Television: Fargo, "Waiting for Dutch"

So a few years back, I think it was, I remember reading a news story about a person hitting a homeless man with their car. The homeless man got stuck in the windshield, and the driver took the car home and put it in their garage and left the man stuck until he died. Or something like that. I may have the details a bit wrong, but that was the chief idea, and that story was brought back to me forcibly when I watched this episode.

But first, some background.

This season of Fargo is set in 1979 and covers the "Sioux Falls" incident Molly's father Lou mentioned years later—something that happened when he was a police officer. So now we have a young Lou (Patrick Wilson) and an even younger Molly, and his wife who is going through chemotherapy.

We also have the Gerhardts. A sort of crime family. Father Otto, Mother Floyd, and three sons: Dodd (Jeffery Donovan, who I remember from The Pretender), Bear (I think his name was?), and Rye (Kieran Culkin). Rye is a weasel who doesn't want to pull his weight and "has ambitions" in the way of being a typewriter distributor. Seriously. But in order to get into that particular business, he has to convince a judge to release some funds. And the way he goes about that gets very messy, involving killing multiple people at a Waffle Hut—and lands him in the windshield of Peggy Blomquist's car.

This is where you came in.

Peggy and her husband Ed also have ambitions. Ed wants a family (though Peggy seems to be evasive on this), and he plans to take over the butcher shop when his boss retires. He's the sensible sort and wants to go right to the police when he realizes his wife has hit a man with her car and then brought him home and left him to die. Still, he's forced to kill Rye outright when Rye attacks. And Peggy convinces Ed they'll just both end up in prison and no family or butcher shop for them, so Rye's body instead goes into the big chest freezer.

All this, and Otto has had a stroke, and there is another group planning to "acquire" the Gerhardt "business." Really, the show is all about plans and how they don't work out.

So we're set up for a lot of conflict, and really the show is just so well written and well done overall it's quite fun to watch. Can be very tense because you really never know what might happen or who might die. Nothing seems to be a given. Well, I guess we know Lou and Molly make it. Everyone else, though, is up for grabs. And that's what makes it fun.