‘Fargo’ Recap, Season 3, Episode 4: The Wolf at the Door

“There’s an accounting coming, Mr. Stussy, and you know I’m right,” says V.M. Varga, “Pitchfork peasants with murder in their eyes, and me, your guardian angel.” Now that’s a hell of a hard sell for a hostile takeover of your Minnesota parking-lot concern by a murderous money launderer! Fargo is an expect-the-unexpected kind of show — how else would you describe the opening of this week’s episode, “The Narrow Escape Problem,” in which an uncredited Billy Bob Thornton recites the opening narration from Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf as the musical fairy tale’s characters are matched with the show’s? (Varga, of course, is the wolf; Peter is Gloria Burgle, implying confrontation to come.)

Still, I really didn’t expect David Thewlis’s English gangster to cite a potential revolution against the One Percent as the reason for his illegal enterprise. As he puts it to Emmit, even a relatively modest millionaire like himself will have a bullseye on his back when the masses finally wake up and wonder where all the money went. The benefit provided by Varga’s forced partnership isn’t just more money, it’s the anonymity that kind of unimaginable cash can provide. That’s the nature of what he calls “the billionaire business”: total insulation from reprisal. Ennis’s late lawyer Irv could testify what that insulation entails, if Varga’s thugs hadn’t tossed him from an upper-story parking garage for trying to penetrate it.

Varga’s theory of human behavior is expressed via a memorable metaphor: bulimia. Twice in this episode, we see him in his deliberately shabby suit, gorging on rich food, then heading for the bathroom and bringing it all back up. (The handkerchief he neatly unfolds to protect the knees of his pants from the men’s room floor is a lovely little shoutout to the similar ritual performed by the Faulkneresque alcoholic writer W.P. Mayhew in Barton Fink.) Consume all you want — just don’t dare to leave a trace of it where people can see.

The episode’s references to contemporary sociopolitics don’t stop with Varga’s speech about the perils of “living in the age of the refugee,” either. His Russian underling delivers a monologue worthy of a game-theory tweetstorm regarding the life of Vladimir Putin, whom he says understands a fundamental truth about how the world works: “The truth is whatever he says it is.” You could take this as a direct rebuke to the Russian regime, I suppose, but I don’t think Varga himself thinks that small. For one thing, it’s Stalin’s picture, not Putin’s, that graces the wall of his ad hoc office, and despite the inexplicable red-baiting that frequently accompanies screeds against Russia’s hypercapitalist kleptocracy (lot of that going around these days!) the two leaders have approximately zero in common ideologically save their understanding of power. For another, Varga’s the one imposing his truth on Emmit, no Moscow required.

Gloria gets a taste of international relations at their worst too, from her new Chief Moe Dammik. Like a nastier, Iraq War version of The Big Lebowski’s Walter Sobchak, he basically tells her he didn’t watch his buddies die face down in the muck in Fallujah so she can gallivant around actually trying to solve her stepfather Ennis’s murder, especially not without his prior permission. “I had boys like you in the service,” he lectures her. “Tell ’em to go right, they go left. All of ’em, to a man, went home in a bag.” Delivered by the wonderfully severe Shea Whigham, these lines transcend their finger-wagging “look here missy” intention and take on an air of frightening prophecy.

After all, Gloria is getting closer and closer to the truth, mostly because the lie laid over it by Ray Stussy and his girlfriend Nikki Swango is so easy to see through. All it takes is a business card taken from the wallet of the late killer, Maurice LeFey, to bring Gloria to Ray (fresh from impersonating his brother at a bank, a scheme Emmit and his consigliere Sy see through instantly themselves and which costs Ray his job) and connect his surname to her slain stepfather’s.

Things might have stalled there if not for the arrival of a fantastic new character: Officer Winnie Lopez, a cheerful chatterbox cop Gloria meets in the ladies’ room at Ray’s precinct house. Amid her TMI torrent (fun facts: Winnie refers to tampons as “putter-inners,” and during sex her husband “pops faster from the back”) Officer Lopez seems to see a kindred spirit in Gloria, since she takes enough note of her homicide case to report back the strange coincidence she herself has uncovered while investigating Sy’s parking-lot rampage last week — Ray, the parole officer of the murderer, has a brother named Ennis, who lives in Eden Prairie. It’s a plot-based payoff for one of the funniest scenes in the episode: Winnie’s interrogation of Sy at the Stussy offices, in full view of Varga’s thugs, who’ve got the man jumping at shadows in a way only Michael Stuhlbarg’s masterfully nervous performance can convey. And it’s a rare break for Gloria, who’s spending most of her spare time, it seems, struggling in vain to get any machinery to work for her whatsoever.

This season of Fargo takes place several years ago, and unfortunately the revolution Varga predicted has yet to come to pass. But it seems he’s not wrong about the accounting that’s coming. Gloria’s caught the scent of a guy connected to a guy connected to a guy who prefers to leave behind no scent at all. I don’t like the odds for the Stussy brothers; the big question is what happens to Gloria when her hunt leads her to the wolf, the deadliest hunter of all.

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.

Stream Fargo, Season 3, Episode 4, "The Narrow Escape Problem" on FXNOW