YMMV / Fargo: Season Two

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Broker sends the Undertaker to kill Mike presumably because he's failed to handle the Gerhardt situation. However, Ed's able to contact Mike because he reads in the papers that Mike and the Kansas City affiliates are holed up in the Pearl Hotel. Broker could have just as easily felt that one of their bases outed and Mike's identity going public meant that Mike was a liability attracting too much attention.
  • Bear hauling Simone out into the wilderness to execute her. Some see a Shoot the Dog moment where he is forced to kill his niece after they'd set in motion catastrophic events that led to Otto and others being killed. Bear has a minor breakdown afterwards as traitor or no, they were still family. Others see it as his Moral Event Horizon and a display of how he can be as selfish and murderous as his brothers and that he turned a blind eye to Simone's abuse right up until it inconvenienced him personally.
  • Ben Schmidt is portrayed as rather wimpy and unwilling to really deal with the Gerhardts, even handing over his gun when he and Lou go to the Gerhardt ranch. However, during this scene, Floyd asks Ben how his mother is, with him responding that she's "off the crutches". Was it a sign of how in bed Ben was with the Gerhardts, where they were able to talk so genially? Or was it Floyd subtly suggesting that she knew about Ben's loved ones and that he might want to be careful about who he crosses? There's also the fact that it's never said how Ben's mother got in those crutches to begin with...
• Award Snub: Patrick Wilson, Ted Danson, Cristin Milioti, Jeffrey Donovan, and Zahn McClarnon were not nominated for their work. Wilson is considered the most egregious snub, but he was at least recognized by the Golden Globes.
  • Kristen Dunst losing the Emmy to Sarah Paulson was at least seen as understandable given it was another hugely acclaimed performance. Losing to Lady Gaga at the Golden Globes however is seen as an absolute crime, especially since Gaga's performance in American Horror Story wasn't even well received.
• Awesome Music: Blitzen Trapper's cover of "Man of Constant Sorrow", which plays over the end of "Rhinoceros".
• Broken Base:
  • The UFO showing up towards the end of "The Castle". Judging by forum comments, it was either a brilliantly bizarre payoff after episodes of buildup, or a lame Deus ex Machina that destroyed any grounded reality the show is based in.
  • The Reveal concerning Moses Tripoli, the Fargo mobster from season 1. We learn that Ohanzee Dent is him, having gotten facial surgery and forged his own empire. For some, it's a great Call-Forward that ties into the themes of the season, as Mr. Tripoli's ambitions ultimately came to futility and it serves as a karmic end to Hanzee, the man who destroyed the Gerhardts with his treachery, as he is ultimately killed by Lorne Malvo because he was a nuisance. Others feel that the Call-Forward really stretches the suspension of disbelief with the Magic Plastic Surgery and feels too forced a way to link seasons 1 and 2 together. Couple that with the fact that Tripoli was one of the more uninteresting characters in season 1, and his death serves as an unsatisfying end to the more memorable Hanzee.
• Creepy Awesome: Mike Milligan's creepy Sugary Malice hasn't stopped him from being one of Season 2's most popular characters.
• Cry for the Devil: Hanzee Dent's usually too terrifying to elicit much sympathy, but the rare flashes we get to some of his Hidden Depths reveals he's a weary, tired man sick of the constant racism and abuse slung his way for being Native American, to the point of his long service of Vietnam is, at best, scoffed at. This is probably best shown in the moment he has with Peggy and Ed where he requests a haircut, clearly tired of his life of crime and nearly getting that one chance to get out.
• Ensemble Dark Horse
  • Noreen Vanderslice, the Perky Goth who works with Ed at the butcher shop.
  • Karl Weathers, the drunken and highly opinionated local attorney who manages to stand up to the Gerhardts.
• Even Better Sequel: Or prequel in this case. From the start, critical response to the first episodes of Season 2 was even more positive than it was with regards to the well-liked first season.
• Fan Nickname: Jesse Plemons was known as "Meth Damon" when he was Todd Alquist in Breaking Bad, on account of his resemblance to Matt Damon. Due to weight he'd put on between that and playing Ed here, some fans call him "Fat Damon" here.
• Genius Bonus:
  • When Reagan recounts his experience making war films, he starts having difficulty remembering the details. Reagan suffered from occasional memory lapses during his presidency that only worsened over his two terms, until his eventual diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease after leaving office.
  • The ninth episode, "The Castle," is a reference to Franz Kafka's novel of the same name, wherein the protagonist is prevented from doing his work because of an obstructive bureaucracy, similar to Lou's problems in the episode. Had they listened to his simple solution instead of getting all up in his face about Jurisdiction Friction and general snobbery, the massacre at Sioux Falls wouldn't have happened.
