100 Favorite Shows: #10 — Fargo
“Buzz Aldrin was afraid of spiders and he went into space.”
It was a bold move when FX announced in 2012 that they would be creating an anthology series based on the acclaimed 1996 Coen brothers film, Fargo. Not only was the original movie (starring Frances McDormand and William H. Macy) beloved, but television had tried to adapt the northern mid-western crime story before in the form of a misguided Edie Falco vehicle. But that was without the Coens’ involvement. The FX miniseries was to be executive produced by Joel and Ethan with much of the written work coming from creator Noah Hawley. Two years later, Fargo debuted and it instantly became one of the most renowned (and my personal favorite) anthology series of all-time. The first season drew largely from the film, but the second and third arcs expanded far beyond a small-town man out of his element and the cop searching for him. With a fourth season keeping pace last autumn, you betcha the risk of adaptation paid off.
(You betcha there’s spoilers for the first three seasons of Fargo in this essay.)
The expression, “a rock and a hard place” is an example of a Morton’s fork. That is to say, Morton’s fork speaks to two decisions that lead to an undesirable outcome; no matter what a person chooses, they will be met only with a vexatious result. A rock does not contradict a hard place. Rather, they work together to make the goals impossible for the person tasked with working towards them. In the criminal world of Fargo, every character has been posed with a Morton’s fork at some point, but the most prominent example obviously comes in the season one finale, “Morton’s Fork.”
This episode brings the damaging crime streak put in motion by Lester Nygaard’s (Martin Freeman) small-town selfishness to a close. Throughout Fargo’s first season, Lester enables Lorne Malvo (Billy Bob Thornton), a dangerous hitman who interprets Lester’s internalized submission as representative of a desire to see those who abused him killed for their actions. Before it even occurs to Lester that vigilante “justice” is deeply immoral and hellish, Minnesota’s smattering of villages is irrevocably wounded by Malvo, the wolf who came to town.
“Is this what you want?” Malvo asks Lester before he kills the people he pretended to be close to for a job against a member of witness protection. Desperate to prove himself as a strong-willed man who won’t roll over to Malvo, Lester curbs his silence with a prideful “yes,” officially damning his life to criminal ties or to death. Lester was far gone by this episode, “A Fox, a Rabbit, and a Cabbage” (a subtle allusion to Freeman’s time on The Office), but his attempt to level the power Malvo held over him was his final error. To get on Malvo’s level, he had to instigate the deaths of others, rather than the plausible deniability he maintained before when Malvo would prod him and Lester would say nothing. This elevator sequence begins the penultimate episode, which eventually ends in Lester sending his wife, Linda (Susan Park), to her death as bait in his orange coat. Not only is it an egregiously selfish decision, but it’s also incredibly cowardly. For as much as Lester tried to embody Malvo by acting maliciously towards people he pretended to love, but he couldn’t even rise to the brash carelessness of Malvo’s hitman persona.
In “Morton’s Fork,” Lester goes to great lengths to pretend that Linda’s death is a surprise to him, but he’s such a terrible actor that Molly Solverson (Allison Tolman), the deputy in town, sees through him almost immediately. Typically, crime stories like Fargo position the everyman protagonist as the one worth rooting for, but season one never pretended that Lester was worth our cheers. When his activities fall under suspicion, he immediately acts in the same way a four year old would if she was seen punching her sibling. He denies, he lies, he connives. But all it does is worsen the Morton’s Fork he’s eventually posed with when Molly decides to release him from custody.
Before Lester departs, Molly tells him the story of a man on a train platform who lost one glove, so he decided to drop his other glove, too. That way, whoever found one glove could just “have the pair.” Lester’s in way too over his head to fully process the story, but it’s clearly a small-scale Morton’s Fork. The man with gloves is going to have an unpleasant outcome in terms of his hand warmth. But for the greater good, he drops the other glove so that a different person will not want for heat in their extremities. Lester could give up Malvo and confess to his crimes for the sake of no further people getting hurt. Instead, he doubles down on his “innocence,” only to result in a few more deaths along the way.
