‘Fargo’ season 2, episode 2 review: Ed cleans up, Peggy goes to work and a snowman named Billy Bob

The season 2 premiere of “Fargo” brought us a lot of rich storylines and we have a very good feeling that this is going to be one heck of a ride. We had the Gerhardt family lose their patriarch and their youngest son, Rye, killed by a local woman named Peggy, (by accident) who are now hiding his body in her freezer with the help of her husband Ed. Another group wants to rise up now that the Gerhardt family is weakened and the cops (Lou and Hank) are investigating Rye’s Waffle Hut slaughter.

A group wants to buy out the Gerhardt family business now that their patriarch is out for the count from this stroke, but his wife, Floyd is not willing to give up their territory. While the eldest son feels that he should be in charge now, Floyd is not willing to step down at this point.

Everyone’s looking for Rye, both the Gerhardt brothers as well as the new group in town looking to turn any of the brothers over to their side. Men from the corporation, lead by a man named Mike, heads to the typewriter store to get a lead on Rye and they learn that he was last seen heading off to talk to the judge who is now dead.

Lou is still investigating the murder at the Waffle Hut and is running into a wall, that is until his wife finds a gun at the scene of the crime in a bush. There was a nice little homage to season 1 in this scene when Betsy asks Molly what she wants to name the snowman and she says “Billy Bob”. Lou notices Mike’s car driving by and calls into Hank to pull their car over, but he’s not able to get anything out of Mike and his boys except attitude.

Ed and Peggy still haven’t cleaned up the mess of Rye’s body in their house or their bloody broken car.  Peggy is going to work like nothing happened, but Ed is staying home to clean up and get things squared away. While Peggy is at work, lying about the night before, Ed scrubs down the garage and burns all of this clothes. As for Rye’s body, Ed drives it to the butcher shop that he works at, to dispose of the body using the meat grinder. Lou sees Ed’s truck outside and pulls up to the shop as Ed is inside grinding up Rye’s body. As Lou knocks on the door, Ed chops off Rye’s fingers and one of them rolls away, under a door…. will he notice? Ed did notice the finger and luckily he noticed before Lou did.

Peggy on the other hand has gotten a ride home from the owner of the salon, who discovers that Peggy has been stealing toilet paper from her shop and also sees the hole in her car. Peggy is finally able to get her out of her house, but not before the shop owner makes a bit of a pass at Peggy.

After such a strong premiere we were a little let down by this episode. There’s too many small stories that are linking together, but barely. It was a very slow episode, where very little happened for most of it and there were so many short cuts to next scenes that we were never really fully engaged. Also, we don’t really know what the deal with the aliens are at this point, but they are taking away from the story a bit. Episode grade: C

What did you think of tonight’s episode of “Fargo” and do you like this season so far? Leave us a comment below and tell us what you want to see happen. (Photo: FX)