By: Brandon Wolfe
Malvo on the loose is what ‘Fargo’ boils down to in its final hour. His resurgence sends a shockwave of fear through the entire town of Bemidji. Like Michael Myers in the ‘Halloween’ movies, he’s an unstoppable killing machine set loose on a small town that isn’t prepared to deal with things like him. All that’s missing is for Donald Pleasance to pop up and frantically tell Molly and Gus that evil has descended upon them. But Malvo’s return also means that old scores must be settled. While some, like the front desk clerk at the police station, are petrified that he’ll pop up out of the ether at a moment’s notice, there are others that have unfinished business with this monster that they set out to tie off.
That Malvo does get taken down is not a huge surprise, I suppose. He is the show’s central villain, after all, and this is the finale. It is, however, a mild surprise that he CAN be taken down. He has seemed so otherworldly in his competence and his sheer commitment to evildoing that the show had started to hint that perhaps he was a supernatural force, possibly even the devil himself. Even in this episode, Molly puts forth the theory that Malvo is “maybe not even a man.” But Malvo is indeed mortal, and the real surprise of “Morton’s Fork” comes with the identities of the parties who wind up exposing that mortality. It’s Lester who springs the trap that sends Malvo scurrying back to his lair with a bloody, fractured leg, the student besting the master at his own game. But when Malvo is finally put down for good, it isn’t Molly who does it, as many might have guessed. Nor is it Agents Budge and Pepper, the disgraced FBI duo itching for vengeance against Malvo, but who prove no match for him. It’s cowardly old Gus, whom fate tips off to Malvo’s location with the heavily symbolic signpost of a wolf in the road. Gus lies in wait for Malvo to return and when he does, Gus reveals that he has solved the predatorial riddle that Malvo posed to him long ago before putting a series of bullets into the man. And he was indeed just a man, even if it took an unusually large amount of bullets to officially prove it.
“Morton’s Fork” is a satisfying finale, but like the ‘Breaking Bad’ finale, it’s perhaps satisfying in a bit too clockwork of a fashion. Everything happens that needs to happen, we get our catharses, but for a show that kept us guessing from week to week, it’s hard to shake the feeling that ‘Fargo’ could have surprised us a bit more in its denouement. Malvo is dead, Lester’s crimes are brought to light, Gus gets his heroic redemption, Molly gets her family and her new position as chief of police and all is right with the world. It works, but it feels a little too neat and tidy for a show that always seemed refreshingly difficult to pin down. Plus it’s hard to grasp why the Budge and Pepper characters were given the prominence that they were afforded in this final batch of episodes, considering they don’t really do or affect anything and suffer the same fate that befalls all cops assigned to guard the house of a killer’s target in works of fiction. I can only assume that executive producer Noah Hawley is simply a big Key and Peele fan.
But looking at it another way, “Morton’s Fork’s” happy ending does register as a surprise of sorts. Given how bleak ‘Fargo’ had been up to this point, an ending where Malvo wins and leaves more devastation in his wake didn’t seem out of order. Like the finale of ‘True Detective’, another show that wallowed in gloom and doom, ‘Fargo’ lets some light in during its final moments, finding a note of optimism to oppose the ugly world it had previously presented us. Similar to the film upon which it’s loosely based, the show opts to champion decency and goodness in a universe that increasingly seemed to have little use for those things. When Bob Odenkirk’s Bill reveals to Molly that he can no longer stomach the nastier aspects of his job – a nice, humanizing moment for the character that directly calls to mind the Coens’ ‘No Country For Old Men’, a film that this series seemed to take as much inspiration from as it did from ‘Fargo’ – Molly reassures him that goodness still exists in people. The Malvos and Lesters of the world don’t erase that, they just occasionally obscure it.
‘Fargo’ was a true shock this spring. There was no reason to expect anything from a TV adaptation of an almost 20-year-old film, especially a film as heralded as that one. It seemed like a pointless trade on name recognition, interesting only for the actors it had managed to attract. But the series was a true original, brilliantly written, perfectly acted and constantly compelling. It will be interesting to see how the show will proceed from here. Hawley has stated that the series would adopt an anthology approach for subsequent seasons, and would focus on a new set of characters and circumstances next year. ‘True Detective’ is also using this method, but that show has it a bit easier. Its only obligation is that it needs to center around detectives. It could otherwise take any form or setting that it chooses. ‘Fargo’ on the other hand is essentially locked into crime and quirkiness in snowy Minnesota. That’s a narrow set of parameters. But ‘Fargo’ already bucked the odds once. There’s no reason to doubt it again.
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