It is Christmas Eve. Varga opens all the packages under the Christmas Tree at Emmit's house. He stays there and waits until Emmit comes home.
Chief Gloria Burgle and Officer Winnie Lopez find Ray's body in his apartment. Nikki is found and arrested. Chief Moe Dammick tries interrogating her. He shows her pictures of Ray's body but she won't tell him anything. Chief Burgle wants to interrogate Nikki but Chief Dammick says no.
Burgle and Lopez are called in to meet with their bosses, Dammick and Chief Muderlack of St. Cloud PD. Lopez is ordered to return to her duty as a traffic cop. Dammick orders Burgle to stay home on leave until her tenure as chief of Eden Valley PD is over. She makes him think that she is but then she tries to get in to see Nikki Swango. She runs into a few bureaucratic roadblocks and is unable to get in to see Swango.
Emmit goes to the restaurant and meets with Sy and Ruby Goldfarb. It doesn't go well. Sy wants to sell the business but Emmit talks about buying Goldfarb's business from her. Officer Lopez shows up at the restaurant. It was Chief Burgle's idea: deliver the news of Ray's death to Emmit and see hom he reacts. Sy tries to chase her off. He doesn't know that Ray is dead.
Officer Lopez tells Emmit and he botches it. She doesn't tell him that Ray was murdered, just that he's dead. He immediately starts blaming Nikki. Sy gets Emmit to leave with him and drives him home. Ruby Goldfarb is left sitting at the table alone. Officer Lopez walks over and asks her if she can ask her a few questions.
Sy drives Emmit home. They sit in Sy's Hummer for a few minutes and talk. Emmit accuses Sy of colluding with Ray. Sy denies it. He doesn't seem to hold the accusations against Emmit. Sy looks up just before he leaves and sees Varga watching him from an upstairs window. Sy goes home. His wife helps him out of his coat and then he starts crying. He says something about the world having changed but still looking the same.
Varga and Emmit have a brief chat. Varga recites a poem about a crooked man. It doesn't seem to do much to mollify Emmit.
Yuri breaks into the Eden Valley PD offices. He's there to get his hands on the file for the murder of Ennis Stussy. Officer Mashman had just left but he returns. He forgot his gun. He tries talking Yuri into leaving but Yuri intimidates him into leaving. Yuri leaves, taking the file he came for.
An officer comes in to the holding area and says he needs to check Nikki's cell for contraband. He cuffs her to the bars and pulls out a syringe. Before he can use it Chief Burgle comes in. It isn't clear how she got through the mounds of red tape. The officer with the syringe escapes. There was video surveillance of the holding area but the video didn't catch any of the stuff involving the officer with the syringe.
Chief Muderlack is finally convinced that there might be something to Chief Burgle's suspicions. Dammick and Burgle go in and have a chat with Swango. The only thing she tells them is to follow the money. Dammick rescinds Swango's parole. Gloria promises to visit Nikki in prison and offers to bring her a pie. Nikki asks for a coconut cream pie with chocolate sprinkles.
Nikki is put on a bus with a bunch of other prisoners. She is put in the back of the bus next to Mr. Wrench from season 1 of Fargo. The bus heads to the prison but it crashes after Yuri steps out of the woods in to the road. Everyone on the bus seems to be out of it or dead as Yuri begins to cut through the cage at the front of the bus.
Thoughts
There are a number of noteworthy things about this episode. The confrontation in the restaurant was tense. Everyone had different levels of knowledge. It was fascinating to watch it unfold. Maybe next episode they will reveal what happened when Officer Lopez talked to the widow Goldfarb.
Mashman's confrontation with Yuri was also very tense. Yuri would have killed Mashman, under different circumstances, but Varga had told him to be discreet. Still, there was a definite threat of violence in the air.
The mood in the room when Dammick and Burgle are debating the case, which happens more than once, is electric. It seemed like both of them would like nothing better than to tell the other one to shut up or worse. Dammick still doesn't want to admit that he might have been wrong despite the preponderance of evidence that continues to amass. It will be interesting to see where he winds up at the end of the season.
The last of the moments that got to me occurred when Nikki told Gloria what her pie preference was. She seemed to let down her guard in way she had not before. It got me a little choked up. Nikki knows that her life has just been flushed down the toilet. She was reaching for the only lifeline available.
I'm not sure exactly how things are going to turn out but I know a couple things from IMDB. I didn't mean to learn them. I ran across them when I was checking things out. Nikki will be in it until the end. Mr. Wrench is going to be in at least one of the three remaining episodes. Season 1 was set in 2006. This season is set in 2010. I don't recall exactly where things wound up for Wrench and Numbers but clearly one of them survived. I wasn't making notes or writing summaries when I watched that season.
I will be very surprised if there aren't a few more of the main characters dead by the end of the season. I will be surprised if Chief Burgle is one of them. Everyone else is fair game in my book.
No comments:
Post a Comment