fargo season 2 musings: an ode to lou solverson

I don't know why I feel inclined to write this, but alas, spoilers ahead...

I'm going to be honest with you guys, I didn't know where to start with this one. I tried to find a video of Mike and Lou's above interaction on YouTube but I couldn't so I had to settle for those gifs. But I think that right there, that is the most succinct way to summarize Fargo. But now I'm going to write like 300 million words because while Lou and Mike's conversation is succinct, it doesn't do this show justice. Fargo season 1 was so well done, interesting and entertaining, even though Brule told me like 100 million gazillion times how great season 2 was, I wasn't entirely sure I believed him (I'm an asshole guys. I doubt everything everyone tells me, no matter how much I trust and love them). So let me tell you, if you are expecting some stupid, talentless, sophomore slump, you are fucking wrong. The writers were all "you liked season 1... well we're doubling down bitches!". And double down they did. The second season is bloodier, funnier, smarter, and is quite possibly the best season of television I've ever seen. Hands down, it's a thing of beauty.

Typewriters: they're not just for women anymore!

This season was totally reconstructed from the last. It was actually jarring going from season 1 right into season 2. This season is set in 1979 so not only is it more colorful but the soundtrack is poppin (I listened to this end credits song, like 1 zillion times). They utilize the split screen technique that was widely popular in the 60's and 70's which was pretty cool and took a little time to get used to. Like at first I was like "what the what??" but it just.... fits like everything else in this perfect little show. There was also so much going on this season plot-wise, with 1970's politics ("the 70's were always coming, like a hang over"), the beginning of Reaganomics, women's liberation movement, the aftermath of the Civil Rights movement, Vietnam, aliens, but somehow it still doesn't feel overloaded. It's a testament to the writers that they can cram pack all these huge things together in such a cohesive manner, and yes, you did read that right. There are aliens this season. That's how fucking good Hawley and the writers are. I like to imagine them sitting around and being like "okay season 1 was pretty good guys, but kinda generic. Let's get crazy and see if we can pull it off." and suggestions are thrown out "No, talking buffalo aren't crazy enough, what's that Johnson? Aliens. Aliens will work quite well, thank you". Or maybe it was a bet between Hawley and some prick named Curt from Hawley's high school. Hawley's like "I could write anything and it would dabomb.com" and his friend's  like "okay well how about ALIENS in a show about a ton of murders in the Midwest during the late 1970's?" WELL HOW ABOUT ALIENS, CURT. HOW FUCKING ABOUT IT? Anyways.......

I'd say I swear I'm not crazy but that's just what crazy people say.

So this season rather than having a couple main players, we have a couple groups of main players. There's the Gerhardt crime family, Mike Milligan/Kitchen Brothers/Kansas City mafia, the Minnesota police, and Ed and Peggy. I love that there's all these big crime syndicates and the police and then a random couple, a butcher and his hairstylist wife. And in all actuality, this season happens SOLELY because of that random couple's actions (or maybe the alien's? Let's put a pin on that). If Peggy had done pretty much ANYTHING ELSE IN THE WORLD, Sioux Falls (my hands started to sweat just writing that.....) would've never happened. What was really cool too was the build up TO Sioux Falls. There were a couple references to it last season (Lou's little story to Malvo and, in passing, when Colin Hanks admits to his boss about letting Malvo go, he's like "It's Sioux Falls all over again!") so before the season even starts, you've already got this inherent dread. So what's the first shot we see season 2? A Native American actor waiting in the cold for Reagan with the big subtitles over the screen "MASSACRE AT SIOUX FALLS". I mean, FUUUUUCK, the writers didn't even ease you into it. Of course that massacre refers to a Native American massacre rather than the mob war/alien intervention we see this season but STILL. There's this whole build up to the war and you can sense it, everyone getting heated and all testosterone-y, but it's not until Peggy says to Ed (or maybe Constance?) about the Life Spring seminar in Sioux Falls that your stomach just falls to the ground. I swear I was like "NononononononoNOOO! DON'T DO IT LOU, LEAVE THEM ALL TO DIE" (Lou would never do that though, he's mother fucking LOU SOLVERSON). My favorite episode is the one that focuses almost entirely on Peggy and Ed (and Hanzee looking for them) hiding out in the cabin with Dodd held hostage. Ed keeps going to the market place thingy to make a call on a payphone, and in the background is a little hang man game, can you guess what the answer is.......... *starts sweating profusely* IT'S COMING (OMG OMG OMG I JUST REALIZED THAT WAS THE SAME EPISODE ED WAS HUNG BY DODD, HOLY FUCK THIS SHOW, THIS FUCKING SHOW!)

