Fargo and the weapons we choose

When Floyd Gerhardt backed away from the negotiating table and declared war on the Kansas City syndicate, Fargo's second season became vastly more violent, with an ever-escalating body count on both sides. The losses have been heavy, and many of the characters have now put down their guns long enough to start licking their wounds. With that context in mind, the title of this week's Fargo is a bitter joke: "Did you do this? No, you did it!" Everyone is on the defensive — and there's plenty of blame to go around.

Fargo isn't merely giving us a war between two rival crime syndicates; it's giving us a war between two rival ideologies. On one end of the struggle, we have both the Gerhardts and the Kansas City syndicate — two similar criminal empires that are desperately scrabbling for a bigger piece of the pie, and that aren't afraid to fall back on violence, no matter the collateral damage. On the other end, we have the full weight of the state's law enforcement agencies — a group explicitly permitted to use violence in drastic situations — who are desperately and heroically trying to prevent any kind of bloodshed.

Of course, Fargo has never been quite as simple as cops vs. robbers. We have bad cops on the side of the good guys — like the sniveling Ben Schmidt, who Lou finally calls out as a "shit cop." We have sympathetic figures on the side of the criminals. Ed Blumquist has joined his wife on the run, but his unwitting role in the larger criminal conflict began as an act of self-defense. How can you look at his simple dream of living "like three pigs in a blanket" in small-town Minnesota with his wife and child — a dream he'll clearly never achieve now, though he's too naïve to realize that — and feel anything but heartbreak for him?

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But whatever side you're standing on, Fargo never lingers on actual violence for long. Death is quick and painful and unromanticized. The true trauma comes from the ripple effects.

All season, Fargo has offered a master class on how TV shows can ratchet up tension by avoiding resorting to violence — an impulse that makes it stand almost entirely alone in TV's vast pantheon of crime dramas. (One of the few flaws of Justified — FX's otherwise excellent police drama, which concluded earlier this year — was the largely consequence-free ease with which its protagonist would shoot and kill criminals.) Last week's episode, with its massive round of standoffs, was remarkable for many reasons, but chief among them was the near-total bloodlessness of a situation that seemed like it would inevitably end in death.

Several weeks ago, we were treated to a flashback set in the 1940s, revealing how Otto Gerhardt used his own adolescent son in a violent coup against a rival gangster — a brutal sequence that set the stage for a similar explosion of violence in 1979. In Fargo, violence can only beget more violence. The window-washing ambush that opens this week's episode just inspires Kansas City to send yet another killer, known only as "The Undertaker," to take on the Gerhardts. When the Undertaker arrives, he never even gets a chance to complete his violent mission: Mike Milligan, ensuring that another assassin won't encroach on his hard-won territory, blows him away. When Bear Gerhardt kills his niece Simone for double-crossing the Gerhardt family, he's tying up a loose end — but whatever he gains in the short-term won't be worth the blow to his family. Even the simpler acts of violence tend to be remarkably ineffective. Dodd Gerhardt, a bloodthirsty blowhard who would always choose a sword over an olive branch, was so quick to draw his gun that he shot his own ally in last week's episode. When Peggy got the drop on him, she took him out with his own cattle prod.

The police, of course, have their own history of violence, extending back decades further than Otto Gerhardt's criminal empire. "Eliot Ness himself deputized my daddy during prohibition," recalls one cop. "Used to tell stories of Tommy Gun bloodbaths and heads rolling in the road. Never thought I'd see it in my lifetime, but here we are." With so many guns in the hands of the villains, it's no surprise that we've seen our hero Lou Solverson draw his own gun over and over again, against people on both sides of the criminal war.

But Fargo's drama also hinges on the reminder that we not only get to choose the weapons we use — we get to choose how we use them. In Lou's hands, a police pistol is a tool of de-escalation. He's not afraid to fire it, but he'll exhaust every other option first, and merely drawing it is usually enough. Everything he does is aimed at minimizing further violence, from attempting to negotiate a peaceful surrender with the Blumquists to enlisting a lawyer friend who can convince Bear Gerhardt to lead his posse away from the police station without firing a single shot. That philosophy largely extends to his fellow law enforcement officers. This week, Lou's father-in-law Hank cuts a deal with Floyd Gerhardt, with one strict condition aimed at stanching all this bloodshed: no immunity from capital crimes. "It's a question of what you can live with, I suppose," Hank later reflects. "How many ghosts."

Beneath his stoic Midwestern exterior, Hank is clearly straining to make sense of all the horror he has seen. Near the end of the episode, Betsy Solverson — Hank's daughter, and Lou's wife, and as moral and capable as ether of them — makes an ominous discovery. When she opens a closed door in her dad's house, she discovers a room covered in strange astrological symbols. Is Hank, like so many of season two's characters, seeking some kind of greater answer in the stars?

Whatever the answer, the police have some new and dramatic earthbound solutions on the horizon. As Lou ominously notes, cutting a deal with Floyd has the unfortunate side effect of making it look like the police have chosen a side. Dodd Gerhardt — apparently held captive in Ed Blumquist's trunk — is about to be delivered to Mike Milligan, pitting each side's most ruthless killer squarely against one another. Who did this? You can trace every branch of Fargo's story to its roots, and you'll get a different answer every time. At this point, it doesn't matter how it started; it matters how it's going to end.

Can this mess be resolved without any more killing, as the show's heroes are desperately hoping? In the end, it's Floyd Gerhardt who delivers the most honest appraisal of where Fargo stands: "Stories used to be simpler. This, then that. Now, I don't know how it ends."

Read more Fargo recaps:

• Fargo and the fog of war
• The structural audacity of Fargo
• The radical women of Fargo
• Fargo and the myth of Sisyphus
• The truth is out there: The UFOs and aliens on FX's Fargo, explained
• Minnesota Nice vs. Evil: The moral universe of FX's remarkable Fargo