FX
Warning: The following post contains spoilers for tonight's fifth season finale of FX's Fargo“Bisquik”
Who would have thought that a TV series based on an iconic Oscar-winning noir film by the Coen Brothers would have so much potential five seasons later?
However, Fargo series creator Noah Hawley continues to prove that there are a thousand bodies buried in these Minnesota snowdrifts.
Granted, MASH ran for 11 seasons; The industry joke is that the CBS show ran longer than the actual three-year Korean War. But much like Larry Gelbart was relentlessly inspired by 1970's Robert Altman, Hawley's mind for “true stories” about folksy people from Scandinavia and the Midwest is not yet as empty as freshly fallen snow.
Typically, especially in streaming times, a series begins around the third season, and seeing Fargo in renaissance testosterone mode this season has even given Hawley a new sense of hope for the FX series. We thought he'd close the book on these crazy, serious people in exchange for shooting aliens in Thailand this year, but as the Austin, Texas resident promised at the start of season five, he's been at it for almost a decade old people not yet finished series. He's just warming up.
“I would be lying if I said this wasn't the most fun I've had in my year producing this show,” Hawley told us at the premiere in November. “I haven’t run out of ways to tell these stories. Why shouldn’t I continue?”
You can bet on it.
After concluding a racially themed Fargo Season 4 set before the mafia wars in 1950s Kansas City, punctuated by a rare dramatic turn from Chris Rock and Jessie Buckley, what, by 2020 standards, is the best portrayal of a Don't -Cha-Know” won. Hawley, a U.S. citizen (who was only beaten in ferocity by Juno Temple's Dot Lyon this season), always planned to set his sights on prosperous Trump America – and he ever did. But also manage to create an intense thriller with twists and turns? Who saw this coming?
The big shock wasn't so much that Dot shot her ex-husband Roy Tillman, the sheriff of North Dakota, at the start of tonight's episode. I'm still reeling from Episode 9's Tillman gunning down Lorriane Lyon's (Jennifer Jason Leigh) skilled operator-lawyer and fixer Danish Graves (the hysterical, eye-patched David Foley in a big TV comeback) in cold play.
Hawley quickly clarified unanswered questions in today's fifth season ender. After the Feds' Waco-like standoff with Tillman's force, Hamm's character continues his escape into an underground passage, where he ultimately kills Lamorne Morris' deputy Witt Farr. Roy's other wife, Karen Tillman (Rebecca Liddiard), is arrested while Dot is rescued by the Feds. Before it all ends, Gator Tillman shares a tender moment with Dot/Nadine – has she really seen his mother Linda, another of Dad's victims?
Temple’s character says, “No, honey, I thought so. She was just a beautiful angel in a dream.” (Dot/Nadine told Gator in an earlier episode that she saw his mother to calm him down, to escape and to make the bad guy realize that a mother would never give up on her son .)
Dot returns to the homestead where she meets the fully recovered Wayne (David Rysdahl). And in more “they're not such tough characters” moments in “Fargo,” we see Dot and Lorraine, who have been at each other's verbal throats this season, have a lovely kiss and makeup. You see, they always had the same enemy in Roy Tillman.
“I just got the download, you shot him in the stomach; That’s my girl,” says Leigh’s Lorraine, hugging Dot.
“There,” adds Lorraine, “good for you.”
We then jump a year.
The biggest takeaway here is that Lorraine visits Roy in the federal prison in Thompson, Illinois. I guess he survived, but that's not the good news. Lorraine condemns him: “I want you to live for a very long time. While you live, I want you to feel everything your wives felt, every blow, every humiliation, every fear.” Their strength, after all, is debt. She doesn't name a specific person who will terrify Roy, but hints that she paid off all the cell blocks to fall on his head. There is no escape Roy, there will be hell to pay.
“I’m not afraid of you,” Roy says.
“It’s not me you have to be afraid of,” Lorraine says, pushing forward a pack of cigarettes.
“These could prove useful,” she adds.
But Hawley saves the best for last when it comes to Fargo: goody-goody on the outside with some downsides on the inside, and it's a crazy final scene where Dot and her daughter arrive home to see Wayne find who gets a visit from the grumpy, nasty murderer Ole Munch (Sam Spruell), an elephant who doesn't forget when it comes to paying off a blood debt.
“Man frees the tiger so that the tiger can finish its fight. “It doesn’t mean the man is done with her,” he warns Dot.
Wayne responds politely, “We saw a tiger at the Minneapolis Zoo once, you can hear him roaring from two miles away… he runs about 40 miles an hour.”
“The debts must be paid, a person's flesh has been taken away – now a pound is demanded in return,” says the Grim Reaper of several centuries.
Punkt argues with him directly and catches flies with honey instead of pulling a gun out of the holster: “Everyone says a debt has to be paid, but what if you can't?” She says to Ole: “If you can Are you poor or lose your job? Or maybe there’s a death in the family – doesn’t that mean the debt should be forgiven?”
Ole is at a loss.
Dot then orders him, “We're already halfway to dinner, it's a school night…You either wash your hands and help, or you do that another time.”
She tells the relentless killer, “You took a job, you got hurt, you can’t be evil because of the risk.”
“It's like getting angry at the table you stubbed your toe on,” she lectures him, reminding Ole that his mother would have done anything for him, just like Dot, to save her own daughter.
Ole then helps Dot make Bisquik cookies for the family's chili dinner. She tells him the secret ingredients that make her a killer: buttermilk and honey.
Dot's final piece of wisdom to Ole as the camera freezes him chewing the baked dough: “You must eat something made with love and joy and you will be forgiven.”
“Fargo is always a tragedy because people can’t communicate,” Hawley also told Deadline.
Until it isn't, in a great sense. Because one of the most exciting seasons of Fargo ends with cookies.