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'Fargo' Season 4 Episodes 1 and 2 Review: There seem to be too many characters as power struggle starts

It is ultimately not gangs that control the world, it is the market and power is illusive at best

Spoilers for ‘Fargo’ Season 4 Episodes 1 and 2, ‘Welcome to the Alternate Economy’ and ‘The Land of Taking and Killing’

Noah Hawley’s ‘Fargo’ has often been called a great critique of capitalism. And for very good reason. The show transcends good and evil and shows that ultimately, everything is affected by market forces, no matter how we choose to see it. Season 4 of the anthology crime/dark comedy series ups the ante by examining not just class but also race. 

Set in the 1950s, in Kansas City, Missouri, the show examines two groups — the Italian Americans and African Americans. Both groups were considered outsiders, and both wanted their place in the proverbial American dream. But the story is not as simple as one would perceive a gang war to be. The show examines discrimination profoundly. Whether it is the Italians getting sent away from a classist private hospital because they weren’t the same class or a banker refusing to see the value of “credit cards” as a financial instrument, just because it came from a Black man, ‘Fargo’ Season 4’s first episode already sets the tone for what viewers can expect from the series, even if they haven’t seen the previous three season.

How Russain Jewish gangsters and Irish gangsters tried to cement peace in the early-’20s when the heads of both families traded their eldest sons as collateral, forms the basis of the story. Of course, the Jews were betrayed by the Irish scion and were killed. History repeated itself again when the Irish and the Italians came to a similar truce. And it ended the same way. The Italians annihilated the Irish. The show’s story focuses on the third instance of this repetition of history: Between the African Americans and the Italians. Only time will tell if it will end the same way. 

Peace may have been a possibility had the Italian patriarch Donatello Fadda (Tommaso Ragno) not met an untimely death from an almost serendipitous set of circumstances. That left his son Josto (Jason Schwartzman), a man with a severe Napoleon complex in charge. But not for long. For also prowling around the throne was his fresh-off-the-boat tough-guy brother Gaetano (Salvatore Esposito). On the other side, the death of Donatello made an opportunity for Loy Cannon (Chris Rock) and his gang to try and take over some territories.

The first two episodes of ‘Fargo’ Season 4 are reminiscent of the power struggle inside and outside the Gerhardt family in Season 2 of the show. And as a reference point, that works. An ambitious scion. A thug family member who doesn’t trust him. And a group of seemingly allied outsiders who are trying to leverage the death of the head of a crime family to gain their own footing. ‘Fargo’ if nothing, does a masterful job of demonstrating the transition of power.

But power, as a concept, in Hawley’s world, is illusory at best. It is ultimately not gangs that control the world. It is the market. It is the conniving nature of a capitalistic economy that only uses these players as pawns against each other to keep the illusion of control alive. In Season 2, Bokeem Woodbine’s Mike Milligan learned that the hard way, when even after winning it all, he realized he was nothing more than a cog in a larger machine. Perhaps that too will be the fate of Cannon. Who is to say? 

The ensemble cast has already made its presence felt in the first couple of episodes. But where “the more the merrier” applies, the flipside is always, “three is a crowd”. And ‘Fargo’ Season 4 has a crowd. There are too many characters, many promising a satisfying arc, for viewers to pay attention to. While that may change as the show progresses and weeds out the less important ones, for the first time, ‘Fargo’ has felt a more complicated watch beyond its lofty philosophies. But whatever characters do make the final cut, one hopes Jessie Buckley’s Oraetta Mayflower, the malevolent but sweet-talking Minnesota nurse has a bigger story ahead of us. Doesn’t she almost remind one of Billy Bob Thornton’s Lorne Malvo from Season 1?

‘Fargo’ Season 4 airs every Sunday at 9 pm ET, only on FX.