Spoiler alert Ed: you're not going to win this game.

I think my favorite part of this entire show is Lou Solverson. The first time I watched this I spent the entire time texting Brule saying things like "I love Lou soooooo much" and "Lou is sooooo dreamy". I mean, I loved Lou last season, being the only dude on the show that Malvo knew he couldn't fuck with, but it doesn't compare to this season. Before we only got a snippet of him and this time we get to see him with a young Molly, his wife Betsy, his father-in-law Hank, and hell, he even cares and protects Ed and Peggy. (Seriously, I'd watch 6 seasons and a movie just of Lou and Hank solving crimes and making fun of dumb cops together. I'd nominate that show for a theoretical Emmy and the movie for an Oscar. And they would win too!) Lou is kind, funny, and smart. He picks up bacon for his ailing wife, he reads his daughter bedtime stories, he stays up all night sitting on his porch with a shot gun tying knots to protect his family, he's one of probably only 2 cops that isn't bought by the Gerhardt family or the Kansas City mob in all of the Midwest (Hank is the other cop), he breaks light bulbs and put them around the doors to prevent the Gerhardt mob family from ambushing the police station, you know, the standard "good guy" stuff. But he's a veteran and a cop, so he's seen the worst parts of humanity but he isn't afraid of it. Instead, he acts as a defender to protect the best parts of humanity. It's his boulder to push. At the end of the day, it rolls back down the hill and the next morning he pushes the boulder back up. That's what makes him such a great character. He's not some goody two shoes, brown nosing ass wipe that you not-so-secretly hopes gets shot and dies forever.  He's flawed, he's conflicted, he fights, he's human.You root for him, just like his daughter Molly in season 1, and all you want is for him to make it home to bed with Betsy so he can say goodnight to all the ships at sea. *sigh*

 The best part of Lou is that sexy Minnesota accent *swoon*

One of the great things about this season was that it was set in 1979 and so it set up a very interesting dynamic with the women on the show. The women on the show are diverse, well written, and fucking AWESOME. Peggy is probably one of the most interesting characters I've EVER seen on TV and movies alike. I equal parts want to fucking strangle her and hold and protect her and Kirsten Dunst really nails it. I mean, that's Peggy. She could've played her a million different ways and it wouldn't have worked but she walked this really fine line where you go from empathizing and pitying her to fucking wanting to kill her for doing the DUMBEST FUCKING SHIT. (You hit a dude with your car, drive home with him in your windshield, pull into the garage and just.......make dinner? WHAT THE FUCK?) Peggy just wants to be her true self, her best self, essentially she doesn't want to be the token housewife, married and living in the suburbs of an ice tundra known as Minnesota (and girl... I feel you on that!) but the problem is, in 1979 the world isn't quite ready for women like that yet, at least not in the Midwest. She's trying to be someone she can't because of her time and circumstance but it's like she can see it, just out of reach, and its frustrating. That's why she's such an interesting character, you totally feel her frustration and relate but she does NOT act like a fucking normal person and that's when you just want to reach in the screen and slap some sense into her. I thought a lot about the scene at the end where she thinks Hanzee is smoking her and Ed out of the fridge in the market. From the first moment we met her, she's acted inappropriately, from not stopping when she hit Rye, to her weird self realization in front of a tied up Dodd, to stabbing him because he didn't say "thank you". I think her imagining that Hanzee smoking them out was her dealing with Ed's death, in the movie she where she originally sees this in, everyone gets out okay and they all live. Ed just died so she's imagining a world where he doesn't, that they make it out okay. Because that's who Peggy is, she's a dreamer, she doesn't live in the world that everyone else is in, she lives in the world that she thinks is better and refuses to acknowledge when something might derail the image in her head.

Peggy will stop stabbin' when she is GOOD AND READY, ED!

Then on the flip side of Peggy, you have Betsy, Lou's wife. And they couldn't be any more different. Betsy looks around and sees the world as it is, she's logical (between her and Lou, of COURSE Molly was going to be a bomb ass cop), I mean she works out exactly what had happened with Peggy and Rye before she is dismissed ("that seems a little crazy" YOU'RE NOT WRONG, HANK!) . She is a housewife, a stay at home mother, but she doesn't see it as a curse or a burden like Peggy. This is who she is, she is living the life she wants, the one she loves, and she's not any worse for it. I like that they had those two different view points because one life is not better than the other, being on your own or being a mother and a wife. It's all about what's the best life for you and being able to make that decision for yourself instead of being forced into it.

