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I’d like to introduce you to someone. No no, wait right there, it’s okay, he’s just in the hallway. Ah, here is now.

What’s that? You’ve got a pressing engagement elsewhere? Gotta leave the Smutny mortuary and hole up in a hotel where you’re literally laundering money by washing the vomit off of it in the bathtub? Don’t worry, he’ll meet you there too.

“He does that sometimes,” says Zelmare Roulette to her poisoned partner Swanee Capps. “Mean old Mr. Snowman.”

Does he now?

In the fourth episode of Fargo‘s fourth season (“The Pretend War”) we get our first good looks at, I assume, the mysterious figure we saw in the middle of the street at the very end of the season premiere. You remember him:

Who is he? What is he? When Ethelrida sees him in the hallway, she shuts the door against him, and that appears to be that; the next time we see her she doesn’t appear to have been affected by the sighting in any way. This would point to him being part of a nightmare, or at worst a vivid figment of her late-night imagination.

But then he emerges, impossibly, from the bathtub in Zelmare and Swanee’s hotel room, and his presence appears to momentarily incapacitate Swanee to the point of near death. For her part, Zelmare endures his coming with barely repressed terror, shutting her eyes to avoid having to see him. She doesn’t need to see him. As her subsequent comment to Swanee indicates, she’s quite familiar with “mean old Mr. Snowman,” quite familiar indeed.

This isn’t the first time Fargo the series has trafficked in the supernatural. Season Two was punctuated by alien vistations; Season Three gave us a character who was invisible to all electronic sensors, and another, played by Twin Peaks‘ Ray Wise, who can best be described as an avenging angel, meting out justice to the wicked. And there are precedents in the work of Joel and Ethan Coen, whose entire oeuvre is Fargo the TV show’s source material at least as much as Fargo the movie itself: Barton Fink, The Man Who Wasn’t There, The Hudsucker Proxy, and even The Big Lebowski—whose narrator, the Stranger played by Sam Elliott, shows up and interacts with the Dude before addressing the audience directly—all dabble in the paranormal, to name a few.

But neither the show nor the body of cinematic work that inspired it has, to my recollection, presented us with so pure a figure of horror as Mr. Snowman (played by Will Clinger, according to FX’s press notes on the season). With his blackened, frostbitten fingertips, his missing nose, his pale gray skin, and his ability to change the atmosphere surrounding him, he’s more like a White Walker or one of their wights than anything we’ve seen on the show before. Why series creator and episode co-writer (with Stefani Robinson) Noah Hawley decided to veer so hard and so far in a horror direction with this entity is a mystery, at least for now.

If you couldn’t already guess, I don’t have a problem with it! Think of horror—and fantasy, and science fiction—as a form of vocabulary through which we articulate feelings and fears that everyday language is incapable of expressing. Isn’t fear, and the feelings it engenders, Fargo‘s stock in trade?

There’s certainly a lot for our protagonists—I won’t say heroes, since what’s a hero—to fear in this episode.

If you’re Constant Calamita and Rabbi Milligan, you have to worry about your botched hit against Lemuel Cannon putting you in Loy Cannon’s crosshairs. The Rabbi talks himself out of trouble, for the most part; Calamita earns himself a gnarly burn on his face for his murderous efforts. (Given that his driver when he’s stopped by Cannon’s men gets burned to death, he gets off easy.)

If you’re Josto Fadda and Ebal Violante, you have to worry that despite being the boss and consigliere of the Fadda family respectively, you have no idea what baby brother Gaetano Fadda is getting up to without consulting you, an argument eventually hashed out at gundpoint before Gaetano relents.

And if you’re Josto, you should be worried about your affair with murder-nurse Oraetta Mayflower, who you’re lucky is only asphyxiating you for the erotic effect.

If you’re Ethelrida Smutny, besides mean old Mr. Snowman, you have to worry about your discovery of Miss Mayflower’s trophy closet, where she keeps the newspaper obituaries of every patient she’s murdered, along with the personal effects she stole from them.

If you’re Detective Odis Weff, you have to worry that U.S. Marshal Dick “Deafy” Wickware is sticking around Kansas City despite your best efforts to throw him off the trail, and that he’s quickly wising up to your connections to the local Italians—an ethnicity he has some experience with in a lynching capacity from back in Salt Lake City.

If you’re Dibrell Smutny, you have to worry about your husband Thurman obliviously paying off his debt to Loy Cannon with Cannon’s own stolen cash, recognizable as such from the telltale scent of vomit that Zelmare couldn’t quite wash off.

And if you’re Loy Cannon…well, you haven’t seen the Godfather movies since they’re decades in the future, so you don’t know that surrounding yourself with oranges is bad luck for any gangster, but you’d better worry about it nonetheless.

Yes, mean old Mr. Snowman has plenty of company when it comes to reasons for Fargo‘s characters to be afraid. I’m just curious to find out when all those debts of fear come due.

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

Where to stream Fargo