List of episodesThe second season of Fargo, an American anthology black comedy–crime drama television series created by Noah Hawley, premiered on October 12, 2015, on the basic cable network FX. Its principal cast is Kirsten Dunst, Patrick Wilson, Jesse Plemons, Jean Smart, and Ted Danson. As an anthology, each Fargo season possesses its own self-contained narrative, following a disparate set of characters in various settings. The whole crime scene is just another headache for Officer Lou Solverson, the younger version of Keith Carradine's character from season one, this time played by Patrick Wilson.
Solverson is dealing with an ill wife and young daughter at home. Meanwhile, the death of Rye should also complicate matters for the Gerhardt clan, where patriarch Otto has suffered a stroke just as the family business is being intruded on by an opposing syndicate from the South. When we watch Fargo season 4 start tonight, we're going to travel back to the midwest.
The crime drama anthology series returns with a brand-new story and set of characters, and this time, it's set in 1950 Kansas City. The second season of Fargo, an American anthology black comedy–crime drama television series created by Noah Hawley, premiered on October 12, 2015, on the basic cable network FX. As in Season 1, it's a murder that ties together the disparate storylines. This time it's Peggy and Ed who are the main catalysts that set the season's events in motion by killing Rye , the youngest son in a local crime syndicate. While the couple might think they can cover up the murder and continue leading their lives normally, they don't have the context of the larger story playing out.
Chatting in the squad car, Peggy thinks serving her time in California would be nice and Lou says he'll see what they can do. Lou tells her about his time in the war and rescuing people during the fall of Saigon. He recalls a baby whose mother dropped him onto the ship and one of Lou's men caught him. Lou tells the moving story of a helicopter pilot who did everything possible to save his family before attempting to save himself. He brings the story around so that it ties into when Ed told him he would protect Peggy no matter what.
"It's the rock we all push," says Lou, adding that it's not a burden, it's a privilege. Peggy said she never meant for any of this to happen; she just wanted to be someone. Lou says she's someone now but Peggy explains she didn't want to be defined by someone else. She's angry Rye Gerhardt walked in front of her car and set this all off. She tells Lou he wouldn't understand because he's a man. "It's a lie, okay, that you can do it all. Be a wife and a mother and a self-made career woman…like there's 37 hours in a day.
Like if you could just get your act together…" Lou stops her by reminding her people are dead. As an anthology, each season of Fargo is engineered to have a self-contained narrative, following a disparate set of characters in various settings. Noah Hawley and his team of writers used the second season to expand the scope of the show's storytelling—from its narrative to its characters. They increased the show's cast of core characters to five, each with interconnecting arcs and different viewpoints of the central story. Hawley wanted viewers to sympathize with characters they might not feel empathy for in real life.
The producers at one point discussed revisiting a modern period for their story. According to Hawley, the change in the time period helped to develop a sense of turbulence and violence in a world that "could not be more fractured and complicated and desperate". Whilst Season 1 mainly told the story of Lester Nygaard and Lorne Malvo , the second season takes up a similar premise, but seems to turn every conceivable aspect of the show up to 11.
It tells the main story of Peggy and Ed Blumquist, who just so happen to be the wrong people in the wrong place at the wrong time. After Rye Gerhardt murders three people in a diner, he is hit by Peggy's car, and unintentionally driven back to her house where Ed is left with no choice but to finish him off. This sinister and gory night sets off a series of events that soon engulfs the entire region. The TV series has never attempted to adapt the plot of the movie, nor does it strictly function as a sequel or a prequel; each season presents a story with characters who exist in the same reality as the film. To this point, the show's clearest connection to Fargo's fictional universe has been a scene in the fourth episode of Season One, when Minnesota "Supermarket King" Stavros Milos remembers how his business was saved by a miracle.
Specifically, it was the moment that he found a suitcase full of cash in the middle of nowhere, buried under snow and marked with an ice-scraper. This is the same satchel full of ransom money that cranky kidnapper Carl Showalter hid at the end of the motion picture – effectively planting the seeds for an entirely new screenplay, in another medium. There's a moment early in the new season premiere of the FX crime drama Fargo when a parole officer recalls how he met his fiancée, a slick hustler named Nikki Swango . As the episode flashes back to Nikki at a police station, getting booked and photographed, fans of filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen might experience some deja vu. The situation, the way it's shot, and even the way the crook gets yanked around by the authorities – it's all right out of the Coens' 1987 comedy Raising Arizona. (And that's not even counting Ewan McGregor asking "Are you gonna do what's right, or are you gonna do what's right?!?" – which sounds a whole lot like this line.
Wilson, whose other TV credits include A Gifted Man and Girls, will play Lou Solverson, a Vietnam war veteran and Minnesota State Patrolman. Keith Carradine played the role in the first season of the series. Lou's wife, Betsy, and young daughter, Molly have yet to be cast. Season Three opens with a strange scene in East Germany that, as of yet, has zero connection to the rest of the story. That may change by the time this latest batch of episodes is done; but even if not, there's precedent in the Coen brothers filmography for a prologue that functions more like an overture.
