Good morning! Chaz’s son Gordo finishes breakfast and goes to school where he gets in a scuffle with a kid in the cafeteria and the gun, planted by his Uncle Lester, comes tumbling out of his backpack. Set-up part one, complete.
Deputy Bill flashes a search warrant in the face of Chaz’s wife and Chaz comes home just as the deputy uncovers pieces of incriminating evidence in Chaz’s secret gun closet. There’s the mallet used to kill Peggy, a pair of her underwear, and boudoir shots of her wearing them. Chaz’s wife spits in his face. It happens in slow motion.
Lester’s in an interrogation room with Deputy Bill. Three people have been murdered in 2 days, and now a kid brings a gun to school, the Deputy says. Lester feigns dismay. When Bill asks if Lester’s wife was having an affair, Lester gives the academy-award winning role of his life. Bill, who’s known Lester for years, is particularly upset about the affair. He surmises that Chaz killed Peggy when she tried to end it. Lester whole-heartlessly agrees. He walks out of the interrogation room – also in slow motion – and that same smile we saw last week creeps across his face again as he walks by Chaz’s holding cell. Lester’s a new man and everything’s been turned upside down and inside out. Chaz’s expression is one of a man who’s in shock. He realizes, I venture to say, that he planted the seed in Lester when he told him there was only one way for this case to be over, he had to give the cops something —someone.
Flashback to the storm from Molly’s point of view. In whiteout conditions, we learn that she barely sees Malvo in front of her, but she shoots at someone behind her. The Buridan’s ass dilemma. Then Gus shoots at something he can’t see and Molly goes down. When she wakes up in a hospital bed, Gus and Greta are there. “Did we get Malvo?” she asks, her speech low and drawn out. “I had him and then this other fella popped up.” Gus, the other fella is Mr. Wrench, which was pretty obvious to us, and that he’s in a recovery room upstairs. Gus takes a deep breath and confesses that he was the one who shot Molly. He promises to get her a new spleen. “Guess we both got bullet holes now, huh?” Molly’s dad says. That’s possibly the third reference to the “Sioux Falls incident” we don’t know about.
Malvo’s somehow locked himself in the real estate office (a front for organized crime) of the big man who appeared at the beginning of the last episode chewing fish heads and demanding that Hess’s killer be killed. “Two hombres tried to kill me in Duluth.” Malvo says, “Did you tell them where to find me? And who do I see about this in Fargo?” Malvo says one phone on the desk is a hearse phone and the other is an ambulance phone, and the man will have to choose one unless he tells Malvo what he wants to hear. A shot rings out, but did he choose the ambulance or the hearse?
Chaz is transferred to county jail in handcuffs and everyone he walks by looks at him like, well, like they’d be looking at Lester if he’d gotten caught instead. Meanwhile, Lester volunteers to break the news to Mrs. Hess that she’s not getting any of her dead husband’s life insurance. But instead, Lester assures her there’s a few more hoops to jump through until she can get the money, skillfully positioning himself as a middleman. After a copious amount of day-drinking, Lester fucks her from behind so hard that the portrait of the widow and her dead bully Hess comes crashing down from the wall. When Lester leaves, he walks out whistling. What an arc.
In Fargo, two black cops played by Key and Peele are staking out the mobsters, but are so busy talking about the dangers of processed food (Pulp Fiction reference?), Malvo slips by with a bazooka tucked in his coat. The rest of the scene is shot entirely from outside of the building. The camera follows Malvo’s every move, but we can’t see him, we just hear the sounds of footsteps, screaming, people falling to the ground. Finally, a man comes crashing through the window and Lester slips away, as per…
On her way home from the hospital, Molly stops at the station. She learns from an officer that Chaz is the murderer. Molly, distraught, walks outside and stands there, her breathing heavy and shallow. It doesn’t seem like Lester will get away with this in the last 3 episodes. But will Malvo? I can see him slipping away into the whiteness again, leaving us to only to theorize about who the hell he was.
