‘Crime is up, jobs are scarce’
After being teased with posters and film shoots, we get our first real world sighting of Ronald Reagan this week. Cult actor Bruce Campbell steps up to the plate with a great impression, wowing the citizens of Fargo at a local hustings with his spiel about religion, education, family, spiritual revival, getting rid of big government and a “rendezvous with destiny”.
“My father was a salesman,” he tells the crowd. Lou seems to be the only person in the county not buying it, and he draws a short straw, getting to escort Reagan’s bus around to hear more of his heartfelt tales: “Where some saw a drowning man, I saw a life to save …”
Reagan joins Lou in the restroom and swaps war stories, matching Lou’s note about serving in the Mekong Delta with a tale about “a Nazi bastard” who “had us cornered”. Which turns out to be from one of his movies, of course. Lou cuts through Reagan’s utter confidence in the power of Americans to solve any challenge: “But how?” he asks. There’s no answer.
‘Just a little housekeeping – let’s kill ourselves some deer’
As early Reaganomics works its magic on Fargo, elsewhere in a snow-covered forest there’s another example of “troubled and afflicted mankind” tearing itself apart. The North Dakota goon squad loads up its guns (and arrows) to take down the Gerhardts. Hanzee interrupts the “hunting trip” and cuts the throats of one of Mike Milligan’s twin sidekicks. Blood and snow: it’s the Fargo way.
‘By a butcher?’
Hanzee returns to the Gerhardt farm with Rye’s belt buckle and a story about his killer. Just as he starts to explain to Floyd that her youngest son was killed by Ed the butcher from Bud’s Meats, Dodd catches his eye: you mean the Butcher of Laverne, don’t you? They spin a story on the hoof about a contract man from Kansas City and Rye being a bargaining chip in the whole intercity affair. OK, then, that’s one honourable death from the Gerhardt spin doctors for Rye.
The tail of the snake
More marital confusion for the Blomquists as Peggy and Ed flip between wanting to run and wanting to stay. Ed wakes in the middle of the night to find Peggy planning for her trip to California (a trip he’s got no idea about). She admits that Constance saw the car. He’s solid in his thoughts: “Whatever comes, we’ll deal with it or it’ll deal with us. Figure it out, stay together, make it work.”
Peggy does figure it out: “You want to buy my car?” she asks Sonny, who offers her $700. Peggy takes it – better than $1,400 tomorrow, she reasons.
‘Just point and shoot’
Charlie tries to step up to the Gerhardt plate but meets his match in Noreen, the nihilistic assistant in Bud’s Meats. With the strict “no witnesses” instruction ringing in his ears, he falls for Noreen’s morose charm: “Pig meat, cow meat, chicken meat … Halloween or Easter?” He comes back later – and Noreen throws him off again with a scream: “Ed!” she shouts. And in a weird bit of Fargo prophecy, Ed Blomquist becomes Ed the Butcher, hacking the Gerhardt goon with a cleaver as Bud’s Meats goes up in flames.
“You were right,” Peggy tells Ed as he bursts in with a new plan: let’s run. The police sirens outside call their bluff: it’s too late.
OK, then …
- “The man made a movie with a monkey!” Karl says, holding back the tears and trying to resist Reagan’s charms. Will Lou find out if Joan Crawford had crabs? No, he will not.
- As Mike Milligan proves to Simone Gerhardt when he opens a hatbox to reveal his colleague’s head, he’s not the world’s most romantic wrong-side-of-the-tracks lover.
- “It’s a shit sandwich: half-Gerhardt, half-Dakota city.”
- Has Molly seen a UFO too?
- “Any man can fire a gun, a longbow is an art.” Yes, right up until the point where someone shoots you in the head.
- “I’m just all left thumbs. I can fix the toaster.” More moving everyday scenes chez Solverson: Betsy hoping her nausea means she hasn’t been taking a placebo; Hank doing his best to goof around with Molly; Lou losing his cool and telling Reagan his dark theory that the “sickness of the world [is] inside my wife somehow”.
- “Some people are made of plastic.” The funk soundtracking Simone’s trip to see Mike is the Dramatics’ song Watcha See is Watcha Get, while Peggy’s bus trip plays out to Three Dog Night’s Shambala – did anyone else think she’d got on the bus to California?
