Fargo season 2 episode 2 review: Before The Law

As families fall apart, everything is at stake

Ted Danson in Fargo (MGM (FX))

The events of last week have caused schism from Fargo to Luverne.

“Isn’t it a minor miracle,” Kansas gangster Mike Milligan tells Ted Danson’s Hank Larsson ominously, “that in the state of the world today, two men could stand on the side of the road in winter and talk rationally while people all around are losing their minds?”

Milligan, played with mischievous villainy by Bokeem Woodbine, stalks around the second episode of the second season, serving as a recurring reminder of the mob war which the characters find themselves embroiled in.

The outside force coming to hurt them.

When he and his armed enforcers encounter the embearded Sheriff alone in the woods, there is a moment of eerie calm.

The threat of violence hangs in the air.

It is in this epoch that the episode exists: the eye of the hurricane.

As the police ponder what happened at the Waffle Hut, Ed and Peggy are dealing with the fallout from their deadly encounter with Rye Gerhardt, and Rye’s Fargo crime family is preparing for Milligan and the vast operation whom he represents.

I’m boss

Mother mobster Floyd (Jean Smart) wants to ensure her husband’s empire endures the crisis triggered by his cardiac episode.

She’s a pragmatist, she wants to hear out the Kansas takeover proposal.

But she’s also a woman, as we’re reminded in several scenes, and that means for all her steely competence she’s not boss in the eyes of family nor foe.

It sounds as though Floyd, however formidable, was Otto’s consigliare, her considered nature managing his ‘grind their bones’ fury.

“I’m boss,” says eldest son Dodd, a fired-up Jeffrey Donovan. He’s got that Otto bloodlust, but he’s reckless and his entitlement, Floyd thinks, could jeopardise everything.

As she recounts the story of the family’s rise, offering a big picture where so many in the series can’t see beyond the immediate, Dodd shrinks into his seat like an overgrown child.

That doesn’t mean he’ll concede, however.

The power vacuum threatens to rip this family apart before Kansas even makes their move — and they’ll be there to pick up the pieces.

The prisoner of we

The Gerhardts aren’t the only family increasingly at odds.

Ed and Peggy, so traumatised by last week’s hit-and-run-and-then-murder, are supposed to be united.

But while Ed desperately wants a return to the way things were, spending the episode cleaning up the mess, you get the impression Peggy almost wants to get caught.

She’s bringing her boss over to the house, wandering over to the scene of the crime, coming up with unconvincing lies.

“You’re a bit of a badgirl,” her unnamed boss tell her gleefully, upon realising she’s been stealing toilet paper from work.

She likes the thrill of the secret, that and it’s quite clear she doesn’t want things to go back to normal — she wants change.

But Ed is risking everything for normality.

In the spectacular scene at the episode’s close, Ed is caught in conversation by Officer Lou Solverson in the middle of the night.

Lou is only after bacon from his neighbourhood butcher, but Ed has the body in the back, the body Lou is looking for — it’s chopped into bits and half-fed into the meat grinder.

What’s more is that one of Rye’s severed fingers has smack in the middle of the Butcher shop, inches from the law enforcement’s feet.

This isn’t something that can stay secret for long.