This isn’t the first time Fargo the series has trafficked in the supernatural. Season Two was punctuated by alien vistations; Season Three gave us a character who was invisible to all electronic sensors, and another, played by Twin Peaks‘ Ray Wise, who can best be described as an avenging angel, meting out justice to the wicked. And there are precedents in the work of Joel and Ethan Coen, whose entire oeuvre is Fargo the TV show’s source material at least as much as Fargo the movie itself: Barton Fink, The Man Who Wasn’t There, The Hudsucker Proxy, and even The Big Lebowski—whose narrator, the Stranger played by Sam Elliott, shows up and interacts with the Dude before addressing the audience directly—all dabble in the paranormal, to name a few.
But neither the show nor the body of cinematic work that inspired it has, to my recollection, presented us with so pure a figure of horror as Mr. Snowman (played by Will Clinger, according to FX’s press notes on the season). With his blackened, frostbitten fingertips, his missing nose, his pale gray skin, and his ability to change the atmosphere surrounding him, he’s more like a White Walker or one of their wights than anything we’ve seen on the show before. Why series creator and episode co-writer (with Stefani Robinson) Noah Hawley decided to veer so hard and so far in a horror direction with this entity is a mystery, at least for now.
I reviewed last night’s episode of Fargo, which was a doozy, for Decider.
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