Fargo’s Craziest Episode Is One We Really Should Have Seen Coming
(Deus ex machina, indeed.)
The FX series drafts a Season 1 star to help deliver its most ambitious hour yet.
BY JOANNA ROBINSON
The ninth episode of Fargo’s second season, “The Castle,” tied up all kinds of loose ends while also creating a whole new set of questions. We’ll explore how the bloody hour of television delivered on a promise creator Noah Hawley made well over a year ago. But first, for you own protection, mind the spoilers, doncha know?
When Hawley spoke to Vanity Fair last June about Season 1 of Fargo he said—and has since often repeated—that he had a pretty clear concept when it came to planning out an anthology:
The anthology is so exciting in that as long as it gives you that feeling that you’re watching a Coen brothers movie then really you can do just about anything. I like this idea of the history of true crime in the Midwest. We’re just opening to another chapter. It might reference the movie or it might reference this season. It could go either way.
We should have known to take him more literally. The latest episode opens on a bookcase and a slim volume titled—you guessed it—“The History of True Crime in the Mid West” and the book falls open to reveal a riff on the opening disclaimer (this will be important later).
Then Season 1 star Martin Freeman narrates (in his native British accent) the remainder of the episode as if he were reading from the chapter on Luverne, Minnesota, covering the Massacre at Sioux Falls. It’s a brilliant and quirky bit of frame narrative that not only brings back Freeman and delivers on Hawley’s overall concept for a Fargo anthology, but also sets up a truly audacious ending.
Because all those Season 2 hints and teases about UFOs and lights in the sky come to bear in the final minutes of the episode as Lou Solverson (Lou Solverson), Peggy Blumquist (Kirsten Dunst), and Ed Blumquist (Jesse Plemons) are saved from certain death by a deus ex machina in the shape of a bonafide spaceship. Lou is suffering from a head wound, so we might doubt his perspective but then Peggy plainly says to a gobsmacked Ed, “It’s just a flyin’ saucer. We gotta go.” So that’s confirmation that within this world we’re watching aliens and UFOs do exist. But what do they mean?
When speaking with Vanity Fair just before Season 2 began, the cast weighed in on the UFOs. Wilson was right to say, “Trust me that gets weirder” and it’s possible that Jeffrey Donovan claimed the lights were “always intended it to be a weather balloon” because his character didn’t survive to see this episode. Sometimes actors aren’t privy to episodes they don’t film. Hawley said of the UFO angle and the 1970s, “There really was this sense like we’re being watched. We can’t trust anything. So all of that paranoia of the American moment plays into those elements . . . Look, the Coens’ universe is very much a place where you have to accept the mystery and figure out . . . does it mean something? Does it not mean something?”
We could take Season 2’s earlier reference to “The War of the Worlds” literally. “No one would have believed, in the last years of the 19th century, that human affairs were being watched from the timeless worlds of space. . .And yet, across the gulf of space, minds immeasurably superior to ours regarded this Earth with envious eyes, and slowly, and surely, they drew their plans against us.”
But the interference from the spaceships in this season don’t seem like the actions of a jealous alien race. There’s an almost moral judgment at play here. The lights in the sky resulted in Rye Gerhardt’s death (one he surely deserved) and Lou Solverson’s salvation (also deserved). But the lights also saved Ed and Peggy by seeking out and blinding Hanzee. While Ed and Peggy may be more deserving of life than Hanzee Dent is, they’re certainly not innocents. Still, since Fargo Season 1 was so preoccupied with the notion of good and evil and biblical justice, it’s tempting to slot Season 2’s powerful presence in the sky into the role of divine intervention.
The Coens have long been preoccupied with the notion of divine intervention from the life-saving flood in O Brother Where Art Thou to the wrath-of-god tornados of A Serious Man. And back in Fargo Season 1, a mysterious shower of fish from the sky temporarily saved Martin Freeman.
But, then, it’s hard to credit this episode of the show with leaning too hard into “good triumphs over evil” when we also got the senseless death (or maybe just collapse?) of Cristin Milioti’s character Betsey Solverson. Remember that the ring from Betsey’s coffee (which she used to swallow her useless placebo pill) turned Molly’s drawing of the sun into a flying saucer. So maybe the spaceships are just a dispassionate harbinger of death.
That was certainly the case in the Coen Brothers film The Man Who Wasn’t There. Billy Bob Thornton’s character sees a UFO in the sky just before going to his death in the electric chair with the walls of his prison framing the ship in a similar way the walls of the Sioux Falls Motor Motel framed the ship on Fargo.
But in the end the bigger question is whether the UFOs are actually there at all. The episode’s frame narrative throws the whole thing into doubt. Freeman’s voice over includes phrases like “historians of the region have long debated the next two words spoken” meaning this isn’t an objective story we’re seeing. To put it in X-Files terms, this is “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space.” So was it really a flying saucer that saved Lou Solverson from the Massacre at Sioux Falls? Well, we’d have to ask Keith Carradine’s version of the character to get the straight story and, if rumor is to be believed, we might get to do just that. Then again, he might just give us the same line he gave Lorne Malvo back in Season 1. “I’d tell you the details, but it’d sound like I made them up.”
Of course, the UFOS and “The History of True Crime in the Mid West” weren’t the only significant callbacks of the episode. The fact that Hanzee orchestrated the 1979 Massacre at Sioux Falls dovetails nicely with the season’s cold open of a fake Ronald Reagan movie called The Massacre at Sioux Falls featuring the dead bodies of slain white cavalry men.
Hawley keeps pushing the line of where he’s willing to go with a show that seemed, initially, like a strange knock-off of that famous Coen Brothers movie. But for each boundary pushed—be it time period, frame narratives, or the paranormal—Hawley always manages to connect the dots back to the Coens. And that’s what makes Fargo stand out in a sea of reboots, remakes, and sequels as one of the strongest stories of 2015.
http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/201 ... stle-recap 
