Weekly Recap: Fargo, S02E01
By Rob Kerr, Visual Media Director
Let’s be honest: everybody at some point in time has seen something terrible happen very quickly, and no matter how hard they try to avert their gaze they just can’t help but keep watching. There’s a sick thrill that comes with watching the ripples spread in the wake of an unplanned disaster, and with only one episode into its second season, Fargo is already proving itself hard to look away from.
Adopting the increasingly popular anthology format revitalized by American Horror Story, this season of Fargo takes place during the year 1979 in the snowy plains of Minnesota. “Waiting for Dutch” opens with a bizarre non sequitur featuring a very cold Native American actor waiting for then-actor Ronald Reagan to leave his trailer, immediately letting the audience know that they are in for a very strange time.
We are then introduced to Dodd and Rye Gerhardt (Jeffrey Donovan and Kieran Culkin respectively), two bumbling brothers doing their best to carry out the family business--your standard crime family “protection money” type deal. In proper Fargo fashion, the stakes rise unbelievably fast as small blunders quickly turn into dead bodies.
State Trooper Lou Solverson (Patrick Wilson) quickly appears at the scene of the crime with local sheriff/father-in-law Hank Larsson (the incredible Ted Danson). The two riff about recipe cards and soufflés while identifying corpses, a great example of the contrast between graphic violence and the mild-mannered people involved that Fargo manages to do so well. The main cast is rounded out with married couple Peggy and Ed (Kirsten Dunst and Jesse Plemons), who have to make some very rash decisions after Peggy drives home after hitting a pedestrian, conveniently leaving him smashed through her windshield. The supporting cast includes Brad Garrett as part of an organized crime syndicate trying to eliminate the Gerhardt family, and Nick Offerman as a conspiracy theorist with some very interesting opinions about the Kennedy assassinations.
This first episode does an excellent job at transplanting Fargo into a new setting while still retaining all the elements of the first season and 1996 film. The humor is as dark as ever, and everything seems to go to absolute shit in record time. If the rest of the season continues at this pace then I think we will have some incredible television. Oh yeah, did I mention aliens…?
