Season 2, Episode 4: ‘Fear and Trembling’
“We surrender our needs to the needs of men, to our great detriment.”
These true words — and deeply ironic ones — come from Peggy’s boss Constance, who wants to reassure the young hairstylist that blowing a chunk of the Blumquists’ savings on the Lifespring course is something she needed to do, even if it cost Ed his bid for the butcher shop. Constance follows that shot with a chaser (“No one’s ever going to tell you how to live your life again”), but as a thesis statement, it speaks perfectly to the women on “Fargo” this season. There are critical distinctions to be made when considering characters like Peggy, Simone and Floyd, but all three are asserting their power in a world run by men. They’re not ceding control of their destiny, no matter how dire the consequences.
“Fear and Trembling” is our winter-is-coming episode — metaphorically speaking, of course, since winter is the only season in the Fargoverse. The episode hums with the tension of a powder keg about to go off, so much so that it’s difficult to imagine a sweeter agony than this moment before the Gerhardts and Kansas City go to war and the other characters start becoming collateral damage. One thing is for certain, however: Women won’t be surrendering anything without a fight. That was true last season with Molly Solverson (Alison Tolman), just as it was in the movie with Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand), and the expanded cast of characters in this season of “Fargo” carries the theme forward while broadening its range. Molly and Marge may be kindred spirits, but this is a motlier bunch.
Jean Smart’s performance as Floyd Gerhardt has been the standout turn on the show so far, and “Fear and Trembling” showcases her brittle resolve as well as any episode to date. The big revelation from this hour is that she’s not acting as a proxy for Otto. For all his underhandedness, Dodd is the one who’s behaving as his father would in this situation. The 1950 prologue at the movie theater establishes Dodd as a killer from an early age, but the key insight is “kill the king, be the king,” six of the last words a rival gangster says before young Dodd sticks a knife in his throat and Otto seizes the throne. When Joe Bulo calls Floyd a “good woman” and says he wishes he’d known her husband, she says, “No. My husband would have killed you where you stood the first time you met, so be glad you’re talking to his wife.” For Otto and Dodd, gangsterism is a Darwinian enterprise, not a matter for negotiation.
We barely catch a glimpse of Floyd and Otto’s marriage before Otto’s stroke, but this episode lets us imagine that Floyd stood by her husband and helped manage the business, but quietly developed her own ideas about how things could run. She’s fearsome but pragmatic: As the show has emphasized, perhaps too vigorously, the Gerhardt crime family is a ma-and-pa operation and Kansas City is the big box store coming to town. She can see how that ends. Otto and Dodd may be comfortable with a “Wild Bunch” ending, if it comes to that, but a nuanced power-sharing arrangement keeps the peace and keeps the Gerhardts in business in North Dakota. That’s a much better outcome than a hostile takeover by K.C. goons like the prog-rock outfit Mike Milligan and the Kitchen Brothers.
Floyd knows she’s trying to thread a very thin needle. She has to project strength from a position of clear weakness. And that’s doubly difficult to do as an “old woman” in a conference room full of snarling men. She gives a masterful performance in her negotiations with Bulo, and there’s every indication that Bulo, another pragmatist (Milligan is his Dodd), would go along with the deal if he felt the Gerhardts would hold up their end. But talks have collapsed before they even entered the room and Floyd doesn’t know it yet. She’s been forced to surrender to the impulses of a foolish man — and because that man is her son, Bulo correctly surmises, she can’t punish him for it. Otto may be “a legume,” but he’s still running the show through Dodd, whose business tactics are limited exclusively to violence and intimidation. All stick, no carrot.
There are divisions in the Blumquist marital unit, too, but in this case, the wife firmly has the upper hand. Peggy could be described, generously, as a woman who longs to transcend the life she’s built for herself. Talk of children, talk of owning the butcher shop — these commitments feel as stifling as Ed’s fleshy body pressing down on her in bed. (Can he at least remove the sweat socks?) Peggy could also be described, less generously, as grotesquely self-involved and lacking empathy. She has the reasonable expectation that Ed will support her no matter what; if he’s prepared to clean up after the hit-and-run, then he’ll get over his annoyance at losing the butcher shop so Peggy can be the best Peggy she can be. In her mind, the hit-and-run is more an obstacle than a moral or mortal crisis, yet another thing confining her to the domestic prison she longs to escape.
I’ve complained a little about the show’s ham-handed cultural references and its tendency to make its themes too explicit — see another of those complaints below — but the Vietnam story Lou tells the Blumquists about “the look” a man gets from his fellow soldiers when they know he’s about to die feels entirely apt and true. Lou has figured out what happened to Rye beyond a shadow of a doubt, and he knows the Gerhardts will figure it out soon, and that will be the end of the Blumquists. (The only thing he doesn’t know is that he’s inadvertently saved their lives once already.) Ed seems right on the verge of acknowledging the truth when Peggy cuts him off and walls her husband permanently in denial. Peggy doesn’t need this Lifespring course, because she’s already a master at bending reality to her will.
Still, she’d be wise to heed Lou’s advice: “Do yourself a favor. Lock the door.”
Three-Cent Stamps
• “Your X-rays and blood work are not, as they say, ‘good.’ ” With that bedside manner and the threat of a placebo in the critical trial, Lou and Betsy might consider another doctor.
• Ed talking to Peggy while naked from the waist down recalls a scene from Robert Altman’s “Short Cuts” in which Julianne Moore is ironing, pants-less, while carrying on a conversation. Such is the casual intimacy of marriage, perhaps, but there’s a sense here that Peggy isn’t happy with it. The same with the sweat socks in the sack; perhaps she feels he’s getting a little too comfortable.
• Hanzee too delivers a good Vietnam story that not only aids him in intimidating a weak auto repairman, but also underlines the second-class citizenship of minorities in the war and at home. The scene at the auto shop also scores some quality reaction shots from Nick Offerman, whose look of displeasure is highly meme-able.
• Simone and Milligan are hooking up, and it’s not exactly Romeo and Juliet. Simone is a femme fatale of the old school, a duplicitous pleasure-seeker who seems happy causing mischief for its own sake. Boredom appears to be her worst enemy. (Her second-worst is her father, whom she thinks Milligan will probably have to kill.)
• At the end of a great episode — perhaps the best of the season so far — it was a bummer to hear Lou vocalize themes about a world “out of balance” and its lack of a “moral center.” He talks about how people used to know right from wrong, but that’s not even true, based on what he knows and what we’ve seen. The Gerhardts alone have been in business for a long time.