Fargo

About the series

Contains story spoilers.

Fargo’s first season begins with a collision between two very different men in snowy Minnesota. Insurance salesman Lester Nygaard has broken his nose fleeing a former school bully, Sam Hess, when he meets Lorne Malvo at a hospital. Malvo offers to kill Hess and acts on Lester’s failure to give a clear answer. Soon afterward, Lester kills his wife Pearl with a hammer during an argument and calls Malvo for help. Police chief Vern Thurman arrives, discovers the body and is shot by Malvo. Lester knocks himself unconscious to make the deaths resemble a home invasion. Noah Hawley’s series has moved from a seemingly incidental hospital conversation into multiple murders, with deputy Molly Solverson investigating a chain of events that Lester desperately wants to separate.

Molly’s difficulty is partly institutional. New chief Bill Oswalt knows Lester from childhood and cannot accept that he might be responsible for anything so brutal. He favours an explanation involving a stranger, while Molly connects the hospital encounter with the deaths and an abandoned car. Continuing to investigate Lester gets her removed from the case. Other men have no such hesitation: Fargo mob enforcers Mr. Wrench and Mr. Numbers are sent to find Hess’s killer, abduct a man matching a description and kill him after learning they have the wrong person. Malvo, meanwhile, takes a job tracing blackmail threats against supermarket owner Stavros Milos. Spray-tan residue points him toward Don Chumph, the boyfriend of Stavros’s estranged wife, giving him another weakness to exploit.

The separate investigations begin to overlap through evidence Lester cannot comfortably explain. Molly obtains a security-camera image of Malvo abducting the man whose frozen body was found near the crashed car. Approaching Lester under the pretence of buying insurance, she lets him see the photograph and reads recognition in his response. Wrench and Numbers have already threatened him at the office, so his attempt to resume ordinary work offers little shelter. Elsewhere, Malvo takes over Chumph’s blackmail operation and turns Stavros’s religious fears against him. He kills the man’s dog, replaces medication and arranges for pig’s blood to run from a shower. Gus Grimly, the officer who previously let Malvo drive away after being threatened, finally reports that encounter and meets Molly in Bemidji.

Stavros’s belief that his prosperity is a gift from God has a specific origin: years earlier, stranded in winter and deep in debt, he found a buried briefcase of money after praying for help. Malvo’s manufactured signs therefore reach into a private explanation of how his life changed. Crickets released into the supermarket become another apparent plague. Gus does manage to arrest Malvo, but the prisoner produces a minister’s identity and an alibi; Oswalt goes to question him instead of letting Molly attend, and Malvo is released. Lester also attempts to use police custody as protection, punching an officer after escaping Wrench and Numbers. The two enforcers stage a fight to get arrested themselves, leaving him in the same cell as the men he hoped to avoid.

That failed escape finally forces Lester to identify Malvo to Wrench and Numbers. His physical condition provides a separate trail: a shotgun pellet from Thurman’s killing remains in his hand, and the wound becomes severely infected. Taken from jail to hospital, he is questioned by Molly while delirious. She presents the connections she has assembled to Oswalt, who begins to recognise that the apparently separate events belong together. Malvo is still managing the Stavros scheme, confining Chumph in a pantry so he cannot interfere with the expected payment. Spotting Gus near Stavros’s home, he follows the officer to his house. A neighbour confronts him before he leaves, extending the menace beyond suspects and crime scenes into the space Gus shares with his daughter.

A year later, Lester unexpectedly recognises Malvo in Las Vegas and insists on being acknowledged. Malvo is now posing as dentist Mick Michaelson, cultivating a colleague whose protected brother has a bounty on him. Lester’s interruption destroys that long operation. Malvo kills his companions in an elevator, and Lester returns to Minnesota knowing that he has made himself a target again. Molly questions his account of the trip; his new wife Linda supports it without knowing what happened. Planning to leave, Lester stops for passports and cash at his office and notices a light he did not leave on. He sends Linda inside wearing his coat. Malvo shoots her, mistaking her for Lester, while Lester watches from the parking lot. The danger to his household has become something he deliberately redirects toward another person.

Lester tries to manufacture an alibi for Linda’s death, but the plane tickets left in the coat he gave her undermine it. Malvo reaches his house after killing the FBI agents guarding him, only to step into a bear trap Lester has hidden beneath clothing. Injured, he escapes to his cabin, where Gus has found him and shoots him dead. The recordings kept there include Lester’s confession to murdering Pearl, turning Malvo’s private collection into evidence against the man who survived him. Two weeks later, pursued in Glacier National Park, Lester crashes a snowmobile and continues across a frozen lake on foot. He falls through thin ice. Molly and Gus learn of his death at home, where his citation for bravery prompts him to acknowledge how much the investigation owed to her work.