Fargo season 2 finale: Palindrome

The perfect ending

This is the end (MGM)

I can imagine some viewers aren’t entirely happy with the Fargo finale.

Last episode seemed to promise one last showdown between Hanzee and Detective Lou Solverson, with some Ed and Peggy thrown in for good measure.

But that didn’t happen. There wasn’t the traditional end-of-season climax.

Instead we were treated to a series of stray bullets, thwarted ambitions and interrupted conversations. And that fits just right.

The Gerhardt family were wiped out last week in the infamous massacre of Sioux Falls, and with them went the main gangster story of the show.

Mike Milligan, by a combination of dumb luck and a vengeful Native American assassin, defeated the crime syndicate from Fargo and handed their mini-empire to the Kansas City mafia.

The silent panning over the deceased Gerhardts, from Dodd in the cabin to Simone in the forest to Bear and Floyd in the motel parking lot, illustrates what’s been lost: family.

Only Mike doesn’t know that’s what’s been lost. So when he is placed behind a desk and told he’ll be handling accounts and be given a 401k instead of being crowned some criminal king, it all dawned.

A few weeks ago Mike said he couldn’t be stopped because he’s ‘the future’ — and he was right. But the future is the 80s, and 80s is the era in which crime became business and business became crime.

The Gerhardts didn’t just die. Their whole way of living did.

The lost art of conversation

I started with Mike’s ending because it is the most definitive. The stories of core characters Ed and Peggy, Hanzee, and the Solversons are abrupt, mysterious and ‘life goes on’ respectively.

For Ed, it’s pretty straightforward. He’s dead.

During the chase sequence early in the episode, he gets struck by a stray bullet from Hanzee’s rifle. And that ultimately does him in.

Ed doesn’t sign off with a grand romantic speech to Peggy; no, in fact he dumps her seconds before succumbing to his injury.

“This isn’t going to work out,” he tells her, explaining that he just wanted to get back to how things were and she wanted to fix something that wasn’t broken.

But Ed was always simple. He was a good man, strong and brave and loyal, but he was secondary to his wife.

In a show packed full of phenomenal performances, I think Kirsten Dunst delivers the best of them all — and I wasn’t her biggest fan previously.

She’s desperate and delusional, scatterbrained but savvy, powerful yet powerless. A lot of the conflict in this series stems from Peggy’s dogged refusal to accept her life as it is, and also her refusal to understand herself and her situation.

Zack Handlen at The AV Club has a wonderful idea about the end of Peggy’s story. I think he’s on the money.

It ties in with the episode’s big speech, given by Sheriff Ted Danson to explain those weird drawings in his study.

It turns out he was trying to construct a language, one based on symbols, one that would help prevent the kind of miscommunication, misunderstanding and suffering that caused this whole mess in the first place.

It’s beautiful and foolish. And it completely cuts to the core of Peggy’s dilemma.

She doesn’t know. And she isn’t heard. Her experience is not recognised; not ever by Ed, and not in the finale in her scene with Lou.

Yes, she’s pretty crazy. And yes, lives were lost, including her husband’s. This is what Lou is thinking about: Ed the heroic husband dying to protect his darling Peggy.

Peggy tries to explain, she really does, that she’s been stifled, that she has little agency in her life.

She’s angry and upset and confused, not just about Ed but about it all, about her life. But she doesn’t know how to express herself, she can’t communicate.

So it comes out as a rant, insensitive and unhinged, and thus Lou - like everyone else in Luverne - shuts her up. “People died Peggy.”

And we don’t see her again. Crushed by judgement, lost in feelings she doesn’t understand.

That’s why the Hank’s language is needed, even if it’d never work.

Visions of the future

So Betsy didn’t die — yet. She will, and it probably won’t be long from now, but the perfect Minnesota couple get a few more months (or years).

What she sees in her cancer vision at the episode’s outset is the future without her, and it’s pretty great — but with a tragic tinge. Her husband and her daughter live on, and create a really nice life. (Hooray for the old cast cameo!)

But there’s a doom overhead as well: Hanzee, and all the evil he represents. (probably including Malvo)

What her arc shows is the fight for life. Ultimately it doesn’t matter that she feels let down by who she is, it doesn’t matter that she’s helpless in this state; she will struggle to live and to be a mother, a wife and daughter.

When Maureen tells her about Albert Camus’ ideas on the absurdity of life and death, she tuts it away: ‘Well you can tell he didn’t have an 11-year old daughter’.

Tripoli

And so Hanzee, who was enthralling mystery all season long remains that way till the end.

He escapes the authorities, that much we know, and he changes his face and name, that much we know.

The name he adopts - Tripoli - is that of the mob boss 30 years from then in the first season of Fargo. Is that just a wink or canon? I suppose it doesn’t matter.

He didn’t get the haircut that would allow him to leave this life behind. But it looks like he’ll get a new face (through the wonder of plastic surgery) and maybe this time he’ll be the boss, instead of throwing his lot in with some existing force like the Gerhardts.

One of my favourite seasons ever

This was my first TV series as a critic, and there’s been some growing pains. I hope to the few who have kept on reading (I know not many actually watch the show in the UK) enjoyed my take. It’s been a real privilege covering it.

My overall thoughts on Fargo are overwhelmingly positive. The first season was a masterpiece, but it felt like it borrowed so much from the original Coen Brothers film.

This one, on the other hand, was a true original. And was better for that reason. The air of unpredictability, the range of characters, the purity of Noah Hawley’s vision — there’s nothing quite like it currently on air.

It didn’t provide easy answers, or simple ideas. It was about America, and all its contradictions. It was a myth, with some things better left unexplained. It was a morality play, in which bad decisions were made again and again.

Not even the aliens could ruin it.