  • Each night, the Solversons riff on the catchphrase of famous broadcaster Walter Winchell, "Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America, from border to border and coast to coast and all the ships at sea." Winchell was a hard-line anti-Nazi and anti-racist in the 1930s and 1940s, and he transitioned into a hard-line anti-Communist in the 1950s. With Lou being a Vietnam War veteran and Betsy the daughter of a WW2 veteran, and neither displaying any kind of bigotry, it's easy to see why they might remember Winchell fondly.
  • The season finale, "Palindrome," refers to a word that can be read the same backwards and forwards. The rise and fall of the Gerhardt's criminal empire is a Call-Forward to that of Ohanzee's own attempt at making his mark in the world. It will rise and fall, as empires have done time and time again. Hanzee's unnamed accomplice actually knows this and tries to warn him, but as we know in Season 1, Tripoli's Fargo Syndicate will be wiped out by Malvo. It also refers to the structure of the second season in particular, both starting and ending with a dead man, shot through the shoulder, in a freezer.
• Heartwarming in Hindsight: During post-coitus talk in episode 4, Ed muses to Peggy about having a child after they buy the butcher shop. Come 2016, Jesse Plemons and Kirsten Dunst began dating in real life, and in 2018, had a son, Ennis Howard Plemons.
• He's Just Hiding: It can be nice to hope that Ed only passes out from blood loss rather than actually bleeding to death and is then Left for Dead.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • One of the season's main subplots is Betsy Solverson's battle with cancer and how it affects the rest of her family. Come 2017, Jim Gaffigan dropped out of the third season of Fargo, partly because his wife developed a brain tumor (thankfully, it was benign and successfully removed).
  • At one point, Karl Weathers tries to cheer up Lou by saying: "If John McCain could hold out for five and a half years against Vietcong thumbscrews, she [Betsy] can beat this cancer bullshit in her sleep." McCain himself died from brain cancer three years after the season premiered.
  • Otto Gerhardt suffers a stroke in the season premiere and, barring flashbacks, remains paralyzed and invalid for the rest of his appearances. In 2020, Otto's actor Michael Hogan had a bad fall that left him paralyzed on the left side of his body and suffering from cognitive impairment.
• Jerkass Woobie:
  • Peggy Blumquist inadvertently causes a shitload of catastrophe due to being selfish and short-sighted (and possibly also batshit insane), and refuses to take responsibility for any of the havoc her actions have wreaked. On the other hand, from her point of view, she's stuck in an unhappy marriage where her husband resists any attempt to change things and constantly obstructs her efforts to better herself, and even when she finally does start making genuine effort to improve her relationship with Ed, Ed dies and she's left sobbing next to his body before she's arrested with nothing to show for herself.
  • Simone Gerhardt collaborated with Mike to sell her family out, and only really regrets it when she's put in danger, dismissing her grandfather who died because of this as unimportant. However, her father is Dodd, an abusive, misogynistic asshole, who disrespects her even as she tries to help him with the family business. Even with all the wrong she's done, it's not hard to feel sorry for her.
• Magnificent Bastard: Ohanzee "Hanzee" Dent is the Hypercompetent Sidekick to the entire Gerhardt Crime Family, and a seemingly-unassuming Native American mercenary whose unexpected brilliance eventually brings him above both his employers and the Kansas City Mafia. Already a ruthlessly efficient tracker and assassin with an unmatched tendency to eliminate every person in his way, Hanzee's weariness over mistreatment in his life even in spite of his years in Vietnam spurs him to start manipulating every side in the heated conflict brewed from the death of Rye Gerhardt. Hanzee kills his abusive boss Dodd, and—with his last chance to escape the criminal life seemingly dashed—Hanzee effortlessly plays both the Gerhardts and the police pursuing them against each other, spurring them into a massive shoot-out that decimates both sides as he walks away the only true victor of the conflict. In the end, under the new identity of Moses Tripoli, Hanzee goes to forge his own successful criminal empire through the years to come, even with the full knowledge that some day, it too will collapse and fall into the sea.
• Narm Charm: Mike Milligan's "Jabberwocky" poem is a major Large Ham sequence that borders on Big-Lipped Alligator Moment, but it sure is fascinating.
• One-Scene Wonder:
  • Judge Mundt in the first episode who gets quite the Never Mess with Granny sequence.
  • Affably Evil Gerhardt lieutenants Roost, Mickey and Joey, who only appear in two scenes, and only speak in one.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • The Undertaker is built up as a menace and gets a damn cool entrance with his two henchmen. After he gets a word off, all three are killed by Mike and Gale. A shame, really, especially considering that of all the factions in season 2, the Kansas City mob had the least amount of named characters.
  • The Gerhardt lieutenants, Roost Bolton, Mickey Grout and Joey Seymour, are all promptly dispatched despite their pleasant Affably Evil nature and Badass Boast in their first episode that implied they might play a big role in any coming fight.
• The Woobie: Betsy Solverson. It's heartbreaking to watch her struggling with her illness throughout the whole story, especially knowing she's Doomed by Canon due to her absence in the first season. Fortunately, it happens off-screen between stories.