Fortunately, Molly is guided by a stronger moral code. She has Nygaard in custody, which is what she’d been chasing the whole season. Her intuition, however, tells her that releasing Lester would bring her closer to the wolf: Lorne Malvo. It’s this exact decision that sets off a chain of events leading to Malvo’s death by the gunfire of Gus (Colin Hanks), Molly’s partner and a man seeking to conquer his own fears. A wolf stops Gus’ path on the road in “Morton’s Fork” and while he waits for it to pass, he observers the fiercer predator that came to town in a cabin just to his right.
When Malvo and Gus first met, the “shades of green” riddle was presented to the latter by the former. It helped Gus think about what kind of predator Malvo was — the type who evolved to find prey in the grass and weeds by filtering out the different shades of green visible to the eye. Malvo will always adapt and will stop at nothing to continue feasting on those who capitulate to his boundless, murderous authority. While Gus waits for Malvo to return home, he understands that prey has no chance of topping a predator. Instead, Gus has to become the predator himself. Fortunately, he doesn’t waste time waxing a monologue to Malvo about how he solved the riddle when the wolf tries to heal his leg, which Lester had set into a bear trap. He just opens fire and kills Malvo. Never give a wolf a chance to fight back. Just end the problem.
The idea of a “wolf” coming to town was explored frequently on Fargo. Lorne Malvo is perhaps the strongest parallel to the canine of the north, but it was also depicted brilliantly in season three’s “The Narrow Escape Problem,” when the episode is structured as a retelling of Peter and the Wolf, the classic Russian children’s folk tale (complete with musical symphonies). This time, the wolf takes the form of V.M. Varga (David Thewlis), a different, more cyber-oriented predator than Malvo, who relied on an uncompromising killer instinct. These are the villains who disrupt the quaint, fireplace-centric way of life. Odds are, they see more shades of green than we ever will. Our best bet is to just outnumber them.
One of the strongest aspects of “The Narrow Escape Problem” is that the narration comes from Billy Bob Thornton himself. He’s portraying a narrator, not Lorne Malvo, but it still helps to tie the seasons of Fargo together, almost as if Malvo’s ghost has returned to us as a warning, in case we forgot what predators are capable of doing to small town heroes. The feeling of a phantom is also present in season two’s “The Castle,” which begins with a Winnie the Pooh-esque opening (a book of tales is taken down from a shelf and read to us by a British narrator). “The History of True Crime in the Mid West” has multiple chapters, some of which have been depicted on screen in Fargo. In this particular episode, though, the ghost of Lester Nygaard has come back as Freeman’s voice cascades throughout the episode. It would’ve felt like a comfort if Lester wasn’t such a lecherous sycophant and if the episode wasn’t promising just as many murders as we’ve seen before.
For the true-hearted humans in the world of Fargo, crime is positively inexplicable. “The world is wrong. It looks like my world, but everything is different,” Sy Feltz (Michael Stuhlbarg) bemoans in season three’s “The Law of Inevitability.” Fargo is meant to reflect the normal societies and communities we experience everyday, while heightening the criminal activity within them. Yes, our world experiences many heinous murders and senseless sprees, but the intense violence of them on Fargo works to juxtapose against the quaint lifestyle of the Minnesota/Dakota residents.
Even Bob Odenkirk’s Chief Oswalt character from season one is dismayed by the onslaught of killings with which he’s been forced to reckon. “I used to have positive opinions about the world — about people. I used to think the best,” he tells Molly when he decides to step down as the police chief. Oswalt’s goals were to shovel his walk, eat some pancakes, and live a happy, modest life. When he sees how far the killers of the world go, though? He can barely stomach it and his “unquiet mind” brings the end of his role in law enforcement. In truth, we need more police officers who are sensitive to and disturbed by the violence committed by our worst offenders, but it’s also understandable that believing in the best intentions of a serial killer is somewhat of a Morton’s fork itself. So he turns in his badge in an effort to somehow reclaim the small town lifestyle he’d always been drawn to.
