Don’t Go the MAGA Way

This post contains spoilers for the season finale of Fargo, now available on FX and streaming tomorrow on Hulu.

At the end of Fargo the movie, justice is mostly done. The kidnapping orchestrated by Jerry Lundegaard, and carried out by Carl Showalter and Gaear Grimsrud, results in a lot of deaths and heartbreak. But Gaear kills Carl (and feeds his body into a wood chipper), Jerry gets arrested, and Marge Gunderson — as morally upright a person as you’ll find in a Coen brothers movie — catches Gaear. As she drives him to jail, she considers the trail of bodies he’s left in his wake, “And for what? For a little bit of money. There’s more to life than a little money, you know.”

It is a story set in a universe that’s ultimately more moral than not, and Noah Hawley has largely followed that philosophy with the Fargo TV show. There is terrible violence in each season, but the worst characters tend to get their comeuppance, if not die outright, by the end, while things mostly work out OK for the good guys. This was especially true in the first two years. Season Three ends on a lady or the tiger moment where it’s unclear whether V.M. Varga will go to prison for a long time or get away with everything, but Gloria Burgle survives and gets a new job where she’s hopefully more respected. Almost everyone dies in the fourth season, but there aren’t any traditional heroic figures in that one.

So the way things shake out here at the end of this excellent fifth season are perhaps not surprising. There is one bad outcome on the side of the angels, as Roy Tillman (Jon Hamm) stabs Witt Farr (Lamorne Morris) to death while attempting to escape his compound. But Roy gets caught and given a very long prison sentence — with the promise of even worse to come from Lorraine Lyon (Jennifer Jason Leigh). Roy’s son Gator (Joe Keery) is also prison-bound, and blinded after having his eyes burned out by Ole Munch (Sam Spruell). Indira Olmstead (Richa Moorjani), meanwhile, seems at peace with her new career working for Lorraine, and Dot (Juno Temple) gets to return to her happy life with Wayne and Scotty, leaving her old, miserable existence as Nadine permanently behind her.

Still, even factoring all that in, what happens after Roy has been dispensed with is wonderful and fundamentally good — perhaps the best single sequence in any Fargo season.

A year has passed. Dot, Scotty, and Indira visit Witt’s grave to pay homage to their fallen friend(*). While Indira heads back to work, mother and daughter go shopping for supplies to make Dot’s trademark Bisquick biscuits. And when they arrive home, Dot is stunned and more than a little afraid to find Ole Munch sitting in her living room, with Wayne (David Rysdahl) — decent, outgoing, incredibly naive Wayne — happily playing host to this immortal killer, assuming he’s some old friend of his wife’s. Munch has given her a year to heal from all that Roy did to her, but he still feels she owes him a debt from cutting off his ear and killing his partner when they attempted to abduct her. 

(*) Witt’s death would sting more if he had been as well-rounded a character as everyone else this season. Lamorne Morris gave him a quiet dignity, but he existed almost entirely to either help Dot or be helped by her. That he dies because he can’t bring himself to kill even someone as monstrous as Roy Tillman is interesting, but he was still more plot device than not. The cemetery scene tells us more about him than the previous episodes combined.

This very easily could turn into another case of Dot Lyon channeling her inner Kevin McCallister, using everyday household objects to defeat an intruder who can physically overpower her. There might be fun in that, even if it would be repetitive of a lot of Season Five. But Hawley (who wrote the episode, which was directed by Thomas Bezucha) has something quieter, more resonant, and lovelier in mind. 

It’s been a season about debt. Most literally, we’ve seen how Lorraine built her fortune out of collecting financial debts that various people owe to various companies. And Indira kicks her useless husband to the curb in part because of the huge financial debt he’s burdened her with while pursuing his various futile childish dreams. But Roy pursues Dot because he believes she owes him a life together no matter how much he abuses her. Witt dies trying to repay the debt of Dot saving his life when Ole Munch tried to kill him at the gas station. Lorraine has no sympathy for the debtors she pursues, or for anyone whose personal circumstances render them less successful than she is.

And over the final 20 minutes of this season, Dot gradually convinces this man who has come to kill her about the futility of pursuing debt at all costs, and how much more satisfying and helpful it is to be generous to one another.

The sequence crackles with tension, because Sam Spruell and the writers have established Ole Munch as such a relentless monster who seems superhuman even beyond being centuries old. Hawley loves to mix and match elements from different Coen films, and here he places a woman who was once kidnapped like Jerry Lundegaard’s wife opposite a force of nature very much in the vein of Anton Chigurh from No Country for Old Men. She hurt and escaped him once before, but only because he underestimated her based on the information he got from Roy. Here, with his mind set and his target properly assessed, he could do almost anything — not only to Dot, but to the daughter and husband who have given her such joy and such purpose, and about whom she is so fiercely protective.

