“You’re a little touched.”
In the sixth episode of Fargo: Season 2, Lou tells Bear, “This kind of thing didn’t work in Westerns and it’s not going to work tonight.” But “Rhinoceros” was the episode where Fargo fully embraced its Western roots, and offered incredibly tense showdown after incredibly tense showdown, all with fantastic payoff.
Full spoilers in the “Rhinoceros” review below.
Fargo grabbed you by the gut and didn’t let go for the entire length of this week’s episode. It’s a credit to Jeffrey Reiner’s directing that the scenes where loaded conversations between two characters were just as tense as scenes where guns were pointed directly in characters’ faces. “Rhinoceros” punctuated these moments with brief flashes of humor, but still ratcheted up the drama until that final quiet scene.
Nick Offerman as Karl Weathers on Fargo
And wow. Just, wow. This episode feels like a two-parter with last week’s fantastic “The Gift of the Magi”; then war came to the Gerhardts and the Kansas City syndicate, and now war comes to the Blumquists and the police in Luverne. “Rhinoceros” picked up shortly after the end of the previous episode, with Lou Solverson and the rest of the police escorting Ed to the Luverne station while Peggy tried to resist. Over at the Gerhardts’ farm, Bear learned about Charlie’s incarceration and physically confronted Dodd about it, who then spun the situation around to say Bear needed to be beat with a belt for his insolence.
Floyd managed to stop that ridiculous just in time, but if there ever was a sign of how her control over her family is slipping, which Joe Bulo noted to her when the Kansas City Syndicate turned down her compromise, it was in this scene. No one is acting according to how she thinks they should, with even Simone, who Floyd clearly views as a potential successor, being the one who ultimately betrays their family. While “Rhinoceros” probably isn’t the end of the Gerhardts, they might have lost more than they gained when Floyd sent Bear and Dodd off to get Charlie back from the police.
Angus Sampson as Bear Gerhardt on Fargo
Fargo leaned heavily on its repeated, self-aware use of split screen to depict the various plot threads playing out: Dodd and Bear head to get Charlie, Mike Milligan takes Simone’s tip that they have headed out, Lou interrogates Ed at the police station and Hank stays with Peggy at the Blumquist home. It’s a lot of story to balance, and Fargo does it with ease, never losing the tension or momentum as it switches from one collision of characters to the next. I was just as on edge watching Hank trying to wrap his mind around Peggy’s inability to realize the scope of the trouble she and Ed are in as I was when Bear was holding a gun to Karl Weathers’ head. (Hank saying to Peggy “you’re a little touched” remains one of my favorite Fargo moments ever.)
Noah Hawley’s nod to Westerns only underlined just how much these various showdown scenes paid homage to those films, and Reiner shot these sequences as one would a war movie even though the scale was relatively much smaller. There was an excellent execution of the parallels between the wars Hank and Lou and Karl fought and them defending their “troops” against enemy in Luverne that highlighted the Wild West quality of this season’s arc — and we haven’t even gotten to the massacre at Sioux Falls yet.
We want to hear it.
Also worth shouting out is Mike Milligan’s “Jabberwocky” monologue. If it sounded like he was saying nonsense, that’s because he was; the famous excerpt from Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There” is considered one of the greatest nonsense poems ever written. Tied in with the show’s usage of Albert Camus and O. Henry stories, the use of “Jabberwocky” is another way to reference the absurdity of life amidst these high drama situations.
“Rhinoceros” was plot-forward, as the Gerhardts took on the police and largely were defeated (the hatable Peggy taking down the even more hatable Dodd was a delight, and Karl talking down Bear was maybe the best scene of the episode) and Ed escaped, with Hanzee on his trail. This climaxed the conflicts that were brewing for half the season, and — if Season 2 follows the structure of Season 1 — we likely are in for a couple of episodes of falling action as the various factions at war deal with their losses and come together again.
It’s such a pleasure to watch a show where every element is at the top of its game, and that’s how it felt watching “Rhinoceros” play out. It’s hard to pick out the one actor who stood out, because everyone — from Kirsten Dunst to Patrick Wilson to Jean Smart to Ted Danson to Nick Offerman, and the list continues — delivered fantastic performances. The way Fargo maintained the level of tension through every scene and hit climactic moment after climactic moment made “Rhinoceros” another standout episode.