That midwestern sense of politeness permeates throughout Fargo. Like when state trooper Lou Solverson (Patrick Wilson here, as a younger Lou in season two, but Keith Carradine in season one) asks his father-in-law, Sheriff Hank Larsson (Ted Danson), “Dinner Sunday?” as Hank bleeds out from a gunshot wound to the stomach. In this sequence from “The Castle,” only a few characters’ fates are secure in the face of the Massacre of Sioux Falls (a crucial chapter of the episode’s initial book) and Hank is not one of them. The small town niceties help to provide some semblance of peace as Lou thinks he’s looking onto Hank’s face for the final time. In the face of horrific crimes, it’s this sense of decorum that characters do their best to hang onto.
Many of the figures in Fargo were guided by an upbringing founded on rules, manners, and — in some cases — the Bible. As forces arrive in their small towns that pick order apart like vultures on a carcass or Stephen A. Smith on a morning show, their methods of reconciling the losses of innocence differ. Some characters die from the bloodshed. Some ignore the traditional methodology as a means of protection. (Season one Lou grabs a shotgun and rocks on Molly’s porch at seven in the morning. Hank tells Eisenhower to “go to hell” during the war.) Some decide to just hold their family a little closer, like they did in the original Fargo film. (It’s almost certainly the greatest film-to-television adaptation of all-time.) As Gus warns Molly, “Sometimes you get forces you can’t control.” As good a cop as she is, there’s no training for unpredictable demons. When they come to town, perfectly good people die — and a pregnant Molly Solverson is not exempt.
Molly may not be a Sherlock Holmes-level expert when it comes to interrogating criminals, but she’s got “good instincts and dispositions,” per Oswalt’s purview, which results in him putting her up for police chief. She’s a pure-hearted protector who operates as a unique hero because, to her, heroism isn’t chasing down and killing bad guys. Sometimes, it’s just rising to the occasion when you’d rather be huddled on the couch watching Deal or No Deal with your family.
After all, there are three things in Fargo that can’t be explained: why criminals do what they do, why people refuse to take the Banker’s deals on that game show, and why certain objects come from the sky.
In “Buridan’s Ass” from season one, fish fall from the sky in a perfectly reasonable animal tornado, which may or may not be an act of God. In “The Castle,” though, a UFO arrives at the Massacre of Sioux Falls and receives no further explanation. Before the massacre began, cops and killers alike slept peacefully at the Motor Motel (only Peggy (Kirsten Dunst) watched the television static, alone with her thoughts) obviously unaware that they were experiencing their lives’ final moments. Massacres aren’t meant to be poetic; the only reason we knew about the end of their breaths is because we’re being told this story from a perspective in the future. Each story of Fargo is as connected as any from an anthology of midwestern crime stories would be. Sometimes, they’ll have the same players (Lou Solverson, for one), but for the most part, they’re only connected thematically.
And on Fargo, this theme was most frequently: you just can’t explain it. You can’t explain why Mike Milligan (Bokeem Woodbine in a turn that later paralleled Ray Liotta’s Henry Hill) ended up being the only major chess piece who dodged the massacre. You can’t explain why Hanzee (Zahn McClarnon in a turn that illustrated Fargo’s fondness for giving the most attention to the non-household names) decided to turn on the Gerhardt family he’d long loyally served and pursue Peggy and Ed (Jesse Plemons) instead. (Freeman even remarks, “The question of why has puzzled historians for decades.”) And you can’t explain why a UFO comes to the massacre to save Lou Solverson from Bear Gerhardt’s (Angus Sampson) wrath. Nor can you explain why characters in season three watch it on television like it’s hosted by Tom Bergeron.
