‘Are you actualized fully?’
The episode starts with Peggy in the most Peggy position of all time, sitting on the stairs of her magazine hoarder basement with her head in her hands and her elbows on her high-waisted jeans. She’s talking to the founder of Wellspring that she has conjured in her mind and he tells her to stop thinking and start being. She begins to start being the person she wants to be, and that person is apparently someone who takes Dodd up to Ed’s uncle’s cabin in the woods.
On the ride up to the cabin — with the delicious split screen of Ed and Peggy side by side even while they’re next to each other in the car — Peggy is trying to solve the future and Ed is trying to get them out of their present predicament. He decides he’ll sell Dodd back to the Gerhardts, except they’re never home to answer the phone. Eventually he calls Mike Milligan, as we saw in the last episode. They plan to meet in Sioux Falls the next day. Cue the massacre.
‘This is just embarrassing’
Hank and Lou storm into Peggy’s magazine hoarder basement of dreams and find two dead Gerhardt men but no Ed and Peggy. Hank is embarrassed that he has to have a medic come and look at the nasty wound on his head, but, hey, them the breaks. The next we see of them, they’re stalking through the trees on the way to Ed’s uncle’s cabin the woods. How the heck did they find it? I bet we find out next episode.
‘Here were hanged 22 Sioux Indians’
Hanzee was lurking in the shadows outside of the Blomquists’ house the whole time, waiting to see where they went. He sees Peggy’s registration for Wellspring and heads off to meet Constance at the convention. On the way he stops by a bar where there is a plaque commemorating the killing of two dozen Indians – which someone has puked on. Inside, the bartender spits in his water and when he goes to leave the patrons surround him shouting insults. He caps two of them in the leg, giving a whole new meaning to Wounded Knee, and then pops the bartender in the head and mows down the two cops who come to arrest him. Was it justified? Probably, but it was certainly overkill.
When he gets to Constance, he holds her hostage until Peggy calls and Constance tries like hell and fails to get an address out of her. That Constance should have been a bill collector, the way she works that phone. Hanzee does get some clues and finds his way toward the cabin, harassing the owner of the gas station who Ed has befriended on the way.
‘Take that, you Nazi rat’
While at the cabin, Peggy is teaching Dodd some manners by stabbing him in the chest with an old steak knife. I think that should happen to every man who calls a woman a “whore”. While she’s watching Ronald Reagan in Desperate Journey on TV, he escapes his bonds and knocks her out. When Ed returns Dodd hoists him from the rafter and goes on a tear about how awful women are. Peggy stabs him in the foot, brains him with a poker and frees Ed.
‘I’m tired of this life’
Just as the Blomquists have the Dodd situation figured out, Hanzee shows up and shoots him in the head for calling him a half-breed. He then asks Peggy to cut his hair so he can look “professional”. He’s aching to actualise himself and society’s expectations of him in the same way that Peggy is. Just as she’s about to shear his first lock, Lou and Hank show up, Peggy stabs him in the arm, and he runs out into the woods, probably to go meet Mike Milligan in Sioux Falls and kill a bunch of people. Or maybe not.
OK then …
- The split screens were just amazing this episode, not only the one with Ed and Peggy in the car, but also the one where Ed is walking to the pay phone and Hanzee is driving to get him and the one where Peggy and Constance are on the phone connecting with Ed getting no answer from the Gerhardts.
- What do you think the word was supposed to be on that game of Hangman on the wall of the phone booth?
- Of course Ed drinks Pepsi. Ed drinking Pepsi is perhaps the most Ed character detail that we have witnessed all season.
- Do we think Constance is dead? I bet she is, but that would make me sad.
- The only thing worse than watching someone get stabbed in the foot is watching the handle break off the knife and the person take their foot off of it the wrong way. Ouchie!
- I loved Peggy saying, “We’re not trapped anymore,” in the car and then having to walk it back when Ed got upset.
- During Desperate Journey the man says to his lady that he will be her shield because one of them has to escape. Foreshadowing much?
- The ultimate irony is that Peggy is finally fully actualized by this whole caper. It was like hitting Rye was the catalyst to her new life. But now that she’s fully actualized, she’s an evil person. The events have tainted her evolution. If only she could have been content being a wife and a hairdresser, maybe none of this would have happened.
