‘Fargo’ Season 2 Finale: Love Among the Ruins

In Robert Browning’s 1855 poem, “Love Among the Ruins,” a young man looks upon the site where a great city once stood, now overrun with nature and a pasture for sheep. There, near the last standing stones of this once-mighty edifice, waits his true love. At the end:

In one year they sent a million fighters forth

         South and North,

And they built their gods a brazen pillar high

         As the sky

Yet reserved a thousand chariots in full force—

         Gold, of course.

O heart! oh blood that freezes, blood that burns!

         Earth’s returns

For whole centuries of folly, noise and sin!

         Shut them in,

With their triumphs and their glories and the rest!

         Love is best.

What followed has been a winding, brutal, bloody tale of a clash of crime empires, with many casualties, casual cruelties, betrayals and mindless murder. But the heart of “Fargo” — as it was in season one — is husbands, wives and family, some good, some not so good.

The Gerhardts, led by tough matriarch Floyd (Jean Smart),  have torn themselves apart trying to keep their criminal enterprise intact after the patriarch (Michael Hogan) suffered a stroke.

Ed has seen what he thought was a happy marriage unravel as the extent of his wife’s psychosis, narcissism and chronic unhappiness lead him further and further from any semblance of normal to the edge of madness.

Meanwhile, Minnesota State Police Officer Lou Solverson (Patrick Wilson), with the help of fellow officer and father-in-law Hank Larsson (Ted Danson), has tried to unravel the bizarre crime spree, while also worrying about his level-headed and brave wife, Betsy (Cristin Milloti), who’s balancing a battle against cancer with raising her six-year-old daughter Molly (played as an adult in season one by Allison Tolman).

Meanwhile, Gerhardt henchman Hanzee Dent (Zahn McClarnon), a Native American orphan taken in by the family, becomes an avenging demon in search of some way to escape his life.

While I can’t tell you what happens in the finale of “Fargo,” I can say that love, real love, wins in all the ways that matter, while all the counterfeit forms of it — greed, lust, envy — go up in flames.

Some Catholics may object to the level of violence in “Fargo” — and I can’t blame them. It’s not quite to the staggering heartlessness of the last few seasons of FX’s “Sons of Anarchy” or the depravity of the pilot of FX’s “The Bastard Executioner” (which is as far as I got in watching that one), but it’s up there.

Oh, and while it’s not HBO/Showtime standards, there is sexual content and language as well.

On the other hand, love and family never mean more than when chaos and destruction threaten. In the midst of the madness of the world, there are Lou and Betsy Solversons, standing by each other, supporting each other, enduring the pains and fears of ordinary life, but leaning on love and faith to survive.

At one point, a friend quotes to Betsy from the French philosopher Camus, who feels that death ultimately makes life a joke. I didn’t write down her reply verbatim, but essentially Betsy says that we all were put here with a job to do, and we have the time we need to do it, and then, when we stand before the Lord, He’s not going to want to hear that His Creation was a Frenchman’s joke.

I’ve seen faith-based tales that didn’t express the beauty and meaning of life quite as well as this tired, suffering woman, speaking from her private purgatory in the midst of a cold-hearted, wintry world.

If you haven’t been watching season two of “Fargo,” the 10 episodes are available to stream on several platforms, including FXNow, Amazon Prime, iTunes, CinemaNow, Google Play and OnDemand via DirecTV, Comcast, Verizon and Time Warner Cable.