After all, that's the way A Serious Man starts, with an old European folktale. In similar vein, Cristin Milioti's Betsy Solverson in season two slips into a dream of the future that's a lot like H.I. Like the first season, the cast is sprawling and stacked with fantastic talent, including Kirsten Dunst, Jesse Plemons, Jean Smart, Ted Danson, Jeffrey Donovan, Cristin Milioti and Nick Offerman. But despite such a robust cast of characters, Hawley never lets the storylines feel unwieldy.
It's his writing that holds this series together, and it's clear he's spent plenty of time reevaluating the winning formula of Season 1 to put together an even stronger project here. From Watchmen to Young Adult to Insidious, Patrick Wilson has quietly emerged as a reliable actor capable of carrying a low budget movie or playing a key supporting role in a big budget movie. He's likeable enough to play the object of affection, but he can also schlub down enough to play an everyman.
Here, he'll play Lou Solverson, the father of Allison Tolman's Molly from the first season, where an older version of his character was played by Keith Carradine. "Fargo Season 5." 'Fargo' is a black comedy TV series inspired by the eponymous 1996 film and set in the same universe. Created by Noah Hawley, the show was first released on April 15, 2014. Each season of the anthology series is a stand-alone story set in a different era. Season 1 is set for 2006, season 2 in 1979, season 3 in 2010, and season 4 in 1950.
The story of each article revolves around violence, deception, and murder. The state trooper is called into investigate the Waffle Hut murders. Lou meets the shaken trucker who called in the crime, and politely ignores him as the trucker goes on about blueberries.
There's something about Midwest dialect here that seems like they're speaking a completely different language to each other. Lou and Sheriff Hank Larrson narrate the crime scene while also talking about Lou's wife Betsy, who is also Hank's daughter. Their spot-on Minnesota accents pepper this delightful dialogue that's cheerful without much inflection. Lou seems harder here than Keith Carradine's older version of him in the first season. We know his wife, played by Cristin Milioti, is destined to be taken away before her time. (And yes, I'm rolling my eyes at her character's fate on How I Met Your Mother and that connection here.) Lou has a tough road ahead of him, and it will be interesting to watch what roughens and softens him this season.
Although the youngest son of the Gerhardt crime family may look like a dead ringer for a young Steve Buscemi, he's actually played by the middle of the five Culkin brothers — which include fellow actors Macaulay and Rory . Kieran got his start playing his own brother's brother in both Home Alone and Home Alone 2 before making a name for himself in such films as Father Of The Bride, The Cider House Rules, Igby Goes Down, and Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World. Rye's two older brothers, Dodd and Bear, will be played by Jeffrey Donovan and Angus Sampson , respectively. Unlike FX's American Horror Story, Fargo doesn't keep the same cast around every year; so Billy Bob Thornton, Martin Freeman, and the rest of Season 1's high-profile cast are nowhere to be seen this time around.
Fortunately, that's not likely to be a death knell for the show, since the cast of Fargo Season 2 is just as stacked with big names and incredible talent. A principal cast of five actors received star billing in the show's second season. Hawley did not tailor his characters with any specific actors in mind, though Nick Offerman, Brad Garrett, Patrick Wilson and Kirsten Dunst were among the few he considered for starring roles in the season's early stages. The search for talent was sometimes an exhaustive process that required advertising via custom built websites and social media.
Once actors were hired, their agents were made aware of the frigid shooting conditions and any issues with the location and potential scheduling conflicts during production were discussed. Hawley discussed the script with actors who had little experience in the television industry. "They're used to reading the whole story but you've given them one or two hours of it," he remarked. Once hired, the actors trained with a dialect coach to master a Minnesota accent. Being better than it had any right to be, Noah Hawley'sFargo debuted in 2014 to an overwhelmingly positive reception. It told a simple story; the story of one man, his terrible crime, the nihilistic psychopath who is neither his friend nor foe, and the colourful cast of characters who find themselves pulled into the intricate and bonkers case.
Next to Fargo itself, the Coen brothers picture that Hawley borrows from the most is their Oscar-winning 2007 adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men. The show's particularly drawn to the character of Anton Chigurh , a remorseless hitman who rages through the film like a supernatural force of destruction. In the first season, Billy Bob Thornton played the similarly malevolent, emotionless (and hairstyle-challenged) monster Lorne Malvo, while in Season Two, Zahn McClarnon's henchman Hanzee Dent fills that role.
But it's only a matter of time, given that this particular archetype is a Coens favorite – see Randall "Tex" Cobb's "Lone Biker of the Apocalypse" from Raising Arizona and John Goodman's Karl "Madman" Mundt from Barton Fink. This season self-proclaims itself as the bloodiest, and most violent Fargo story of them all. A list of every episode, and every time stamp where there's blood and violence would be a monotonously long list. It's not even worth the effort, and if it's a really big deal, then don't watch this on the family TV or whatever. The 10-episode second season is set in Sioux Falls, South Dakota and Luverne, Minnesota. Look for Lou Solverson to take on a case that involves a local gang and a major mob syndicate with the help of his father-in-law.
