After eight long episodes of Noah Hawley’s literally brain-teasing “Legion,” it’s a comparative relief to get back to the familiar footing of his first hit show, “Fargo” (10 p.m. Eastern Wednesdays on FX), which launched its third season with a 90-minute premiere. The “X-Men” spinoff “Legion” asked viewers to follow the pathways of a mutant’s brain, but “Fargo” allows us to kick back and follow the creatively crazy connections between thick-accented folks in the north woods.
Set in 2010 in an unnamed Minnesota town that isn’t too far from the Twin Cities suburb of Eden Prairie, Season 3 introduces us to several groups of people who aren’t connected yet, but will be as the story moves forward.
Helped by makeup and camera tricks, Ewan McGregor plays brothers Emmitt and Ray Stussy. Emmit looks like Ewan McGregor with a perm, whereas Ray looks like former Twins baseball player Dan Gladden. Emmitt runs a real-estate business that seems to be unusually above board by “Fargo” standards, although Ray intimates that Emmit benefited from an unfair cut of the family inheritance.
A man named Varga (David Thewlis) sweeps in and basically tells Emmit and his partner, Sy (Michael Stuhlbarg), that he’s going to use their company to launder money. His leverage is partly that the Stussy’s $1 million bailout loan came from fishy circumstances, but Varga also uses the strength of his personality. It’s similar to Billy Bob Thornton in Season 1, except not overtly scary; Varga gives off an even more understated vibe where you can’t say no to him.
The more entertaining story branch is that of Ray, a parole officer. He bribes low-level criminal “moron” – as described by both Ray and the criminal himself – Maurice (Scoot McNairy) to steal a valuable vintage stamp from his brother’s house. Through an entertaining Rube Goldbergian series of circumstances, Maurice goes to the wrong town, the wrong house, and takes the wrong stamps. He also kills an unfortunate old guy named Ennis Stussy in the process.
Then, in Season 3’s answer to the movie’s wood chipper, Ray and his parolee girlfriend Nikki (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) purposely “accidentally” drop an air conditioner on Maurice in order to cut ties with this disastrous plot.
Filling the role of small-town cop this time around is Carrie Coon as Gloria Burgle, who is climbing toward the police chief position in Eden Valley. Ennis is her stepdad, so his murder – by being frozen in the freezer? (honestly, it’s hard to tell what’s going on there) – is not only weird, it’s also personal. The plot thickens when she discovers a box of old children’s books under Ennis’ floorboards.
Why hide such as thing? My guess is that those are books from communist East Berlin, and Ennis is the state official we saw in the 1988 prologue framing a citizen for murder.
With “Fargo,” it’s hard to not use the bulk of a blog post to recount the convoluted (though admittedly fun) plot – especially since it’s a way to give me a better handle on it. But the characters are equally entertaining.
Probably the most “Yep, those are upper Midwesterners” scene is when Ennis gives his grandson an intricate carving he made to commemorate their camping trip. He says the garbage can is under the sink if he doesn’t want it. That’s sentimentality, Minnesota style. Smaller things like Ennis saying “strawburries” further exemplify the attention to detail (albeit stereotypical detail) Hawley’s show is famous for.
The scene-stealer, not surprisingly, is McGregor, although it’s surprising how he disappears into the role of Ray. While Emmit looks like McGregor, I wouldn’t have known Ray is also played by the actor if I hadn’t heard beforehand. Winstead adds sex appeal to the proceedings, and it’s a typically odd “Fargo” touch that Ray and Nikki excel in low-level bridge tournaments and supplement their income with winnings. They are thrilled to be the “third runner-up” at an area tournament.
Thematically, I don’t yet know where Season 3 is headed. Season 1 was about a force of evil (Thornton’s character) infecting everyone, and Season 2 was about a 1970s housewife (Kirsten Dunst) and her crushed dreams of a better life in California. Again in Season 3, these characters are (or feel they are) trapped in their circumstances, but a wider social commentary has yet to emerge.
Still, worries that Hawley’s storytelling might be getting too ephemeral are unfounded – “Legion” is an entirely separate thing. “Fargo” remains one of TV’s best shows, and I’ll happily stick around to see what he has in mind for Season 3.