But Dot is understandably done with fighting. Roy will never hurt her again, Lorraine has finally accepted her into the family, Wayne is back to normal after his electrocution, and things are peaceful. So rather than improvise some weaponry out of a vacuum cleaner and a spatula, or even order Wayne and Scotty to leave the house and call the cops, she sits down and decides to talk to this strange man and get him to see the world through her eyes. She points out that she owes him nothing — that he tried to hurt her, and she was well within her rights to defend herself — but more importantly argues against the very concept of debt.

“I understand keeping a promise,” she tells him. “People always say debt must be paid. Except, what if you can’t? If you’re too poor, or you lose your job? Maybe there’s a death in the family. Isn’t the better thing, more humane thing, to say that debt should be forgiven? Isn’t that who we should be?”

We have seen that Munch is capable of empathy, in his own twisted way. He never attempted to hurt the old woman whose house he moved into, and killed her son when he saw how terrible the guy — one of an endless parade of entitled manchildren this season, with Roy as their self-justifying king — was to his mother. He liked his temporary housemate, and took Gator’s eyes as debt for Gator inadvertently causing her death. He seems incredibly lonely, as any man as long-lived as he would likely be. The ideas that Dot are talking about with him seem both utterly foreign and like something he could desperately use. He talks about all the places he’s been and people he’s seen in his travels, in a way that Wayne and Scotty take as some kind of tall tale, or larger family saga. (Munch’s penchant for speaking of himself in the third person helps with that.) When he talks about his career as a sin eater 500 years in the past, it is in the same tone with which Dot discusses being Roy’s punching bag. He is a victim of abuse, too. And like Lorraine’s many debtors, he is one example of so many over the course of history where the rich and powerful treat the poor and weak like garbage, to be disposed of without the slightest thought to his humanity(*).

(*) For what it’s worth, Lorraine improves at least slightly over the course of the season, after Indira forces her to look at evidence of what Roy did to Dot, which at least allows Lorraine to feel something for women who have been hurt by men. When she visits Roy in prison, he has once again attempted to rationalize his situation as something that is good for him, and in accordance with his beliefs — even more than Lorraine or the late Danish Graves, Roy is, like so many people in the age of MAGA, convinced that reality is whatever he wants it to be. But in this case, his physical strength is no match for Lorraine’s financial might, as she pays many of Roy’s fellow inmates to put the former sheriff through hell. As they’ve been all season, especially when paired together, Jon Hamm and Jennifer Jason Leigh are just dynamite in this scene, her enjoying her moment of triumph, him trying and failing to hide how scared he is of her now.

Dot offers Ole Munch a choice between revenge and biscuits. Completely unprepared for this, he goes along with it, washing what must be years and years of grime off his hands, and eventually sitting down for a pleasant dinner with the Lyons. He laments what was done to him in Wales: “What they do to us — make us swallow. Like it’s our fault.” Dot does not know the true meaning of his words, but she can entirely relate to the feeling behind them, and offers him a cure for his old, old pain: “You gotta eat something made with love and joy, and be forgiven.” She hands him a biscuit, and he is utterly overwhelmed, not just by the taste, but with the release Dot has offered him — releasing him from all the debts he’s felt burdened by for centuries. It’s a transcendent moment, for him and for anyone watching.

Season Five opened with a dictionary-style definition of “Minnesota Nice” as “an aggressively pleasant demeanor, often forced, in which a person is chipper and self-effacing, no matter how bad things get.” The concept of Minnesota Nice has been a fundamental piece of almost every Fargo story, film, and TV season. But in this beautiful closing moment (beautiful even factoring in the state of Ole Munch’s teeth as he finally lets himself smile), what we are seeing is not Minnesota Nice, but a very nice person who lives in Minnesota. The accent is a put-on, but the demeanor — and the belief that we all are better off focusing on kindness rather than getting what we feel we are owed — feels absolutely real. (Even more than her three years on Ted Lasso, this role brilliantly takes advantage of Juno Temple’s gift for playing sincere, upbeat characters.)

After that underwhelming fourth installment (which, perhaps not coincidentally, took place hundreds of miles away in Kansas City), Season Five had a lot of work to do to argue that Hawley still had interesting stories to tell in this ongoing shuffled Coen brothers playlist. Season Five — this finale especially — more than accomplished that task.