A review of tonight’s Fargo coming up just as soon as I deploy feminine hygiene as a weapon…
“He doesn’t want the stamp, pal. He wants your life.” -Sy
The arc of season three began with equal parts envy and mistaken identity, as Ray’s desire to have a life more like his brother’s leads to the murder of Ennis Stussy. “The Principle of Restricted Choice” offers Ray an unexpected opportunity to quash this feud before even more people die — through his actions, anyway; Emmit and Sy get their lawyer Irv killed by asking him to investigate Varga — when he and Emmit realize they’d both be happier making peace and acting like brothers again. But the realization comes too late — not just because Ennis’ murder will surely lead back to Ray at some point, but because Nikki is still operating under the idea that the whole brotherly chat was just a distraction for her to take the stamp. And when it’s not there, she makes another mistake by assuming the safe deposit receipt is evidence Emmit is hiding it from his brother, and leaves various bits of menstrual evidence as her response, quashing any hope of reconciliation before it’s even really happened.
The Stussy brothers themselves are still the least interesting part of the new season, which is a problem given their prominence, but they also give us entree to livelier characters like Nikki, Sy, and Varga, and the episode does a nice job of expanding our understanding of each, like the way businessman Sy so desperately imagines himself a tough guy, and relishes playing that role when the time comes to order Ray out of Emmit’s life for good, crashing his Hummer into the Corvette multiple times, but also ineptly hitting a waitress’s nearby parked car.
And while the brothers are feuding and Varga is swiftly taking over Emmit’s entire company, Gloria gets to start investigating her stepfather’s murder, which includes the discovery that Ennis had another identity: those sci-fi paperbacks she found in his strongbox were actually written by him under the pen name Thaddeus Mobley. We don’t know the exact plots of Toronto Cain: Psychic Ranger or The Plague Monkeys, but we can guess from the covers, and it’s fun to imagine Gloria’s own story as a woman seemingly invisible to technology(*) — her cell phone never entirely works, and when another automatic door fails to open, she groans, “I’m here, right? You see me?” — and who has turned her back on it in kind, much to the frustration of her new boss Moe Dammik. It feels appropriate that a cop whose office doubles as a library will now be investigating an author’s murder, even if she resists Moe’s entreaties to use computers because, “You know what year it is, right? The future.” But we also see that, like Fargo cops past, she’s smart and determined, and odds are her path will be intersecting that of the brothers, Nikki, Varga, and the others very soon.
(*) Are Noah Hawley and Damon Lindelof coordinating on this running gag where technology refuses to recognize women played by Carrie Coon?
Irv gets fatally tossed off the parking deck by one of Varga’s men, Yuri Gurka. This is also the name of the accused murderer in the mistaken identity case in the East Berlin scene from the season premiere. Presumably, this is a different Yuri Gurka — he’d have been a little kid back in 1988 — and perhaps we’ll find out down the road if they’re related, or if this is an Emmit/Ennis Stussy situation. But all the parallels from name to name, story to story, aren’t here by accident. Two brothers with the same face are going to cause a lot of grief for a lot of people before all is said and done, all because it took them too long to realize they’d much rather be together than apart.
Some other thoughts:
* Our great music writer Steven Hyden will be writing separate pieces analyzing each episode’s music that run the morning after they air. Here’s his take on the season premiere tunes. As for this week’s song list, it includes “Sho Z-Pod Duba” by Dakhabrakha (Varga and his guys pull into a Stussy lot), “Untitled / Original Chant” by Ray G Thunderchild (Ray looks under his desk), “Kalinka” by Ural Cossacks Choir & Uzory (Yuri and Meemo in the parking structure), “The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting On An Open Fire)” by Bing Crosby (Ray eats at the restaurant), and “American Wedding” by Gogol Bordello (end credits).
* Based on past seasons, it’s going to be a while til we’ve met all the significant players, but this one expands the cast a bit on both sides of the cop/crook divide, adding Boardwalk Empire alum Shea Whigham as Moe Dammik, Mark Forward as Gloria’s deputy Donny Mashman (a role intended for Jim Gaffigan before he had a scheduling conflict), Goran Bogdan as Yuri and Andy Yu as Varga’s other henchman Meemo.
* The parolee rambling on about eating meat and grain in times of plenty sounds more than a little bit like Hi’s Raising Arizona cellmate who kept talking about the things they ate in less bountiful times.
* So far, the show has mostly kept the Stussy brothers apart, and when they interacted in the premiere, they were usually not in the same frame. Fifty years after The Patty Duke Show, we shouldn’t be surprised by the way special effects can make it look like one actor is interacting with him or herself when they play a dual role, but the shot of the Stussy brothers sitting on opposite benches outside Emmit’s house was still impressive in how natural it looked.
* Sy seems very focused on the idea that there were slave girls in the back of Varga’s truck. I’m thinking I wouldn’t want a look at his browser history.
What did everybody else think?
Alan Sepinwall may be reached at sepinwall@uproxx.com