Ed Blomquist

Ed Blomquist is a Minnesota butcher's assistant with modest, decent ambitions: buy the shop, marry Peggy, maybe start a family. He's soft-spoken, patient, a little dull by his own admission, and utterly unprepared for the violence that comes crashing into his quiet life after one bad night on a country road.

Plemons plays Ed as almost pathologically reasonable, a man who thinks every problem can be solved if he just stays calm and does the next practical thing. That mismatch between his mild temperament and the escalating carnage around him is the show's dark joke, and Plemons never winks at it — he plays it completely straight, which is what makes it devastating.