‘Fargo’ Season 2 Premiere Recap & Review: Dark And Funny Small Town Intrigue

Minnesota, 1979. Peggy and Ed Blomquist (Kirsten Dunst and Jesse Plemons) are a married couple growing apart. Ed is too preoccupied with inheriting his bosses business, and Peggy spends too much time at Lifesping seminars. They are clearly bored with one another. Then, as they always do on Fargo, the macabre takes hold of their lives when Peggy hits a criminal by the name Rye (Kieran Culken) outside a waffle house with her car. He goes straight through the windshield and leaves blood all over the inside of her car. With a dead body sitting in their freezer at home, Ed and Peggy learn to come together with the delusion that the law will never catch up with them.

‘Fargo’ Recap & Review

Rye Gerhardt is not a nobody, however, as the couple assumed. He is a member of the Gerhardt crime family, better known as Fargo. He is the son of Otto (Michael Hogan), the leader of the family’s operations, and Floyd (Jean Smart), the matriarch with a male name. His brothers, Dodd and Bear, are formidable characters. Dodd (Jefferey Donovan) is obsessed with taking his father’s place, and Bear (Angus Sampson) is bearded, large and looks like he could do some damage.

Rye is not much better than his kin, but certainly holds a much lower competency level. He has a cocaine habit and wasn’t exactly sober walking out of the Waffle Hut in Luverne the day Peggy plowed into him with her car. You can’t exactly blame her and Ed for thinking they have a vagrant in their garage freezer. There will be consequences, none-the-less.

Rye is at the Waffle Hut to threaten a judge in order to help a typewriter scam he has going, but he botches the whole deal. She regales him of the story of Job from the Bible, then sprays him with bug killer. He shoots her and two waitresses before stumbling out into the snow with bloodshot eyes and a knife in his back. Having a paranoid episode, either from the drugs, the pesticide or the adrenalin, he is distracted by the vision of a UFO—which is why he doesn’t see the car coming.

When Highway Patrolmen Lou Solverson (Patrick Wilson) shows up at the crime scene, all he can say is “Yeah.” They’re now on the hunt for a killer, the  identity of whom they don’t know, nor do they know he is dead.

Ed may be a nice guy, but he doesn’t hesitate to finish off Rye. Peggy thought he was dead, but he was thumping around their garage when Ed gets home from work. Rye, of course, is a deranged lunatic and tries to kill Ed who decides to stand by his wife and cover up the incident.

Karl Weathers (Nick Offerman), is foretelling of things to come when he tells Lou, “That’s how it starts, with something small. Just watch. This thing’s only getting bigger.” We can probably count on the fact that the hidden angles of The Waffle Hut shooting will be revealed in time to each one of the characters, and it’s probably not going to be pretty.

Fargo airs on Monday nights on FX.

Pictured: Kirsten Dunst and Jesse Plemons.