Right, like she’s saying them to the wrong person. “Fargo” does allow me to play with a literal pulp crime story that’s both dark and funny. But for whatever reason, I’ve also taken it upon myself to make it a deeper philosophical exercise, as if we can look at those tragedies of the world and find meaning in them, or at least explore our need for meaning. And looking at Joel and Ethan’s work, and seeing those elements that give it this metaphysical quality — you talk to Javier Bardem, and he says he wasn’t even playing a human being in his mind. And this idea of exploring something larger, as in “A Serious Man,” and the three rabbis and the search for meaning — it all goes into the hopper, and in order to support a 10-hour movie, I feel like it needs to have all those ideas.

The Coens’ work, and the past two seasons, touch on a pendulum swing between good and evil. But for this season, there are elements — Gloria’s struggles with technology and Sy’s comment about how “the world is wrong” — which suggest that our evolution as a species may be too much for some people. They’re drowning, so to speak.

I would say that we’re in a more serious moment. The events of the last year have been really difficult and challenging. There are people who feel like they woke up in a different world than they went to bed in. There’s a violence to that. As I was writing toward the second half of the season, it felt like the stakes went up on the conversation — fiction and reality and stories. We get into the “Stussy serial killer,” and the fact that Varga put that crime together: He created an alternate reality that then became “as the rocks and rivers” — it became the reality. For Gloria, there’s no more psychically scarring thing than to know that the reality you’re living in is not the reality that you know.

And the difference between Varga and Malvo is that level of vulnerability Varga exudes: in the ninth episode, when he’s eating ice cream on the toilet, and in his fear during the finale. But at the very end, he returns to that level of being almost superhuman.

I think that he’s shown over the course of those 10 hours that he has this power over reality, so obviously in his own mind, he probably believes a lot of what he says. Obviously he was tipped off by somebody high up at the I.R.S., and there is some sense that he has his bases covered. And he does have high-level connections — certainly when you’re moving that much money around, you’re not doing it in a vacuum. But I’m not afraid to imply mystically that he is some kind of elemental figure, in a Faustian kind of a way. There’s always been a V.M. Varga out there in the world somewhere.

Do you have a fourth season in mind?

I don’t. It’s a big challenge, every one of these — to come up with both a crime to hang it on and a large cast of characters on a collision course — each has to be new and interesting and have a different point of view. But we are exploring certain archetypes that are inescapable on a moral spectrum: There always has to be a Marge and a Jerry and a [Steve] Buscemi and a Peter Stormare, those kinds of pure good and pure evil and moral challenges in the middle. At a certain point, you don’t want to repeat yourself, so the question becomes: “What’s left to say? What’s interesting to say?”