FX's Fargo season two came to a close with the 10th episode titled 'Palindrome' which aired on December 14, 2015. And with the season just finishing up, I'd like to take this opportunity to plead with series writer/creator Noah Hawley for a third season that consists of at the very least 13 episodes. Story-wise, Hawley's fully capable of telling a fleshed-out character-driven story in 10 episodes but as a viewer it's painful to say goodbye to his characters after spending such a short period of time getting to know them all so well.
The cast is stellar and even improved on the fun first season with a number of standout characters. Both Wilson and Danson are good as the law, but as in most films, the bad guys are more fun. Jesse Plemons and Kirsten Dunst were good with Plemons putting on pounds while Dunst actually gets the "meatier" role as the unbalanced Peggy. I felt that the Dodd and Bear were a little too one dimensional but I loved Floyd played by Jean Smart as the no-nonsense mother and potential boss. The real standouts of the show were Bokeem Woodbine as the smart talking agent from Kansas City and Zahn McClarnon as the assassin Hanzee who could have given the Coen Brothers' Anton Chigurh a run for his money.
While Fargo—Season 1 kept a lot of the spirit and style of Fargo, this season seems to be a bit more brutal, but still has that Fargo touch. The movie really captures the Coen Brothers style and reminds me a lot of Blood Simple. It is a study on people on various levels of "goodness" from "Very Good" to "Very Bad" and those that fall somewhere in-between . You find yourself siding with different characters throughout the film and in turn questioning "what's it all for" just like in the original Fargo.
Naturally, this being Fargo, no ill-conceived misdeed goes without reckoning, and Peggy's about to get all the excitement she can handle. As it happens, Rye wasn't some wasted vagrant stumbling in front of the Luverne, Minnesota, Waffle Hut, waiting to encounter misfortune. He was, in point of fact, a wasted member of Fargo, North Dakota's stalwart Gerhardt crime family — the youngest of three sons begat by figurehead Otto and his wife Floyd , to be specific.
Like any imagined brood worth its TV time, the siblings personify broad, disparate archetypes. And that was all before getting blindsided by Peggy's car and stabbed in the abdomen by Ed for good measure in the Blomquists' garage. Things were never going to turn out great for humble butcher's assistant Ed Blomquist and his wife Peggy .
She wanted spontaneity and self-adventure, while all he could focus on was having a family and inheriting his boss's business. The tension between those two extremes was liable to make Peggy seek solace in Lifespring seminars, which would likely have driven her somewhere close to madness, but certainly farther away from Ed. So maybe he's lucky that fate intervened and sent spastic criminal Rye Gerhardt careening through Peggy's windshield, his blood leaking and gathering on her pleather interior like a driveway oil spill. Sure, the hit-and-run quickly unraveled into a series of events that left Ed and Peggy with a dead body in their garage freezer and a hastily idealized plan to evade legal intervention.
But from Ed's standpoint, at least he felt needed, and he and his ever-distanced wife were back to being bound and in sync. Plemons may be nearly unrecognizable in his role as Peggy's husband, rotund butcher's assistant Ed. But the young actor recently creeped out audiences as baby-faced child murderer Todd Alquist on the final season of Breaking Bad. Prior to that, Plemons starred as hapless Landry on NBC's Friday Night Lights. More recently, he also had a supporting role in the Emmy-winning HBO miniseries Olive Kitteridge. He can currently be seen in the Johnny Depp film Black Mass, and will also appear in this fall's Tom Hanks Cold War drama Bridge Of Spies.
She was the rock beside her man for forty years and raised four sons and has five grandchildren. But when her husband has a stroke, Floyd decides it's her time to take over the family business. The only problem is that her oldest son, Dodd, wants the throne for himself.
A prequel to the events in its first season, season two of Fargo takes place in the Upper Midwest in March 1979. It follows the lives of a young couple—Peggy and Ed Blumquist —as they attempt to cover up the hit and run and homicide of Rye Gerhardt , the son of Floyd Gerhardt , matriarch of the Gerhardt crime family. During this time, Minnesota state trooper Lou Solverson , and Rock County sheriff Hank Larsson , investigate three homicides linked to Rye. But what also makes Fargo interesting is that it isn't just apart of the movie-to-TV trend, it also shares the distinction of being an anthology series, TV's other favorite shtick lately. She and her boyfriend have big plans, that is until he mysteriously disappears. Tonya hires the services of Dewell & Hoyt to find her boyfriend, but she is withholding some secrets of her own.
Like all of the women in this town, it would be unwise to underestimate Tonya. Kientz's Max is Cassie's teenage babysitter, who uses her quiet cool & sarcastic wit to navigate the stormy waters of adolescence. Her close group of friends is a welcome solace from her complicated home life.
