FARGO 4.06 - "CAMP ELEGANCE"

 

Okay, things are really cooking now.  The mob war is in full swing, with assassinations and kidnappings and counterplots flowing back and forth, and it’s at the intersection of this kind of intricate plotting and idiosyncratic character detail where the series shines most reliably.  The only real downside to all this gangster action is how it pushes Deafy and especially Ethelrida into making only brief, wordless cameos.  But even without the benefit of actual dialogue, the girl’s letter and marshal’s stakeout are still out there in the mix, disseminating information from one strand of plot to another, so it’s not as though they have just been forgotten.    

And if there is one outright gripe to get out of the way, it is how the show has Swanee shoot Gaetano in the head to knock him out and kidnap him.  Bad enough how the show is relying on the silly old trope that a simple bonk on the head is a totally secure and reliable way to put someone to sleep until you drag them to the next plot point, rather than a dangerous and wildly imprecise method that, even if it manages to hit the sweet spot between not killing a person outright and leaving them awake and pissed off, is still incredibly unlikely to incapacitate them for an interval of more than 30 seconds.  What is especially irksome is how the set up was such that Swanee could have just as easily clobbered him with something from behind as actually fire a bullet into his head, creating a brief sense that the show was teasing the death of a major character and quickly backtracking from it.  Not that Fargo has ever been precious about offing major characters before the climax, so it’s not like I think they were just afraid to go there. But it was an annoying note for just how unnecessary it was to get where the scene is going.

"We had nitpickers like this in Salt Lake a few years back..."

But overall, this was a crackerjack episode that more than made up for that one bum note with escalating action that strained the divided loyalties of various supporting players to their breaking points.  Odis gets batted back and forth most brutally, with Loy mock-executing and forcing him to first give up Gaetano’s whereabouts and then attempt to retrieve Satchel.  Well, I guess he forces him to first listen to a menacing thematically resonant monologue about fighting the weight of history and owning human beings as chattel, then give up Gaetano, then get the boy.  Chris Rock is handling these threatening speeches well individually, but the character is edging closer to self-parody as more and more of his scenes center around them. In any case, it has the desired effect on the crooked cop, who scurries to work for his new criminal masters.  

Loy knows, or should know, that the chances of this actually saving his son are dicey at best, but he also doesn’t have time to concoct a better plan.  Because Josto, for his part, has already given the order to kill the boy, realizing that the inevitable retaliation will actually work to rid him of his troublesome sibling without explicitly going against New York’s order to work with him, and still allow a potential avenue to de-escalate the war by pinning responsibility on the other disloyal thorn in his side, Calamita, and offering up his scalp as a peace offering.  It’s a ruthless and surprisingly savvy bit of gangster scheming to come from the pipsqueak don whose flailing we have mostly been invited to laugh at (and who still offers the biggest laughs of the episode trying to suppress his glee at the prospect of his brother’s death).  

But it’s undone by a touch of bad timing, and the fact that neither of the hangdog underlings he entrusts with the details of the plan choose loyalty to him over conscience.  We pretty much knew which way Rabbi would break, as he has told us he would protect the boy no matter what on multiple occasions already.  More of a surprise is poor bastard Antoon Dumini, as the latest minor Fargo character to receive a sudden, emotionally fraught and surprisingly effective spotlight.  He has been a hapless flunkie all season, up through two-thirds of this episode even, before the final act is given over to a look at his family situation and immigrant story of his own.  He was brought to Kansas as a prisoner of war, having been an actual child soldier of the type Rabbi claims his original family made him.  He takes Satchel to the titular, abandoned POW camp for his Miller’s Crossing-esque death march.   But reminiscing about how simply arriving in the land of plenty once revived him from the "skeleton" that years of wartime hardship and privation had made him jars something in his spirit.  At the moment of truth, can’t bring himself to pull the trigger.

His reward for defying orders and refusing to let an innocent child die is to be immediately shot in the back by Rabbi.  For whom killing another man making essentially the same moral choice as he is functions as a big heroic moment.  What does that mean?  It’s never very clear in the quixotic moral world of Fargo. Maybe Antoon’s decision came in time to save his soul, but not his life.  Maybe it’s just a bleak joke.  The chance that we ever get definitive answers to questions like that are about as good as Dr. Harvard’s odds of making it through the season without being poisoned by a macaroon.

COEN BINGO AND OTHER RANDOM SHIT

• The attack on Odis in his apartment blends the “bursting through the shower curtain” aspect of the kidnapping in the Fargo movie with a very deliberate aping of shot of the opening murder in No Country For Old Men when he is being choked out on the floor as his assailant stares creepily at the ceiling.

• Further NCFOM vibes in how Gaetano watches the shadows under the door to anticipate his attackers a la' Llewellyn Moss in the hotel attack.

• Joe Bulo from New York’s stay in Kansas City will extend another 29 years, at which point he will (in the form of Brad Garrett) get himself beheaded trying to annex Fargo into the outfit’s territory.

• Fosto asks Calamita “are you his boy”, which recalls how all the gangsters talk about Eddie Dane and Mink's down-low relationship in Miller's Crossing.

• The shot of the zombie looming behind Ethelrida as she blows out her birthday candles is creepy af, but hell if I know what it is signifying.

• Ebal continues to be painted in a reasonably sympathetic light, so I’m sticking with my prediction that he survives along with Bulo to integrate the warring clans.

• Calamita driving a car painted in the exact same plum shade as his snazzy suit is a wonderful little detail.

• Fosto compares Gaetano explicitly to a tornado, noting that when one blows by you don’t go chasing after it.  My guess that a tornado will disrupt the endgame somehow seems bolstered!  If it weren't for all the Christmas decorations continuing to indicate that tornado season is still 5-6 months away!