Yes, the UFO was grounded in plenty of foreshadowing so it wouldn’t quite be a deus ex machina. (Rye Gerhardt (Kieran Culkin) witnesses it and a sticker in a convenience store foretells, “We are not alone.”) It’s still an entirely inexplicable moment in Fargo. Why does a UFO bear down on the massacre and make no effort to beam up a character, instead only shining a light on their horrific actions inflicted upon one another? We don’t know and Lou Solverson doesn’t attempt to justify the story in a way that the crime anthology would later explain to us. Instead, the story becomes akin to that of folklore. Every Fargo episode pretends to be “based on a true story,” providing the staunch oral tradition sentiments the series experiences. Might season two just be an older, more reflective Lou Solverson passing down the stories of his heyday to his descendants? The amount of people involved in the massacre (from Minnesota and both Dakotas) allows a great many territories to lay claim to the tale. But there’s still other tales in the world (“It’s Rapid City all over again,” Schmidt (Keir O’Donnell) remarks when the massacre begins). This just happens to be the one folktale we’re told at this particular moment in time. And it just happens to have a UFO in it.
For as much as we can never understand all that transpires in Fargo, there are still a few keys to hone in on. For example, Freeman’s narrator places a particular emphasis on the Hanzee-Peggy dynamic in “The Castle,” as he believes (perhaps due to his own experiences) that the key to understanding crime is to observe the small town folks who happened to get caught up in the narrative. In season three, it’s the Stussy brothers (Ewan McGregor, carrying on the lineage of U.K. actors throwing on delightful Minnesota accents). In season two, it’s Peggy and Ed. In season one, it’s obviously Lester Nygaard. They operate in the realm of folklore as clear fable-driven characters. The name Solverson, Lester’s death coming in a Wile E. Coyote-esque sinking into a hole in thin ice, an air conditioner falling from above and crushing a passerby. It’s operating in the territories of Aesop and Itchy & Scratchy because Fargo’s world is always slightly heightened, but clear in its heroes and villains.
While the threads clipped from the midwestern do-gooders are crucial, they’re also emblematic of many trails followed by investigators: sometimes they go nowhere. Take season three’s “The Law of Non-Contradiction,” for example. (This law is not a Morton’s Fork, but rather it states that, in any scenario if A is B and A is not B, then both statements are mutually exclusive.) The story of the episode is loosely connected to the arc’s overall narrative, as it sees Officer Gloria Burgle (Carrie Coon) traveling to Los Angeles in an attempt to learn more about Ennis Stussy (Scott Hylands), the man whose murder kicks off the entire story.
The episode follows three different storylines: L.A. in the 1970s when Thaddeus Mobley (Thomas Mann) went from sci-fi writer to Ennis Stussy, Gloria investigating Mobley’s presence during that time, and an animated depiction of Mobley’s novel, “The Planet Wyh.” The law of non-contradiction is rebuked in Gloria’s story as she is operating as a sheriff, but is not technically the sheriff. Yet, both sentiments happen to be true because she is the only officer in Eden Valley who aims to uncover the why behind Ennis’ death. The why is a question that no other officer seeks to uncover in a parallel of “The Planet Why,” which depicts a Don Hertzfeldt-esque robot, MNSKY (McGregor), that lives throughout all of recorded history (and does much of the recording). MNSKY’s m.o. is “I can help!,” which is exactly what Gloria strives to do. Yet, neither MNSKY’s operators nor Gloria’s supervisors see the value in helping.
The episode is an argument in the doubters’ favor, considering nothing of consequence really stems from the characters’ decisions. Gloria learns how Mobley became Stussy, courtesy of a fading toilet label, but he’s still dead. She learns that Maurice LeFay’s (Scott McNairy) fingerprints could help the Stussy investigation, but he’s still dead. MNSKY obeys what it’s programmed to do, but it still powers down. Murders, robots, Ray Wise characters — they’re all ambiguous. The episode brings us no closer to comprehension in Fargo’s third season, save from the understanding that not every story has a tidy, reasonable conclusion. They’re about as meaningless as the law of non-contradiction, which Gloria inherently depicts as baseless. To those who consider themselves above the operations of the world, laws, traditions, and answers are irrelevant.
