‘Fargo’ Season 4 Episode 6 Recap: “Camp Elegance”

I like art when it’s stranger than it needs to be. Historically, that was one of the things I liked best Fargo: It’s stranger than it needs to be. Think of Lorne Malvo’s batshit Extended Flashback in Season 1 or the prophetic dream partly haunted by Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” in Season 2 or VM Varga’s whole deal in Season 3. None of that required to be like that, but it was them, because art lives in madness.

Maybe that’s why in the least weird episode of Fargo Season four keep thinking of the incredibly grumpy and shady birthday party (complete with creepy vocals) that the Smutnys, fresh from Loy Cannon’s takeover of their family business, auditioned to their daughter Ethelrida. Happy birthday, kid! It’s really weird here!

Aside from this momentary peculiarity, this episode (“Camp Elegance”) tells a series of fairly simple stories. Detective Odis Weff, for example, is visited by Loy and his boys who would almost suffocate him in the style of Anton Chigurh. But they want him to live, and they want him to work against his Italian paymasters in the hopes that he can remove Loy’s son Satchel from the Fadda mansion after the two mobs are clearly in the after the murder of Doctor Senator Are at war. (By the way, US Marshal Dick “Deafy” Wickware sees it all from his car across the street.)

But Odis never gets the chance – he is attacked by the trigger-happy killer Constant Calamita on behalf of his nervous boss Josto Fadda, who wants Weff to track down his villainous brother Gaetano and keep an eye on Calamita, who struck Gaetanos Triggerman in the Doctor Senator .

However, Gaetano has its own problems. Our loy-up girls Zelmare Roulette and Swanee Capps, who trade for Loy, shoot their way through his guards and knock him out with a well-placed ball on the side of the skull. When he comes to, he’s chained to a chair in a cannon store, where Omie Sparkman (Corey Hendrix), the one-eyed muscle who nearly suffocated Odis with his own shower curtain, is going to practice his boxing moves on the guy. Tough break for the biggest tough guy in the Italian mob.

It’s getting worse for Gaetano, although he doesn’t know yet. Josto summons one of his milquetoast subordinates, Antoon Dumini (Sean Fortunato), and orders him to drive Loy’s son Satchel to nowhere and kill him. Dumini has problems with this order in and of itself – he doesn’t seem like the type to kill a child – but he also rightly protests that killing Satchel will almost certainly lead to the deaths of Josto’s younger brothers Gaetano and Zero one of those are now in Cannon’s clutches. But this seems to be exactly the result that Josto is counting on. Why deal directly with a power struggle when you can count on your enemies to solve the problem for you once and for all?

However, Josto makes a mistake when he tells Rabbi Milligan, “The kid is ready.” The Irish turncoat loves satchels and has long promised that he would run away with it as soon as the shooting starts. So Milligan takes Antoon’s wife Naneeda (Cruz Gonzalez-Cadel) down until he finds out that Dumini brought Satchel to Camp Elegance, the prisoner-of-war camp where he was buried during World War II.

Milligan arrives just in time … to kill Dumini after deciding against the hit and putting his gun back in his pocket. Of course, Milligan has no way of knowing. Sometimes people get killed unnecessarily if they act out of caution in this industry. But now he and Satchel actually have to lamb it, with both sides likely to be chasing them.

And oh yes, Oraetta successfully shit herself by receiving Ethelrida’s anonymous tip from her boss, Doctor Harvard, although by the end of the episode it sure looks like she was cautioned and killed a patient with gout whose moan was that drive half hospital crazy. You know these Angels of Mercy – once you’ve emerged you can’t stop.

Directed by Dana Gonzalez from a script by Noah Hawley, Francesca Sloane, Enzo Mileti, and Scott Wilson, this is neither a particularly curvy nor a particularly meaty episode. We have a mob war that’s starting so some people are killed, others are put on a list Be killed, and some people – like Fadda family consignor Ebal Violante, who returns from New York with instructions from the bosses that Josto must make peace with his brother and end the battle with the cannons (both are easier said than done) to discover that his distinguished colleague Doctor Senator was killed – I just want to put the brakes on the whole thing. But if there is a constant (calamita) in all four seasons FargoViolence is a snowball that rolls downhill. At a certain point there is no stopping it. Driven by its own immutable logic, it rolls and rolls on and on and on and on and on, and the only choice you have is to endure the avalanche or run like hell. Don’t forget to blow out those candles before you go.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Geier, Die New York Times, and everywhere he’ll be, Really. He and his family live on Long Island.

See Fargo Season 4 Episode 6 (“Camp Elegance”) on Hulu