‘Fargo’ Season 3, Episode 4 Recap: A Wolf in Cheap Clothing
‘Fargo’ Season 3, Episode 4 Recap: A Wolf in Cheap Clothing, Let’s see if we can track the allegory here — or if there’s much of an allegory to track.
This week’s episode of “Fargo” lifts the framework of Sergei Prokofiev’s wonderful children’s symphony “Peter and the Wolf,” in which all the major characters are represented by instruments in the orchestra. In the symphony, Peter lives with his grandfather in a forest clearing and goes out one day into the meadow alone, leaving the garden gate open — which allows the duck to get out. (Peter’s pet cat and a bird are also key players.) The boy’s grandfather scolds him for going out in the meadow alone, suggesting that a wolf might come out of the forest. “Boys like me aren’t afraid of wolves,” Peter declares, setting up an encounter with the wolf, which eventually falls into Peter’s trap. The duck isn’t so lucky.
Here, Gloria is Peter, V.M. Varga is the Wolf, Ray is the Duck, Nikki is the Cat, Sy is the Grandfather and Varga’s henchmen are “the blast of the hunters’ shotguns,” introduced by the thundering roll of the kettle drums. A couple of elements are a little out of sync between “Fargo” and “Peter and the Wolf”: The Grandfather, at least in this episode, would be more aptly represented by Chief Moe Dammick, who warns Peter/Gloria about the dangers of “overcomplicating” a case that’s more simply explained as a drug addict killing for his next fix. When Billy Bob Thornton’s narrator nods to Prokofiev toward the end — “Peter paid no attention to his grandfather’s words. Boys like Peter aren’t afraid of wolves.” — Gloria is acting in defiance of Dammick, not Sy. And the cat, Peter’s companion in the story, is a stranger to Gloria and will be hostile to her interests.
Those quibbles aside, the Prokofiev symphony is a playful musical marker for each of the characters and a portentous warning of things to come. But mostly, the “Peter and the Wolf” device is another example of Season 3’s favoring swagger over substance. Each season of the show has gotten progressively more confident in spinning its byzantine tales of crime and human folly in the Land of 10,000 Lakes. But there’s a one-dimensionality to this go-round that hasn’t been worked out, even after last week’s necessary tour of the red-herring factory. Reducing the characters to their representative character-instruments in Prokofiev doesn’t exactly help to add depth, though the trade-off is cleverness for its own sake, which isn’t the worst outcome. We often consume empty calories because they’re delicious.
Now that Gloria has ruled out Thaddeus Mobley’s past as the motive for Ennis Stussy’s murder, the bread crumb trail leading from the crime scene to Ray and Nikki’s doorstep should be easy enough to follow. Dammick’s suspicion that Maurice LeFay killed Ennis randomly doesn’t make sense because, as Gloria points out, Maurice had torn out a page from the phone book and rifled through the victim’s house in search of some specific mystery item. (Hence the entire trip to Los Angeles, which wouldn’t have happened if the Thaddeus Mobley books had been displayed in plain sight rather than tucked under the floorboards.)
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| ‘Fargo’ Season 3, Episode 4 Recap: A Wolf in Cheap Clothing |
While following through with Maurice’s parole officer, Gloria discovers that he, too, has the last name “Stussy,” which should turn those bread crumbs into entire loaves. Her scene with Ray mirrors Marge Gunderson’s first interview with Jerry Lundegaard at the car lot in the original film, but Marge was only looking for information on a missing vehicle. Gloria finds a man with the same last name as the victim. (To quote Marge in her second interview with Jerry, the one that ends with his fleeing the scene, “It’d be quite a coincidence if they weren’t, ya know, connected!”)
At this point, the crimes have been so ineptly orchestrated that their stupefying nature may be Gloria’s biggest obstacle in solving them. After meeting with Ray, Gloria has reason to believe that Maurice was going after the wrong Stussy, but Ray himself couldn’t have been the target, because Maurice would obviously have known what his own parole officer looked like. But then there’s the matter of Ray losing his job over Nikki. And the bone-headed scheme of imitating his twin brother and withdrawing $10,000 from the bank — a number one dollar over the limit a bank will allow without having to report the transaction. At this rate, Ray may just accidentally wander into a prison cell.
Nevertheless, there are some ins and outs to this case that will be harder for Gloria to puzzle out as she dismisses Grandfather’s warning and heads out into the meadow. By the time she’s even aware of the wolf, the duck may already be inside its belly.
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• Ray may be more foolish than Jerry Lundegaard — no small feat, that — but his motives are more sympathetic. His choice to withdraw only $10,000 from his brother’s account exasperates Nikki, but it speaks to his sense of fairness. He believes his brother owes him that stamp, but he’s not interested in taking more than it’s worth. Jerry is motivated by desperation and the desire to have an enterprise of his own. Greed is much more of a factor.
• “I’ll take $10,000 in hundreds and a dollar in quarters for the meter.”
• Dammick bloviating about Falluja undercuts his message about Gloria’s “overcomplicating” the case, but like many authority figures, he cares most about getting her to submit blindly to the rightness of his leadership. “I had boys like you in the service,” he tells her. “I tell them to go right, they go left. All of them, to a man, went home in a bag.” Gloria’s response is sane and succinct: “Well, I’m home already.”
• Terrific introduction to Olivia Sandoval as Officer Winnie, who picks up on the related thread of Sy smashing up Ray’s car — and, more damningly, a stranger’s bumper — with the company Humvee. Lines like “You wouldn’t have a putter-inner by any chance?” or “Good luck with your homicide!” mark her as cheery and unpretentious at a minimum.
• What’s the story behind Gloria’s failure to register her presence with motion-sensing devices? If this were an M. Night Shyamalan production, the twist would be obvious.
