Shaun Munro reviews the fourth episode of Fargo season 3…
Fargo returns to business-as-usual after last week’s entertaining sojourn to Los Angeles, and things finally start coming together as Gloria is drawn towards the Stussys, while Emmit begins to feel the pinch from Varga and his lofty ambitions.
“The Narrow Escape Problem” opens with a cameo-of-sorts from Fargo alum Billy Bob Thornton, who narrates a reading of Sergei Prokofiev’s beguiling fairy tale Peter and the Wolf, which serves to cement the pecking order of the show’s focal characters. A flowery device, perhaps, but it further concedes this season’s more experimental storytelling tenor, and that’s no bad thing.
Meanwhile, it was great fun seeing Ray assert himself at the bank while pretending to be Emmit, and this gave Ewan McGregor the hefty task of playing Ray-as-Emmit, which he pulled off spectacularly, especially with his delivery of the immortal one liner, “If I wanted an opinion from an asshole I’d ask my own.”
Episode four was full of great dialogues, in fact; Chief Dammick trying in vain to give Gloria a dressing-down for her defiant behaviour; Ray getting reprimanded and eventually fired for mingling with Nikki; new St. Cloud cop Winnie Lopez (Olivia Sandoval) investigating Sy’s road rage incident; and Varga interrupting Emmit’s dinner and subsequently charming the pants off his wife.
And what about the array of gross-out moments this week? Varga puked his guts up twice, revealing him to be bulimic, there was the horrifying sight of Maurice LeFay’s caved-in head in the morgue, and Winnie was forced to shove a giant wad up toilet paper down her pants to stem the unexpected flow of Mother Nature. Fargo has never been above some grotesquery, but the abundance of viscerally unpleasant moments here absolutely stood out.
All things considered, the latest episode may have felt more familiar and bogged down in a story that’s struggling to sustain the intrigue of the two prior seasons, but the characters, performances and direction nevertheless allowed it to retain an overall entrancing quality.
Moreover, even if this episode wasn’t the breath of fresh air that last week’s was, it at least got the narrative wheels turning and brought a number of tantalising questions, both old and new, to the forefront. With Varga revealing himself to be a mastermind snoop, it’s seeming less likely that he’s the sneering envoy for someone “bigger” as most surely expected. Is he actually in business for himself?
As much as everyone wants to believe a loser like Ray could bag someone as attractive as Nikki, is she really playing both sides for her own gain?
With Winnie helping Gloria connect the dots between the living Stussys and the dead one, will she become a regular fixture from this point? Is a Winnie-Gloria double act on the horizon? With Luddite Gloria being ignored by the bathroom’s hand washer and dryer, is this leading to some sort of surreal payoff, much like the UFO interlude from last season?
And finally, aren’t we getting overdue an excessive explosion of violence at this point?
Shaun Munro – Follow me on Twitter for more TV rambling.
Originally published May 11, 2017. Updated April 11, 2018.
