‘Fargo’ Recap, Season 3, Episode 2: An Ass Out of You and Me

We live in a world run by racist monsters who would gladly murder your children in front of you if it meant an extra zero for their net worth, so you have to take your pleasure where you can get it, and I get it from Shea Whigham. Best known to fans of excellent crime dramas for his role as Eli Thompson on Boardwalk Empire — the Ray Stussy to Steve Buscemi’s Emmit-like Nucky Thompson, basically — he slowly but surely became one of my favorite things about that show: a character so consumed by his own failures that you could hear it in his voice like a speech impediment and watch it seep out of his face like five o’clock shadow. He’s only in “The Principle of Restricted Choice,” this week’s episode of Fargo, briefly. And he’s delivering the sort of angry-police-chief comic relief familiar to anyone who’s ever watched a cop show, chewing out recently demoted Gloria Burgle and her deputy for operating their podunk department (now absorbed into the county’s police force) from a meeting room in the public library, using a storeroom for a prison cell and eschewing computers entirely. We live in the future, he insists, and she’d better get with the program. If the future includes more of this gravelly voiced actor with a face like a stern Renaissance aristocrat, I’m fucking in.

The second episode of Fargo’s third season is absolutely rife with these kinds of pleasures as it follows its overlapping storylines from place to place. In story number one, you watch Chief, or ex-Chief or whatever she is now, Gloria Burgle investigate the death of her stepfather Ennis Stussy, which gives you a chance to watch Carrie Coon co-star in one of those Coen Brothers service-station-clerk conversations that seemingly mean as much to them, and to their interpreter Noah Hawley, as blonde women meant to Alfred Hitchcock. (Side note: On her way into the station/library to start the day the automatic door doesn’t recognize her presence, a coincidental echo of stuff that’s going on with Coon’s character on The Leftovers.) Gloria also discovers her stepdad, by all accounts an intolerable man, was also “Thaddeus Mobley,” an award-winning Los Angeles–based science fiction author who wrote the pulp novels she found hidden in his floorboards. She assumes this has something to do with why he was murdered.
Which is exactly what Nikki Swango (via the tremendously lively screen presence of Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is counting on, though she doesn’t know the specifics. Her boyfriend Ray has learned that the death of Ennis’s murderer, ex-con turned Ray’s catspaw Maurice Le Fey, has been ruled accidental, which is good news. But he’s concerned the investigation into Ennis’s death will eventually lead some cop to put two and two together, then maybe figure out that Nikki was living right above the scene of Maurice’s death under an assumed name, then figure out they both had the same parole officer, and boom, the whole thing is solved. Nikki, shrewdly, points out that since Maurice killed the guy because of a mix-up, it’d be extremely difficult for the cops to trace him back to Ray and his feud with brother Emmit no matter what. “What possible ‘solve’ is there, besides unfathomable pinheadery?” is her memorable description of the situation, which helps put Ray at ease.

But when the pair concocts yet another plan to get the expensive stamp Ray feels is his by right from his brother, Nikki’s cool head abandons her. While Ray runs interference by faking an attempt to bury the hatchet with Emmit, and then actually kind of meaning it, Nikki breaks into Emmit’s home office to steal the framed stamp but discovers it’s missing, a framed picture of a donkey in its place. Displaying the sort of overinterpretation of visual symbolism that’s usually hard to find outside of reddit threads and clickbait articles, sees this as a deliberate insult, an insinuation that Emmit sees his less successful brother as a jackass. Removing her tampon and leaving it in the place of the safety deposit box receipt that indicates where she believes the stamp has been taken (erroneously—it’s just being re-framed because the cleaning lady broke the old one by accident), she writes WHO’S THE ASS NOW? on the offending drawing in menstrual blood. (This is itself a callback to the offense she took when Ray told her his boss at work was complimenting her rear end.) Watching her backtrack and justify this foolishness when she realizes just how happy Ray was to have patched things up with Emmit (“No trace, right? In and out!” “Well…”) is an absolute delight.

So is the response of Sy Feltz, played by Michael Stuhlbarg — a veteran of both Boardwalk Empire AND the Coens’ A Serious Man, which puts him high in the running for “actor I most like to watch do shit on screen.” Outraged on behalf of his friend Emmit, whom he feels has been far too easy on his shady brother for far too long— and perhaps looking to exert some control in a world where, for reasons we’ll explain, that control is being taken away from him — he shows up at a diner Ray frequents and tells him in no uncertain terms he’ll never talk to his brother again. His tough-guy routine is convincing enough even without the threat to report Ray’s illegal relationship with Nikki to the authorities, but it disintegrates once he takes it upon himself to ram Ray’s beater with his own gigantic Hummer. That part goes fine, and sends the desired message. Unfortunately Sy is so busy flipping Ray the bird afterwards that crashes into an unrelated car on his way out of the parking lot and starts careening back and forth as he attempts to make his getaway, “aw jeez”ing the whole way.

It’s a marvel he’s able to recover quickly enough to help pass off the arrival of V.M. Varga’s “associates” in the Stussy office as business-as-usual: “Oh good they’re here!” he yells with false good cheer when he sees what’s happening, in order to reassure the worried employees. “Remember how I said we’re expanding our IT department?!?!” No one does “everything’s fine! don’t panic!” with panic in his voice like Stuhlbarg does.

Which brings us to the final piece of the puzzle: V.M. Varga (a magisterially gross David Thewlis), completing his takeover of Stussy’s parking lot empire. Sy’s “IT department” excuse is grotesquely ironic, given Varga’s other activity in the episode. Like the work of the Coens themselves — particularly films like Barton Fink and No Country for Old Men, horror movies in all but reputation — Fargo can be very, very scary, often just through implication. Take the sad story of Irv, the luddite lawyer to whom Emmit and Sy foolishly turn for help in digging up dirt on V.M. Varga before he can complete his hostile takeover. This poor old sap doesn’t even know how to hit “enter” on a google search, replying on his sweet but slow-moving executive assistant to help him complete the search.

But when the results page yields only an obvious virus, he clicks on it anyway. We see a progress wheel spinning, then his desktop is replaced with a Photobooth-style shot of the two of them looking at the screen, then there’s the sound of a snapshot being taken, then their computers are switched off by an external source. We already know what this means. Indeed, it’s clear the second their faces show up on Irv’s own computer. But it won’t be until Varga’s Russian underling shows up in a parking garage and brags about how the cossacks used to slaughter, rape, and even eat Ukrainian Jews like Irv’s ancestors that it becomes clear to Irv, if even then. Looking up Varga on the internet is a way to sign your own death warrant, and Irv winds up on the pavement several stories below.

“What makes it so tragic,” Varga tells Emmit and Sy at the end of the episode (thus revealing to him he was in on it) “was how avoidable it was.” If you want Fargo’s moral thesis statement, there you have it. The only reason people need to die is because other people convince themselves, falsely, that it’s worth it.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, the Observer, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.

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