‘Fargo’ Season 4 Episode 3 Review: Gaetano escalates things as show returns to familiar grounds
Spoilers for ‘Fargo’ Season 4 Episode 3, ‘Raddopiarlo’
While the first two episodes felt somewhat different from previous seasons of Noah Hawley’s darkly humorous crime drama ‘Fargo’, the third episode ‘Raddopiarlo’ feels right at home. More conversations. More bad decisions from characters (that would surely come back to bite them later), more kooky characters, and more oddly funny-yet-tense scenes. The episode begins with the introduction of US Marshall Dick ‘Deafy’ Wickware (Timothy Olyphant) who is a Mormon by faith, somewhat weirdly racist (that is no doubt also fuelled by his religion), a constant chomper of carrots (kind of like Bugs Bunny), and overall, a whole new kind of weirdo that the Kansas City PD has to deal with. He’s in town looking for Zelmare (Karen Aldridge) and Swanee (Kelsey Asbille) who in the previous episode had escaped prison.
Together with Odis (Jack Huston), the cop who secretly reports to the Faddas, Deafy tracks the duo to Zelmare’s sister Dibrell Smutney’s (Anji White) home. Of course, the cops don’t find them. But their presence does have an unintended consequence. In the last episode, the malicious nurse Mayflower (Jessie Buckley) brought them a pie spiked with syrup of ipecac. And Swanee ate a considerable amount of it before they went to try and rob Loy Cannon’s (Chris Rock) men. Consequently, that escapade was full of farts and vomit. Typical ‘Fargo’ thoroughfare.
On the Cannon-Fadda conflict front, things were helped none by Josto’s (Jason Schwartzman) fresh-off-the-boat brother Gaetano (Salvatore Esposito), a man who looks like a malevolent and crazed version of Hayao Miyazaki’s Porco Rosso. Gaetano constantly challenges Josto’s authority. But this time, he goes a step further and orders Constant Calamita (Gaetano Bruno) to take Rabbi Milligan ( Ben Whishaw) and kill Loy’s son Lemuel (Matthew Elam), as an act of aggression after Cannon and his men took over the slaughterhouse. This leads to one of the tensest moments of the episode where Rabbi realizes en route that the hit was not ordered by Josto, moments before it was supposed to happen. He hesitates, leading to Constant attempting to finish the job. But Rabbi stops him from hitting his mark and takes his gun from him, with a warning that should he do anything, Josto would hear about this. Rabbi is one the characters worth rooting for in a show where usually very few people are worth rooting for. And Whishaw's performance is as good as ever.
The episode ends with Loy and Doctor Senator (played by Glynn Turman, whose unrelated short story about Hermann Göring in the episode was enthralling social commentary) discussing whether they should retaliate against the Faddas and wondering if it was really Josto who ordered the hit on Loy’s son. All in all, ‘Raddopiarlo’ was a satisfactory ‘Fargo’ episode full of all the things we have come to love in Hawley’s devilish writing. The first two episodes had raised some doubts as to whether the series would remain the same. But those doubts have now been laid to rest.
‘Fargo’ Season 4 airs every Sunday at 9 pm ET, only on FX.