PREACH

Another bad bitch from this season is Floyd. Floyd is really fascinating because of her position in the Gerhardt family. I love how it starts off with the family meeting with her husband, Otto, just like some stereotypical mob family, like a Midwest German Godfather, and right away he has a stroke and Floyd's thurst to the head of the family, much to the chagrin of her son Dodd. There's a power struggle, which I'll talk about more in depth later, but she refuses to be dismissed and gives this great fucking speech to the Kansas City mob:

Maybe when you look at me, you see an old woman. And I am sixty-one. I've borne six children, had three miscarriages. Two of my sons are here today. Two were stillborn. My firstborn, Ellron, killed in Korea. Gook sniper took off half his head. The point is: don't assume just because I'm an old woman that my back is weak and my stomach's not strong. I make this counter because a deal is always better than war. But make no mistake. We'll fight to keep what's ours till the last man.

Floyd rejects the notion that because she's a woman that she can't be the boss too. When they discuss the family business in the kitchen, Dodd tries to kick his daughter Simone out of the kitchen because "she's a girl" and Floyd's all "and girls grow up to be women and change boy's diapers" (awwww snap!). I also liked this subtle thing between Dodd and Floyd, when she had him sit down at the table after challenging her authority in front of everyone, he pulls out a seat in the middle of the table for his mom and she walks around him and sits at the head of the table. Dodd's all "DAFUQ BITCH" and walks his ass around to the complete other head of the table so that they can yell to each other about who has the biggest balls (Floyd) and THEN she plays the mom card and forces him to eat some bread, the ultimate power play (BTW poor Dodd, he keeps being force fed. LOL).

OKAY so  here's this scene. I'm 100% sure no one wants me to go on and on about how much I love this scene and how much it means to me so I'm just going to throw out an unironic "YOU GO GIRL" for this scene because DAAAAAMN!

A main theme from this season was communication, or in many cases, the lack thereof. Whether it's Peggy not reporting that she hit Rye (which instigated everything that happened though I guess you might say Rye stepping out in the street to look at the UFO might be the real instigator but...) or Hanzee's betrayal and telling Floyd the wrong information, the lack of communication between these characters perpetuated the Murderpalooza '79. The two main couples, Peggy & Ed and Lou & Betsy, provided a really great juxtaposition of what a difference communication makes. Peggy and Ed have this big long talk about what they are going to do with their savings. Peggy wants to go to Sioux Falls for the Life Spring seminar to be her realest, truest self and Ed's like "okay but I want to buy the butcher shop so no to the seminar. You're good enough as you are" but what does Peggy do? She goes out and buys a ticket to the seminar, butcher shop be damned! Ed's like "are you fucking kidding me? We talked about this" and Peggy says the truest, realest thing she could say "well you talked, and I talked, so yeah but I don't think you heard anything I said." And she's not wrong, he didn't. And she didn't hear what he said. Even when they are running away with Dodd in the trunk of their car, they keep talking over each other, each having their own conversations and not taking a part in the other's. That's their eventual downfall, they don't hear each other, they don't work as a team. But on the other hand we have the Solversons, Lou and Betsy (and even Hank, while not technically a Solverson, I'm going to throw him in with them). They are constantly talking to each other, whether it's Betsy telling Lou her ideas for these murders or passing along a message from Hank, to going to Betsy's doctor's appointments and discussing her health, to Hank developing some sort of picture language in his own heartrending appeal to stop wars, to just straight up just basic ass checking in on each other. One kind of interesting thing is when Betsy gets really sick and Lou is out of town dealing with the trail of murders Hanzee is leaving behind him (but before Sioux Falls), things keep coming up where Lou doesn't get to talk to Betsy. That's super important because if he had gotten a hold of Noreen or Betsy and found out how sick she was, he would've peaced out of South Dakota so fast but instead he doesn't find out and stays with Hank in Sioux Falls and ends up saving his and Peggy's life. The Solversons are totally honest with each other, down to the hardest things to talk about. Lou asks Betsy after a particularly grim doctor's appointment if he should be treating her any different, she's like "no, me and you, we're a perfect pair, the dream team" and he's like okay well let me know. That's some real fucking shit right there, cutting through all euphemisms and just straight up asking "how should I treat you". They work together as a team and Ed and Peggy don't. That's why Ed ends up dead and Peggy arrested whereas the Solversons end the season going to bed together and saying goodnight to all the ships at sea.

