Fargo just got really, really gross—and we loved it

On Monday, Fargo—FX’s crime drama slash very, very dark comedy anthology series—aired one of the more gruesome scenes we’ve ever seen on television.

[Warning: This post contains both spoilers and gore, so please, take a minute.]

For context, here’s what happened in last week’s season premiere: Peggy (Kirsten Dunst) accidentally runs down the youngest son of a crime family—who, minutes earlier, committed a triple homicide—then drives home with his body still lodged in her windshield. When her husband Ed (Jesse Plemons) discovers the man alive in their garage, he stabs him to death. You know, normal Minnesota stuff.

In the second episode, Ed transports the corpse from their freezer chest to the butcher shop where he works under the cover of darkness and sets about disposing of the evidence. With a meat grinder.

This sequence is beyond intense, especially when Ed’s work is interrupted by the knock of state trooper Lou Solverson (Patrick Wilson) at the front door. The meat grinder is an homage to the infamous woodchipper scene from the 1996 Coen brothers movie that inspired the series, but it’s on an entirely different level of macabre. These shots are all the more disturbing for the surreal, unearthly beauty of their lighting and composition.

Molly Fitzpatrick is senior editor of Fusion’s Pop & Culture section. Her interests include movies about movies, TV shows about TV shows, and movies about TV shows, but not so much TV shows about movies.