Fargo recap: season one, episode six – Buridan's Ass
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Version 0 of 1. This blog is for Fargo viewers watching the Sunday night UK transmission on Channel 4 – if you've seen ahead, please refrain from posting advance spoilers. Catch up with Richard Vine's episode five recap 'Thought about it – the 60/40 thing doesn't work for me' And … breathe. Was anyone expecting that? The blizzard blew into town – the perfect storm, or what have you – and by the end we've got Molly lying in the snow, a police massacre, another plague and Lester working on his own exit strategy. To be fair, we have seen some pretty unhinged behaviour from Lorne Malvo so far – plagues of crickets, showers of blood, murder, behaviour that is "two-faced" as Gus puts it – but the combination of premeditation and ruthlessness here was on a different level. After keeping Don Chumpf locked up in his own house overnight, Malvo reveals the first two elements of his plan to the world's slowest accomplice (OK, one element and a insult). "Part one: make sure the cops are too busy to respond. Part two: have you had Turkish Delight? It's disgusting." Chumpf notes the duffel bags on the floor, the paper taped up on his windows, goofs off with the voice changer, makes the call to Stavros – and still doesn't realise how close to death he is. Before he can even crack another Darth Vader line, he's gagged, duct-taped to a chair with a unloaded shotgun in his hand, and watching in horror as Malvo starts taking pot-shots at passersby through the kitchen window. Malvo drives off, and listens to the police chatter on the walkie-talkie he acquired last week. The Swat team surround Chumpf's house, trigger a gun that Malvo left rigged to a trip wire, and, thinking that they're under fire, break down the door. Inside, in the dark , Chumpf doesn't stand a chance. His gun-toting silhouette looks like an immediate threat; his muffled cries for mercy lost in a hail of bullets. The ladies of Bemidji aren't going to be welcomed into that Turkish Delight palace of dreams any time soon. 'They're shooting up the block – it's goddamn world war three!' The drums beat – and there's Numbers and Wrench, the assets deployed by the mai tai-drinking mobsters of Duluth. They run Malvo off the road, and jump out, pumping bullets into his car. The blizzard is so intense that they can't see much further than the end of their machine guns. Malvo escapes, catches his breath, pulls out a knife, and leaves a trail of his own blood in the snow. It's enough to lure Mr Numbers to his death. The swirling whiteout adds to the fairytale quality of this scene, as the Big Bad Wolf Malvo disappears into the snow, while Gus panics and shoots Molly, a desperate, heartbreaking mistake. 'I gave it back' Stavros has a solution to free him from the biblical plague that's hounding him – he reburies the briefcase in the snow near the fence where he found it a decade earlier. But as he drives back home, there's another plague. This time it's nothing to do with the hand of Malvo – the sky is raining fish. Stavros pulls over as he sees a car crashed on the side of the road, and his firstborn son dead. 'You've been a burden my whole life – I'm done' Lester's brother Chaz disowns him – and another plot is hatched. Chaz is sure that Lester is somehow mixed up in the murders, and suggests that the only way to escape further police suspicion is for Lester to "give them someone". For once Lester listens to his smug little brother. Once we caught sight of the patient bandaged up like The Mummy in the hospital bed, you may have guessed what was in Lester's mind – but I certainly didn't expect Lester to sneak back into the hospital after running around town leaving a trail of evidence to implicate his brother (and his pesky nephew) in Pearl's murder. Would there really be another patient in the room where Lester was being kept under police guard? Still, it was an entertaining subplot that played out with a fun twist, lightening the mood in an episode filled with doom. The speed at which we're rattling towards Malvo's endgame could be partly down to the one-off nature of this season; like True Detective, we're promised a new story with a new cast if it gets recommissioned, so the show needs to get on with it (we've only got four episodes left). Buridan's Ass felt like an episode in which the stakes were raised along with the body count. Will Molly survive the shooting? It's an understatement to say that Fargo would be a very different show without her. What's Malvo got planned for part three of his plan? Has Stavros got anything else to lose? And will Mr Wrench find Malvo? Notes, quotes and the like • This week's entry from the Big Book of Fargo Fables is Buridan's Ass. It's another philosophical head-scratcher: a donkey stands between food on one side and water on the other; equally hungry and thirsty, it dies because it can't decide whether to eat or drink first. Maybe Molly could solve this one – her comeback about the man who was dying to do some good ("Why didn't the fellow just go work for a charity?") really cut through the existential doubt. • "Why is there paper on the windows?" Run Don, run! Oh, too late. • Beeper car keys really come in handy when you're "borrowing" a car and you don't know what it looks like. • "Kill and be killed, get the bag, that's the message." The Duluth boss breaks it down. • Will the money in the briefcase turn out to be Fargo's MacGuffin, passed on to the next set of characters for season two? • More wolves in the script that Malvo writes for the final blackmail phone call. • "Heck of a lot of bullets for a fender-bender." Molly calls it. • This week's entry for the Sounds Of Fargo playlist is a 1960 tune called Piccola by Italian singer Adriano Celentano. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNxIrqYUGj0 (what a great cover). For anyone wondering about the Numbers/Wrench drum theme, it was written by composer Jefferson Russo for the show. |