Team Letsy!....Team Bou? Sure

One thing that is communicated though, rather brutally, is every one's attempt to "get a seat at the table". Fargo looks at all the different forms of hierarchy in life, whether it's domestic, institutional, capitalistic, what have you. I mentioned a little bit about Floyd and Dodd's power struggle earlier. Dodd is very clear that women canNOT be the boss. He thinks that it's his rightful position, one he inherited from his older brother dying in Korea and his dad having a stroke. He didn't work for it, he doesn't need to. He was groomed for this starting way back when he killed his first person when he was like a 6 year old kid. How his father took over the Midwest- "kill the king, be the king." Dodd undermines the real head of their family, Floyd, and looks for war with Kansas City because he thinks that's how power works and that's how he will keep it and get more. Kansas City is functioning on an entirely different system though, but that's not to say that they are above murder. Kansas City isn't your "mom and pop" mob organization, like the Gerhardts. They are capitalists, big business baby, living in a Reagan dream world, and they will kill you if you are not acquired peacefully and to keep the bottom line. When the Gerhardts are all taken out and all that's left is Johnny Baltimore ransacking the Gerhardts place (which by the way, was very eerie and sad. I mean, the Gerhardts were dirt bags but all of them, besides Dodd, were people who cared and made mistakes, and to see their big empty house being stripped of all its family heirlooms was a little unsettling), Mike Milligan and the remaining Kitchen brother explain to him that a king should always being his reign with an act of kindness and an act of cruelty, so that way your subjects know you are capable of both. Johnny Baltimore's only retort is that "This is America, we ain't got no kings!" Mike wisely says, "sure we do, we just call them something else". But "getting a seat at the table" doesn't necessarily mean the head of the table. Some people just want to be a part of the feast, to get their shot at the American dream. There's Peggy and Floyd, redefining what a women's place is, and Mike Milligan trying to move up in the corporate world, even Hanzee finally tries to get a step up, after he lies to Floyd to take out the Gerhardt family, he eventually becomes the boss that we see for a moment in season 1 (that Malvo takes out, Hanzee had that one coming for him)! That was the hope that Reagan brought during the end of the 70's, that there's not a challenge that can't be overcome by an American (I love when Lou asks Reagan "How?" and Reagan can't answer lol)

So what about the aliens? What does it all mean?? I'm gonna be real with you, this was my third time watching this, so I had a plan. I made a list of every time there's a UFO sighting, a reference, etc and then what happened right before or right after the UFO reference. I thought for sure I was going to crack some special deep meaning code. But there's not. The only things of consequence that happened during a UFO sighting/reference thingy was Rye getting hit by a car because he walked out in the street and the bloodbath in Sioux Falls where Bear looks up and Lou is able to grab his gun and kill Bear. That's it. So there wasn't a code for me to break but I just kept thinking about these aliens. Like it didn't feel out of place per se, it felt deliberate and I NEEDED TO KNOW WHY. Apparently in the 70's, there was this huge uptick in conspiracy theories and UFO sightings after Americans learned you can't trust your government (thanks a lot Tricky Dick!), so there was this sort of widespread paranoia over things that couldn't be explained, like UFOs/aliens. The only person who saw the UFO and it didn't faze was Peggy, this is the Peggy after she is self actualized. Think or be. She doesn't wonder or think about the UFOs, they are there. She sees it and is just like "lets go, a murderous Native American is gonna kill us extra hard now that we burned off half his face." There are only two options for her, she can think and discuss and try to explain what the fuck is in the sky and how it got there and WHY or she can accept that it's there and move on. She's self actualized baby, so she moves on. I spent the first two times watching and wondering if there was a larger meaning that I missed or the symbolism or something but this third time, there's the UFO, that happened, now onto the chase between Ed and Peggy and Hanzee and Lou. What I'm saying guys is.....I am also self-actualized. Even back when I was still "thinking" instead of "being", the whole UFO/alien plotline did not bother me at all. This is a true story after all, who am I to say what did or did not happen?

How I felt after my extensive notes on UFOs yielded nothing *tear*

I said this after season 1, this show is fantastic for all kinds of TV viewers, analytical or just want to be taken away from their soul sucking job and family. In 2017 (it's so far away!!!!!!), I plan on reviewing each new episode of season 3 after they air, so hope y'all like this shit. This show has become the metric to which I compare all other shows, so good luck Game of Thrones! Next week, I start reviewing season 1 of Orange is the New Black. Be prepared for a hateful rant on Jason Biggs.

Lastly, here's one more gif of Lou before you go *swoon*

He certainly is a friendly people!