Season three, as a whole, proved to be the same kind of pointless as the Coen brothers’ 2008 comedy, Burn After Reading. We get to the end of the story and (even though we’ve learned a lot about the human condition along the way) we wonder what it was all for. Parking lots? Stamp collections? A graying holiday season? This is what we fought for and jockeyed over? “What’s the point of any of it?” is a question that can quickly lead down a Lewis Carroll spiral of “Why do we even bother being alive?” When season three reined in the cast that had ballooned in season two, it went even further to contribute to the story arc’s overall meaninglessness. Varga gets away, Ray is dispatched early in the season, Emmit goes the way of Matt Damon in The Departed, and Nikki Swango (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) seems primed for an incredible reclamation of her own power until, no. She dies.
In this L.A. episode, Gloria pays a visit to Mobley collaborator and producer Howard Zimmerman (Fred Melamed and, later, Roger V. Burton), who tells her “We’re all just particles.” We float and move through space and, occasionally, we collide in a massive bang! This is a sentiment that runs parallel across all of Fargo’s seasons. A collection of seemingly disconnected characters mind their own lives until some agent of chaos shakes things up and bang!, we see death and suffering.
The episode, and the third season, as a whole, strive to be inherently “useless,” but it also proves to us that the function of devices and institutions only have inherent meaning if we ascribe it to them. Function can take many forms and what might be highly functional for one (those who programmed MSNKY) is useless for another (those who shut him down). It’s why when MNSKY shuts down, he’s the one who flips the switch from red to blue, just like the ambiguous box Gloria discovers — a box that seems to solely have the purpose of opening up to reveal a hand that then flicks the switch to close once again. For most, this machine is useless. What good is technology that just turns itself off? But maybe the hand just doesn’t want to spend time in our chaotic world that sees spouses kill each other and scavengers strip an ancient robot for parts. It turns the light on the box from red to blue, just like MNSKY, and just like the flickering police cruiser lights that drive away from a more-depressing-than-anything L.A. excursion.
Fargo’s third season shunned blue from the color grading altogether. Blue was clearly the color that propelled machines forward and red is what shut them down. When we can only see the red of a police cruiser, we’re hardly able to distinguish the humans from the machines. The blue is leaving our world and our options increasingly narrow, until the only sensible decision is to turn to red and shut the rest of the world out entirely.
It’d be enough to retreat if the world was filled with ruthless killers, but it’s worsened by how ineffectual the cops tend to be rendered. Lou spends much of season one working against Molly’s instincts. Previously, Captain Cheney (Wayne Duvall) had relegated Lou to a similar stature after a confrontation in “Loplop” led to unconventional police work in the face of Peggy and Ed’s apprehension. And, of course, the resistance met by police superiors manifests prominently throughout season three, as Gloria’s efforts are outright ignored by others who could help. (“I can help!”) In Fargo, it seems like the cops do more solving than preventing, but at least in that world, they follow the job’s creed of “protect and serve.” We hardly see that in our world, so it can often seem like police work is all for nothing in the first place (Officer Hunt (Rob McElhenney) informs Gloria that there’s nothing he can do to find her stolen bag), especially when those who populate it work for the wrong reasons. Ideally, the justice system wouldn’t be like the online game, Town of Salem, where you have to work tirelessly to convince others that you’re telling the truth, even when overwhelming evidence isn’t persuasive enough. But in Fargo, it’s essentially the equivalent. Those who work the hardest rarely receive the support they need to work even harder. (“I can help!”)
Clearly, Fargo is beyond rich in its thought-provoking thematics. But these stories of collision and mystery and inexplicable behavior were enhanced by the shattered boundaries of conventional television drama. The blatant inclusion of a UFO (it is shown fully on screen and not left to interpretation) is a thrilling reminder of what our best stories are capable of. It’s a manifestation of the conspiracy-laden paranoia of the 1970s, but it’s also just really fucking cool to see a UFO pop up on Fargo and have it go unexplained. Every character, sans Peggy, is stunned by the impossibility of the flying saucer. In turn, the aliens aboard seem stunned by the cruel violence present on our planet. So much so that they flicker off the light and fly out of view, uninterested in partaking in our Earth-based inanity. The fact that it was able to come in an episode (which is still raved about by Andy Greenwald, to my immense delight and nostalgia) that also balanced the bleak collapse of innocent Betsy (Cristin Milioti) in a moment that seemed like Lou would be unable to be with her when she succumbed to cancer is a testament to the fact that Fargo has one of the most perfect tones in all of television.
