Fargo season 2 episode 8 review: Loplop

One of the all-time great TV episodes

Don't make me stab you again (MGM/FX)

After Fargo finished this week, the great horror author Stephen King tweeted that it ‘may be the best thing on TV in three years,’ describing it as ‘terrifying and hilarious’.

Well he’s right.

Loplop belongs in the pantheon of all-time TV episodes. It’s as though, for one heartstopping hour, Joel and Ethan Coen made television.

That’s not just because of all the Coen callbacks: The ‘going crazy up there at the lake’ from the Fargo film and the gas station interaction like out of No Country For Old Men to name just two.

No, it’s because the characters had character, the events had meaning, the dialogue was crackling, the action was exhilarating, the ending was shocking.

Some say the ‘golden age of television’ - the period of Mad Men and Breaking Bad - is over. Well it’s not.

Three’s company

We spend the bulk of the episode with Ed, Peggy and their hostage Dodd. And the three characters play off of eachother so well.

Kirsten Dunst, who has been quietly marvellous all season, is so damn good as the off-her-rocker hairdresser.

When she starts actualising - aka repeatedly stabbing her tied up houseguest and then force feeding him beans - it’s just dynamite.

She’s so funny, and so are Jesse Plemons and Jeffrey Donovan. It’s one of those unbelievable and yet so real situations that the Coens do so well.

Dodd begs Ed to keep crazy Peggy away from him, Ed has to help Dodd relieve himself in a bucket, Peggy has a delirious chat about ‘trying’ and ‘being’ — it’s so much fun.

And then it’s not.

Because Dodd of course gets loose, and prepares a trap for Ed, returning home having told the Kansas gangsters just who he captured.

In the episode’s final sequence, Dodd has Ed hanged from the ceiling, choking the life out of him. It’s hard to watch Ed’s face get progressively purple and lifeless.

Peggy, previously unconscious sneaks up of the misogynistic Dodd, who spouts one of the great lines about what you can and can’t do with women, and stabs him in the foot with a blade, breaking off the handle in the process.

When Dodd goes to lift it he slices his hand, and a second later he’s been bashed on the head with a firepoker.

Peggy frees Ed but then guess who arrives?

Hanzee

The Native American assassin is quite probably the most compelling character on the show, and in his search for the trio in the cabin goes on a torturous (and a bit awesome) journey through the racist midwest.

‘I just want a glass of water,’ he tells a bartender who spits in his glass and tells him to get out by invoking Wounded Knee.

The rest of the bargoers also try to shame the badass, who walks straight to his car gets out his pistol and starts wounding knees.

When the cops arrive, he calms talks out an assault rifle and kills them. Now he’s a wanted man, but he’s also not far from Dodd.

So when he enters that cabin, it looks like it’s all over for Dodd's captors. And then Hanzee's boss and brother begins abusing him, calling him a ‘mongrel’ and a ‘half breed’.

So he shoots him in the face.

Bye Dodd, you were a brilliantly hateable bad guy.

Hanzee though isn’t going anywhere, not yet at least. He asks Peggy to cut his long hair; in part because he’s on the run, in part because he’s ‘tired of this life’.

It’s a confusingly beautiful moment, and though the couple visibly toil over whether to stab Hanzee in the back it looks as though everything will go on alright.

Except the cops are here. See, I told you this sequence is exciting. Lou and Hank spot them from the woods, bullets are exchanged, Peggy stabs Hanzee in the shoulder, Hanzee just about escapes the cabin.

And scene. As I said: One of the greatest TV episodes ever.