inebriated.”
“Watch your proverbial butts.”
“The jackboots are upon us.”
“It’s possible I soiled myself.”
In under five minutes of screen time, he just leapfrogged Saul Goodman, Franklin, and Bash to number two on my list of favorite TV lawyers. And he’s got eyes on your crown, Hutz.
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Here’s the thing about Mike Milligan reciting the entirety of Lewis Carroll’s famous nonsense poem “Jabberwocky” while preparing to head into battle: It was cool as hell. But here’s the other thing: It’s easy to forget because years of television can numb you to characters delivering flawless extended monologues, but in order to recite that poem like a total badass while loading up shotguns and marching down the hallway of his hotel armed to the teeth, it means that at some point prior to that in the Fargo universe, for some reason, Mike Milligan — terrifying career mobster — had to memorize a poem from the sequel to Alice in Wonderland.
And this, all of it, is fascinating to me. I must know more about it. Does he recite it every time they go off to battle? Is it his thing? Or has he been sitting on this monologue for years waiting for the perfect moment to use it? Because I’m going to be honest with you guys: The idea of Mike Milligan sitting in his house late at night with a copy of Through the Looking Glass, trying to memorize a nonsense poem just so he can look like a huge well-read badass at some as-yet-undetermined moment in the future — which may never come! — is cracking me up right now.
That said, it brings up another point: Having a memorized monologue like this that you can whip out in a tense moment is a great idea. Everyone should have one. But make sure it’s good, and situationally appropriate. Like, for example, I can recite the words to “Shoop” by Salt N Pepa with about 95 percent accuracy, right now, with no music. (Just checked.) But something tells me that me rattling off four minutes of rhymes about sexually empowered women wouldn’t exactly inspire the one surviving Kitchen brother to join my murder posse. So, think it through a bit. Choose wisely.
Odds and ends:
– I’m sure it was just a coincidence (I’m sure of it), but there was something kind of perfect about Peggy using household fixtures to defend her home from bad guys and Lou instructing the cops to put smashed glass under the windows of the station so they could hear intruders enter, all in an episode that aired on November 16, 2015, the 25th anniversary of the release of Home Alone. (Reminder: Home Alone booby traps, ranked.) Dodd Gerhardt is Joe Pesci in this analogy. It’s a good analogy.
– As maybe the only person alive who watches Fargo and CSI: Cyber, both of which feature Ted Danson as a member of law enforcement, allow me to point out how funny it was when his character started talking about forensics and blood spatter last night.
– Danson also got the Line of the Night, Non-Karl Division award for “I could fill a steamer trunk with the amount of stupid I think you are.” That’s a good one. File it away for later.
– So, maybe you’ve picked up on this already, but it’s worth noting anyway. That big Life Spring course Peggy is planning to take? Yeah, it’s in Sioux Falls. If Sioux Falls sounds familiar to you in the context of the show, there’s a good reason for that, as a trip back (or, uh, forward) to season one reveals.
More like Death Spring.
