'Fargo' Finale: 5 Coen Brothers Easter Eggs (And a Bonus Season 1 Nod)
FX’s Fargo put the finishing touches on a flat-out brilliant second season last night. (Are you paying attention, Emmy voters? Good.) And while they had plenty of storylines to wrap up in the finale, they still found time to toss in a few more sly references to the films of Joel and Ethan Coen — and a big honkin’ callback to the events of Season 1.
Let’s pay tribute to another great season by cracking open these Easter eggs, shall we?
1. “That night, I had a dream” — Raising Arizona
The finale opened with Lou’s ailing wife Betsy narrating a dream she had about what the future might hold, with visions of a grown-up Molly (Allison Tolman!) and her husband Gus enjoying cupcakes and Kool-Aid with their kids and an aged Lou. Her words “That night, I had a dream” precisely match those of Raising Arizona’s convenience-store robber H.I. McDunnough (Nicolas Cage), who had similar visions of his family’s blissful future. And that wasn’t the only Arizona reference the finale gave us…
2. The man in the car — Raising Arizona
After Peggy and Ed fled the motel bloodbath, they stopped an old man in the road and piled into his car as he asked, “What’s the trouble, young fella?” That lines up with another innocent bystander: the pickup truck driver H.I. stopped while evading the cops in Arizona. (You know, the one who famously observed, “Son, you’ve got a panty on your head.”) At least he survived the ordeal; the poor guy in Fargo got shot dead by Hanzee before he even got an answer from Peggy and Ed.
Related: Ken Tucker Reviews the ‘Fargo’ Season 2 Finale
3. “Friend-o” — No Country for Old Men
When Mike Milligan and his mute henchman caught a Gerhardt lackey emptying out the family valuables, Mike informed him that “times are tough, friend-o.” That term of endearment, of course, was the calling card of No Country’s relentless killer Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem). And it popped up in Season 1, too, in the mouth of Lorne Malvo’s dentist pal Burt, played by Stephen Root.
4. Moses Tripoli — The Hudsucker Proxy
After the dust settled in Sioux Falls, a battered Hanzee got a new identity from a mysterious underworld fixer, who handed Hanzee a fresh Social Security card with the name “Moses Tripoli.” Moses was also the name of the wise clock caretaker played by the great character actor Bill Cobbs in the Coens’ 1994 screwball comedy. And “Tripoli”? Well, we’ll get to that in a bit…
5. The Solversons in bed together — Fargo
The final shot of Season 2 was Lou back in bed with Betsy, the two of them blissfully content despite all the chaos surrounding them. And that exactly echoes the final shot of the movie Fargo, with Marge forgetting all about that nasty business with the wood chipper and congratulating her husband Norm on getting his mallard painting on the 3-cent stamp. Even after all that death, life goes on.
And now, the finale’s big tip of the cap to the previous season…
Is Hanzee Mr. Tripoli from Season 1?
Let’s go back to that scene with Hanzee and the fixer. Hanzee was assigned a new identity, that of “Moses Tripoli.” Viewers may remember back in Season 1, hitman Lorne Malvo ran afoul of a mob boss named Mr. Tripoli. Sure, he doesn’t look anything like Hanzee… but Hanzee was looking to reconstruct his face to avoid detection. And the speech he gave the fixer — “Kill or be killed. Head in a bag. That’s the message” — are the exact words Mr. Tripoli says in Season 1. So maybe, just maybe, Hanzee goes on to run a Midwest crime syndicate under his new alias.
Need more proof? What about those kids playing baseball and using sign language? Remember Season 1’s contract killers Mr. Numbers and Mr. Wrench, played by Adam Goldberg and Russell Harvard? Mr. Wrench was deaf, so they spoke using sign language, and they worked for Mr. Tripoli.
So maybe we’re seeing their origin story, a good 25 years before we meet them in Season 1. It’s a clever little way to further weave together the stories of Seasons 1 and 2… plus, it gives us something to analyze and argue about while we wait impatiently for Season 3 to get here.
Fargo will return for a third season on FX.
