Bruce Campbell as Ronald Reagan. This is not a drill.
Reagan comes to Minnesota in the latest episode of Fargo, while war comes to the Gerhardts and Kansas City syndicate.
Spoilers for Fargo: Season 2 “The Gift of the Magi” are contained below.
Leave it to Fargo for Bruce Campbell’s much anticipated guest appearance as Ronald Reagan not be the high point of Season 2’s fifth episode. This midpoint of the second season struck the perfect balance of stunning violence with deep emotional revelations. Fargo is currently running on all cylinders, and though good things aren’t coming to the Solversons, the Gerhardts or the Blumquists, it’s impossible to look away.
We want to hear it.
“The Gift of the Magi” opened by cutting between Governor Reagan’s speech in Fargo and Floyd taking the war to the Kansas City syndicate. Hopefully I wasn’t alone in having trouble focusing on what Reagan was saying because the Gerhardt men attacking the Kansas City crew was so engaging. We lost a Kitchen Brother to Hanzee here, which later caused some dangerous friction between Simone and Mike Milligan as he essentially told her, his fling and double agent, that this can never happen again. The Gerhardt crew decapitated Joe Bulo even, which is a clear sign that they aren’t going down without taking a whole lot of Kansas City men with them.
Meanwhile Hanzee delivered the bad news about Ed killing Rye to Floyd and Dodd, who then let his nephew Charlie go off to prove himself and murder “the butcher.” That proved harder for Charlie to do than he thought it would be, as a botched shot led to Ed and Noreen escaping and the butcher shop that Ed intended to buy burning down.
It’s there that the title “The Gift of the Magi” — the name borrowed from O. Henry’s 1905 short story — comes into play, because while all this drama played out at the butcher shop, Peggy decided not to run away to California and instead sold her car so she could give Ed the money he needed to buy the shop. In O. Henry’s story, a couple with modest means each sells the thing that’s most dear to them in order to get a special present for the other. The twist is that both of their presents complimented the thing the other sold, so they were unable to use them. In Fargo that translates to Peggy giving up her dreams of California and Ed literally watching his dream of owning the shop burn down around him, but there’s no comic irony here. The episode ends with a lingering shot of the Blumquists trapped in their home — and trapped in the framing of the shot by the hallway around them — as Fargo P.D. showed up at their door.
We want to hear it.
Albert Camus, whose themes and discussions of the futility of life Noah Hawley has been exploring all season (case in point: “The Myth of Sisyphus”), made a reappearance in this episode, and was used to underline the struggles facing these main characters. Noreen, the butcher shop cashier, was reading “The Myth of Sisyphus” in scenes with both Ed and Charlie, but it’s in Lou’s storyline that we most see Sisyphus’s struggle translate.
Lou took on an ancillary role as he accompanied Reagan around to his various speaking engagements, only having moments to shine when he admitted to Reagan in the bathroom that he felt the sickness of the world might have been what infected Betsy with cancer and when he got emotional in front of the burning butcher shop. This is the episode we see that Lou feels the weight of pushing that metaphorical boulder up the hill, wondering if it’s all worth it. As Noreen pointed out, Camus says the fight against death is futile — maybe Lou is finally wondering if he should give up. Reagan certainly doesn’t have any answers; he just believes in the power of the American.
Beyond the plot development, the quiet moments in “The Gift of the Magi” were simply stunning. From Betsy deciding to take the trial drug and being distracted by the UFO in Molly’s drawing and the idea of forces outside of her control to the sweet scene in the shop between Noreen and Charlie where he is trying to muster the courage to shoot Ed, Fargo wastes none of its screentime. There’s the sense that every moment has specific purpose. This series is delivering a master class in how outstanding television can be when its at the top of its game.
As Fargo: Season 2 reaches its midpoint, it is filling in the shades of its moral lessons and examinations to paint new portraits of American lives and struggles. The episode that was trumpeted for its Bruce Campbell guest appearances was overshadowed by the sacrifices its characters made for one another and the irreversible choices they are stuck with. Is it still worth pushing the boulder up the hill?
