'Fargo' Season Finale Review: Everything Had To Change

The exceptionally fine second season of Fargo concluded on Monday night with a finale that brought a fitting end to this poignant, violent, funny, and mysterious “true” story. WARNING: SPOILERS FOLLOW FOR THE SEASON FINALE EPISODE “PALINDROME” OF FX’S FARGO.

After the spectacularly exciting, bloody, relentless episode that preceded it, this week’s finale was comparatively quiet, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t suspenseful. The first chunk of the episode was a nail-biter: Would Ed (Jesse Plemons) and Peggy Blumquist (Kirsten Dunst) escape the determined, deadly pursuit by Hanzee (Zahn McClarnon)? A wounded Ed and an exceptionally excitable Peggy locked themselves in a supermarket freezer as — we knew what the couple didn’t — Lou Solverson (Patrick Wilson) tracked down Hanzee.
The Ed and Peggy story did not end happily: Ed dead, but not before telling Peggy he thought they “wouldn’t make it” — and he meant as a couple: He’d come to think they’d grown apart, their goals in life had become too different. Peggy, from the back seat of Lou’s patrol car, blamed herself and the late-1970s “have it all” culture that she interpreted as having made women feel guilt if they didn’t achieve everything they wanted.

The hour-plus edition had begun with a montage of all the dead bodies Fargo had accumulated over the course of the season, all the characters framed in blood. The final image was that of Betsy Solverson (Cristin Milioti), whom we were immensely glad to see open her eyes from a deep sleep — turned out, she hadn’t died from her cancer and from last week’s fall in her house.

The rest of the episode — written by Noah Hawley, directed by FX stalwart Adam Arkin, who made a typically superb cameo as the Kansas City crime kingpin Hamish Broker — worked variations on the theme of change. That is, change for the sake of change; change when it’s not needed; and change when it is desperately needed. The change was sometimes literal (Hanzee needing a new identity and to have his burned face altered to avoid arrest — he’ll now be known as “Moses Tripoli”) and sometimes metaphorical (Mike Milligan being offered a promotion that would render him an office drone rather than the “king” he considered himself).

Arkin’s businessman-mobster Broker explained more change to Mike (oh, what a wonderful performance Bokeem Woodbine gave right up to the end), asserting that it’s a new world out there, that there’s now “only one business in the world, the Money Business.” It’s an idea that carried back across the entire season of Fargo, as we saw more and more small businesses — typewriter repair shops, little mom-and-pop grocery stores — quaver in the presence of oncoming changes in how people will do business in the coming Reagan era. Even Betsy’s cancer-ridden dream was of something she’d never imagined before: a superstore in the style of Costco or BJ’s.

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In the end, Hank Larsson (Ted Danson) reappeared, stitched up from his gun-battle wounds, to suggest the old comforts were the best, and we were allowed to think that, for now at least, Lou and Betsy could enjoy their life together, even as we might have said a prayer for Betsy’s continued health. Along with Betsy’s flash-forward (our look backward) to the season-one Solverson clan, it was as unguardedly optimistic as Fargo gets. Which is not to say that Hawley’s show is cynical or even pessimistic — it is what it is, at different times in its existence. You know, like life.

The episode ended with an exchange we’ve heard before: Lou and Betsy in bed, saying their version of goodnight, their variation on gossip columnist Walter Winchell’s old radio-show slogan: “Good night, Mrs. Solverson, and all the ships at sea.” It was a happy ending tinged with just the right amount of melancholy.