Fargo - Year 3

Season Three of FX's original series "Fargo" -- an anthology show set in the universe of the classing Coen Bothers movie -- features all the black comedy and intense violence we've come to expect from the TV version, plus a plot that's even more convoluted and fraught with social and political satire than either the first or second seasons.

The villain this time around is a thin, bedraggled-looking British man named V. M. Varga (David Thewlis). He's a walking compendium of odd historical facts and trivia, blended with an absolute devotion to money, a mastery at financial crime, and a talent for side-stepping facts and twisting truth to his favor. Vargas is no socialist -- quite the opposite, and extremely so -- but his brand of capitalism is hard to distinguish from Russia's classic cold war police state: Hard at work in a dungeon-like headquarters hidden away in the trailer of a semi truck, monitors and electronic surveillance devices around him, Varga is watched over by a portrait of Josef Stalin. Even better, one of his two ever-present aides, Yuri (Goran Bogdan) is a Ukrainian with fond (or perhaps traumatic) memories of Siberia and a detailed knowledge of various Russian pogroms and slaughters.

The good guys here -- as in the movie and in Season One -- include a smart female officer, Chief Gloria Burgle (the always amazing Carrie Coon) of the Eden Valley police, who puts the puzzle pieces together almost as fast as they fall her way. Hampering Gloria is the "new chief" set to take over as Eden Valley's force is folded into the county police, Sheriff Dammik (Shea Whigham), a swaggering clod who terms himself "a simple guy" and lives down to it in his lazy police work.

Caught in the middle are two brothers, the successful Emmit Stussy and his hangdog brother Ray (both played by Ewan McGregor, unable to scrub his Scottish accent as he attempts to imitate a Minnesota manner of speaking). The Stussy brothers have a long-running disagreement regarding their inheritance, with Emmit -- an early adept at business dealings -- trading a red sports car for the valuable stamp collection that went to Ray. Decades later, smarting over the idea that Emmit's launch in life came from the money he made selling those stamps, Ray can't let go of the idea that he's owed something, and he's determined to get it.

Ray's much smarter girlfriend -- a parolee; it turns out that Ray is her parole officer -- has plans of her own for personal enrichment. Her name is Nikki (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), and she's not the gold digger you might take her to be; she's improbably, but ferociously, devoted to her man. All the same, she's sharp and determined, and woe to anyone standing in her way: Nikki has the guts and daring to back up her acumen.

When Varga and his goons move in on Emmit's business, taking it over and turning it into a shady operation, the brothers' feud threatens to disrupt their scheme -- especially once a botched robbery attempt Ray forces another parolee (played by Scoot McNair) to commit takes a wild left turn and becomes a seemingly random murder, drawing Chief Burgle into the morass. Buzzing around the sidelines is the ubiquitous Michael Stuhlbarg as Emmett's business partner Sy Feltz, the target of various gratuitous torments by Varga and his henchmen but also the show's most precisely vocal proxy for viewers who might feel that the events onscreen all too closely parallel their own perceptions of recent U.S. history. "The world is wrong," the emotionally and physically abused Feltz sobs to his wife in one scene. "It looks like my world, but everything is different."

Executive producer Noah Hawley and his writers stuff so much story into these ten episodes you marvel at how they still find time to devote an entire hour to a wild goose chase that takes Burgle in an intriguing -- though unrelated -- direction. Later on they make room for a tense game of cat and mouse as Nikki and a new friend -- deaf hit man Mr. Wrench from Season One (Russell Harvard returns to the role) -- elude a crossbow-toting Yuri in the snowy Minnesota woods.

There are some gaps in plot logic, and the barest touch of otherworldly elements that might not sit well with those wanting to stick to something more or less resembling the real world. (When Hawley and co go all deus ex machina, they don't hold back.) You can also feel the long shadow that "Twin Peaks: The Return" seems to have cast over this production.

Then again, that's sort of the point this time around. What is truth? What is reality? Is it a matter of choice, or at least interpretation? The show takes aim at Russian meddling in our elections and our social media, and all but conjures the specter of Vladimir Putin for us, with brutal beatings, misinformation campaigns, computer hacking, and even a poisoning all figuring large into the story.

"Year 3" takes even more direct issue with the way Americans have chosen to live in political camps that bitterly and deliberately ignore actuality in favor of preferred stories and "alternative facts." The season does this in a manner that's designed to be overt, so its equally flamboyant way of integrating consoling philosophies (or theologies, if you like) seem needed to balance things out. (Besides, there's a so-weird, but so-delightful call out to "The Big Lebowski" included in all this season's semi-Lynchean mysticism.) At least we're not dealing with UFOs again, as in Season Two... well, not much, anyway.

The DVD edition of "Year 3" is presented on four discs and comes with a slate of nearly a dozen extras -- all of which are brief promos for the show. Some look at the story; some interview the cast about their characters; some examine the season's setting, which is mostly in 2010, a time when we were just starting to slip into a national state of mass hypnosis over our glowing iPhones and other devices.

"Fargo" fans will pick up on the shared connective tissue that binds the three seasons with the 1996 film. Celebrants of cable's much-vaunted plethora of daring quality offerings will find further evidence here of the "golden age" of TV we're experiencing. Enraged and sorrowful lefties will commiserate with the writers' no-holds-barred critique of the Trump era, while right-wingers will probably find the hero of their dreams in the smart, rumpled, and complex Varga, a television monster to rival the Smoking Man from "The X Files" for sheer mesmerizing villainy and complex layers of contradiction.

"Fargo: Year 3"
DVD
$25.99
https://www.foxconnect.com/fargo-season-3.html