In "Fargo," comedian Chris Rock gets dramatic as a mob boss whose weapon of choice is the monologue - Salon

"Fargo" is a narrative landscape chockablock with stories.

The new season is an underworld saga about two dueling crime clans from two disparate cultures pitted against one another in Kansas City, circa 1950.

Since the dialogue hits the ear before the season's narrative has a chance to settle into something we can comprehend, I am betting it will be a dividing line between those who saddle up for this new installment of "Fargo" and folks who don't have the energy to devote to so much active listening.

The people in Hawley's version of Kansas City's criminal underworld and its adjacent parts are men and women – men, mostly – naturally given to grandiloquent speech and extensive verbosity.

Initial seasons played with our concept of small town America flavored by so-called "Minnesota nice," which each season connected to another in some way that may not be apparent at first.

The third season takes us to another cop shop in another town and presents a story that amply incorporates the perspectives of two cops and a con artist, all of them women.

Distinct though each plot may be, they still follow a solidly established formula with recognizable parts: a main story, a B-plot and a C, as well as an X factor that lends a surreal unpredictability to it all.

Out of the gate, Season 4 deviates from that formula with a story about criminals and crooked cops with no out-of-the-blue inciting incident playing the straw that collapses the camel.

The Kansas City underworld has ties to Fargo mentioned in previous seasons, but the only connection to Minnesota is by way of an eccentric nurse named Oraetta Mayflower (Jessie Buckley, recently of "I'm Thinking of Ending Things") who, in the tradition of characters played by Billy Bob Thornton, David Thewlis, and Bokeem Woodbine, slides into the part of this season's random evil.

But this Kansas City season has grander aims than merely this.

It's also the first season in which children are prominently featured – as insurance that civility will be maintained, each mob exchanges a son for the other to keep as its ward – and yet, only Crutchfield's daughter is written with a mote of interiority.

The counter to this is that "Fargo" isn't designed to be an inquisition about racism in America, but an exploration of cause and effect and the moral trials that result.

That makes the plot's main thrust one of crime, ambition and consequence, one in which race inevitably plays a role given the era's codified segregation but isn't the main story.

Previous seasons of "Fargo" achieve a balance between quotable dialogue and surprising action.

That former features much more heavily than the latter in this season that slow-walks the narrative toward inevitable death and violence.