‘Fargo’ Season 4 Episode 6 Recap: Life During Wartime

I like art when it’s weirder than it needs to be. That historically has been one of the things I’ve liked best about Fargo: It’s weirder than it needs to be. Think of Lorne Malvo’s batshit extended flashback in Season One, or the prophetic dream soundtracked in part by Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” in Season Two, or V.M. Varga’s whole deal in Season Three. None of these things needed to be that way, but they were, because weirdness is where art lives.

Perhaps that’s why, in the least weird episode of Fargo Season Four to date, I keep thinking of the incredibly morose and shadowy birthday celebration (complete with creepy singing) that the Smutnys, fresh from the takeover of their family business by Loy Cannon, sing to their daughter Ethelrida. Happy birthday to you, kid! It’s really weird around here!

Beyond that momentary flash of peculiarity, this episode (“Camp Elegance”) tells a series of pretty straightforward stories. Detective Odis Weff, for instance, is paid a visit by Loy and his boys, who nearly choke him out on the floor Anton Chigurh–style. But they want him alive, and they want him working against his Italian paymasters, in hopes that he can take Loy’s son Satchel away from the Fadda mansion now that the two mobs are, after the murder of Doctor Senator, clearly at war. (U.S. Marshal Dick “Deafy” Wickware sees this all from his car across the street, by the way.)

But Odis never gets the chance—he’s waylaid by trigger-happy hitman Constant Calamita on behalf of his twitchy boss Josto Fadda, who wants Weff to track down his rogue brother Gaetano, and to keep an eye on Calamita, who was Gaetano’s triggerman in the Doctor Senator hit after all.

Gaetano, however, has problems of his own. Acting on Loy’s behalf, our stick-up girls Zelmare Roulette and Swanee Capps blast their way through his guards and knock him out with a well-placed bullet to the side of the skull. When he comes to, he’s chained to a chair in a Cannon warehouse, where Omie Sparkman (Corey Hendrix), the one-eyed muscle who nearly suffocated Odis with his own shower curtain, will be practicing his boxing moves on the guy. Tough break for the Italian mob’s biggest tough guy.

It gets worse for Gaetano, though he doesn’t know it yet. Calling in one of his more milquetoast underlings, Antoon Dumini (Sean Fortunato), Josto instructs him to drive Loy’s son Satchel out to the middle of nowhere and kill him. Dumini has problems with this order in and of itself—he doesn’t seem like the type to kill a kid—but he additionally protests, correctly, that killing Satchel will almost certainly lead to the deaths of Josto’s younger brothers Gaetano and Zero, both of whom are in Cannon’s clutches now. But this seems to be exactly the outcome Josto is counting on. Why deal with a power struggle directly when you can count on your enemies to take care of the problem for you, once and for all?

Josto makes a mistake, though, when he tells Rabbi Milligan “The kid’s done.” The Irish turncoat is fond of Satchel, and has long promised that he’d run away with him once the shooting starts. So Milligan braces Antoon’s wife Naneeda (Cruz Gonzalez-Cadel) until he finds out that Dumini has taken Satchel to Camp Elegance, the POW camp where he was interred during World War II.

Milligan arrives just in time…to kill Dumini after he’s already decided against going through with the hit and put his gun back in his pocket. Of course, Milligan has no way of knowing this. Sometimes acting out of an abundance of caution in this line of work gets people killed unnecessarily. But now he and Satchel will indeed have to lam it, with both sides likely hunting them down.

And oh yeah, Oraetta successfully bullshits her way through her boss Doctor Harvard’s receipt of Ethelrida’s anonymous tip ratting her out, though at the end of the episode it sure seems like she’s thrown caution to the wind and killed a patient with gout whose moans have been driving half the hospital crazy. You know those angels of mercy—once you pop, you can’t stop.

Directed by Dana Gonzales from a script by creator Noah Hawley, Francesca Sloane, Enzo Mileti, and Scott Wilson, this is not a particularly twisty episode, nor a particularly meaty one. We’ve got a mob war kicking off, so some people are getting killed, some people are getting put on a list to be killed, and some people—like Fadda family consigliere Ebal Violante, who returns from New York with instructions from the bosses that Josto must make peace with his brother and wrap up the battle with the Cannons (both of which are easier said than done) only to discover that his respected counterpart Doctor Senator has been killed—just want to slam the brakes on the whole thing. But if there’s one constant (Calamita) in all four seasons of Fargo, it’s that violence is a snowball rolling downhill. After a certain point there’s no stopping it; powered by its own immutable logic, it keeps rolling and rolling and growing and growing, and your only choices are to endure the avalanche or run like hell. Don’t forget to blow those candles out before you go.

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.

Watch Fargo Season 4 Episode 6 ("Camp Elegance") on Hulu