After an episode that quite literally saw a spaceship descend from the cosmos and interrupt a bloody motel firefight, the season finale of Fargo dialed things back a bit, which was probably for the best because, man, how would one even move forward from there? I mean, yes, I have some ideas, but they are admittedly bad ideas. Fargo handled it much better. Let’s discuss.
1) When we last saw the survivors of the Sioux Falls Massacre, it looked like we were headed for a finale about a double manhunt: Hanzee chasing Peggy and Ed, and Lou chasing Hanzee. And it looked, briefly, like that’s what we were getting, especially when the opening notes of Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” started playing and Hanzee put a bullet in a fleeing Ed as he and Peggy were running off to barricade themselves in a supermarket refrigerator. But Fargo is nothing if not odd angles and zigs when you expect zags, so instead of Peggy busting out and driving a sharp implement into Hanzee’s torso for the second consecutive episode, she was greeted by Lou and Ben, who informed her that Hanzee had given up the hunt and run off.
What we ended up getting in the finale — save Ed’s fate and a gaping shotgun wound to the chest of a silverware thief courtesy of King Milligan and his loyal knight, Sir Kitchen — was a philosophical, largely bloodless episode that saw the characters try to make sense of what the hell just happened to them over the previous nine episodes. Which, all things considered, is a pretty reasonable thing for them to do.
2) Can Peggy Blumquist have it all? Well, no. But can she see a pelican? Maybe, provided she gets brought up on federal charges and sent to a prison in California overlooking the bay. So that’s something.
Also, R.I.P. Ed Blumquist. Poor Ed. All he ever wanted was to own a butcher shop in Luverne and have a few kids, and he ended up dying in a supermarket in South Dakota after getting shot by a double-crossing hitman and seeing a spaceship. Life comes at you fast.
3) Ed may have been the only main character to meet his real, earthly demise in the finale, but Mike Milligan died a little bit too, in a spiritual sense. He thought his victory in the Gerhardt war would make him a king. He thought he might get a parade. He loves parades. Instead, he got “promoted” into an office job where his day-to-day responsibilities will focus less on playing God in the streets and more on working with the accounting department to maximize revenue. And he has to cut his hair. And dress less flashy. I mean…
Look at him. He looks so sad. I can’t remember feeling worse for a bloodthirsty killer. Part of me hopes he wears that slide gun to the office sometimes, under his new conservative wardrobe. Just to feel alive.
4) Speaking of feeling alive, would you look at that? Betsy and Hank didn’t die after all. What a relief that was, especially the way Betsy’s non-death was revealed, after an opening montage of dead Gerhardts. And her survival allowed her to rip off some of the night’s best lines, from comparing cancer to a half-rotten peach, to crapping on Camus and his worldview, to “We’re put on this earth to do a job, and each of us gets the time we need to do it.” Betsy Solverson, cool lady. Glad she lived.
5) We also learned Hanzee’s fate. His entire fate. And it turns out it involves Lorne Malvo. This was very cool. See, when Hanzee got his new identity and slid out the Social Security card, the name on it read “Moses Tripoli.”
If your brain started wrinkling a bit when you saw that, there’s a good reason, and it’s not just because Moses Tripoli is a great fake name. It’s also because Moses Tripoli was the mob boss who ordered the hit on Lorne Malvo in season one, which backfired spectacularly and ended with Malvo killing him. You remember, this guy?
So, after double-crossing the Gerhardts and setting the Sioux Falls Massacre in motion, Hanzee stuck around the midwest with a new face and identity and spent the next 25 years building a criminal empire, only to be killed by a man who would later be killed by the son-in-law of the state trooper who chased him away from the motel that night in 1979. Small world.
(GIF via Vanity Fair)
6) The line of the night goes to Lou Solverson: “I’m gonna take Peggy Blumquist back to Minnesota. If anyone’s got a problem with that, after the week I’ve had, they can keep it to themselves.” This is both the most polite, most Minnesota way possible to say “kiss my ass,” and just a huge, huge understatement. “If anyone’s got a problem with that, after the week I’ve had, they can keep it to themselves” sounds like something a frustrated kindergarten teacher would say on a Friday afternoon. Lou spent all week chasing murderers across state lines and getting shot at. And a UFO saved him from being strangled! If anyone ever, in the history of mankind, was justified in using a swear word or two, it would have been Lou Solverson in that situation. But nope, not Lou’s style.
7) Speaking of the Solverson clan, one of the most poignant moments of the night was Betsy’s description of the dream she had:
“That night I had a dream. It felt so real, even though I knew it couldn’t be or wasn’t yet. I dreamt of a magical future, filled with wondrous devices, where everything you could ever want is available in one amazing place, and there was happiness there. Then I saw farther still, years, decades into the future. I saw a handsome older man, his back still straight, visited by his children and grandchildren, people of accomplishment, of contentment. Then I saw chaos, the fracture of peace and enlightenment, and I worried that the future I had seen, magical and filled with light, might never come to pass.”
Two things about this dream: One, Betsy’s “amazing place” full of everything sure did look a lot like a Costco or a Wal-Mart, which was a little funny, but was also a nice tie-in to what happened with the corporate Kansas City mob taking out the mom-and-pop Gerhardt operation. And two, heeeeeeeeyyyyy there Solverson-Grimly family!
8) People in this episode were remarkably chill about the spaceship. Hank’s only question about it — it, again, being a giant hovering aircraft that came from outer space — was “So, you gonna put that in the report then?,” and Betsy barely even reacted when her husband and father came back from a violent shootout with a story about a UFO. This was, and is, fascinating to me. There was a spaceship last episode. The finale could have been 50 straight minutes of Lou curled up in the fetal position mumbling “Oh geez oh geez oh geez oh geez oh geez oh geez oh geez oh geez oh geez oh geez oh geez oh geez oh geez” in the motel parking lot, and my recap would have been, like, “The finale of the second season of Fargo lacked action, in a traditional sense, but it should be commended for its commitment to realism.”
9) A big shoutout to Noreen Vanderslice, both for dropping everything to become the Solverson family’s emergency nanny and nurse, and for tying together the season’s theme with her reading choices. Sisyphus was all over this season in ways that never attempted to be subtle. Hell, “The Myth of Sisyphus” was the title of one of the episodes. But the references were everywhere: Lou and the role of a man, Mike and his futile journey up the mob ranks, Ed trying to make it work with Peggy and her mounting frustrations, Peggy and her search for something more (whatever that was, exactly). Everyone was just pushing that rock, man.
10) One last time for the road: The second season of Fargo was 10 episodes of inventive storytelling that ranged from intense to fun to heartbreaking and was peppered with terrific performances from its cast, especially Bokeem Woodbine and Kirsten Dunst. With shows like Breaking Bad and Mad Men leaving us in the past few years, we need that. More of it. As much as possible. Is it time for season three yet?