Fargo is a series that could have an entire season leading up to the reveal of a UFO and then follow it up with a season that mostly just tells us to be afraid of technology. (Officer Hunt has 352 Facebook friends! Zimmerman uses a modulator to speak! V.M. Varga can render everyday people completely hopeless with the click of a mouse, instead of the click of a trigger!) It could send fish down from the sky and it could track the origin of a Golden Planet award for science-fiction and it could stretch the boundaries of television by animating a robot floating throughout the history of time in a more condensed fashion than even a Terrence Malick film. Fargo can be anything and yet, it still manages to be the dark comedy set in the snowy terrains of the United States.
This is thanks in large part to the Coens’ sensibility that is woven into the series’ DNA. Their films are always a bit tricky to parse because they’re drawing on wide-ranging influences, from the Old Testament to Magnolia. But there is a clear affection for their films throughout the series. Episode ten of season three is entitled, “Somebody to Love,” which is reminiscent of A Serious Man (also starring Stuhlbarg). The ambiguity of many moments is tied to the uncertain navigation of The Man Who Wasn’t There (also starring Thornton).
Fargo excels because it’s reverent to the Coens, but refuses to be slavish to their specific style. (Hawley, Matt Wolpert, Monica Beletsky, Enzo Mileti, and the most recent effort from Stefani Robinson contribute to a more intellectually diverse group of voices contributing to Fargo.) The atmosphere of Fargo is incredibly enticing, even if it wasn’t based around a saga of the absurd and the criminal.
On top of it, the casts are always dynamite. All sorts of archetypes are balanced against one another in stunt casting form, including the dreamy, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern-type personas of Budge and Pepper (Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele), the reluctant alcoholic of Karl Weathers (Nick Offerman), the unwilling-to-give-up-his-power older brother of Dodd Gerhardt (Jeffrey Donovan), and, of course, the archetype of Ronald Reagan (Bruce Campbell).
Each of these facets help to enhance the intrinsic tension and “okie dokie” humor of Fargo. Freeze framing shots at a massacre, focusing on the sludge and slush sticking to used cars in the state, splitting the screen to track the paths that lead to one outpouring of death. Place all of these moments under the direction of Jeff Russo’s melancholy orchestration and you have a series that is telling us the story of crime through means unlike any other television program dared to do. The creative team went to such lofty lengths to make the feeling of Fargo come across as cohesively as an animated Disney film with hundreds of different hands shading in the princess dresses. As such, it earned them the right to sprinkle in the homages and Easter eggs that help us remember the greater universe of Fargo. Whether that’s the return of Mr. Wrench (Russell Harvard), the 2006 description of a UFO that came to town, or Steve Buscemi’s original case of money that was found by Lester Nygaard before Kumiko ever came to town, it all resulted in one of the most creatively-satisfying endeavors in all of television. The kind that threw out any idea it believed in and wasn’t afraid to get real weird with the plotting of the story.
Bizarrely, I find Fargo, for all of its unforgettable deaths and violence and ability to go far, to be a comfort series. I don’t know if it’s the knitted promotional art or the fact that winter is my favorite season, but something about Fargo just felt like a warm blanket. I’d like to grab a milkshake and curly fries with Gloria and I’d like to be held by Colin Hanks while we watch Deal or No Deal together. Maybe it’s just because I used to listen to Fargo recap podcasts while making waffles alone at six in the morning every Friday, but something about the series feels deeply personal to me and intertwined into how I view the world and the depiction of art. It just sucks that I have to be one of the people tossed into the bloodshed of the world, rather than one of those with the privilege to watch it from afar and steer a saucer back to space when I realize there’s nothing on the planet that makes a lick of sense.
