In a barren cultural landscape where so many new ideas and TV shows lie frozen in the snow, barely given a chance to make it past their initial episodes, it's hard to imagine that the fifth season of a series based on a 27-year-old film would become a perpetual source of inspired creativity. But Fargo’s latest Midwestern caper still has plenty to say, and proves the cruellest and most vital season since its first.
Noah Hawley’s anthology series has spent the past decade using the Coen brothers movie that inspired it as a jumping-off point that got further and further removed from the saga of Marge Gunderson, Lester Nygaard, and the botched kidnapping scheme that puts them on a darkly comic collision course. While none of the subsequent seasons have been an outright failure, there's a welcome pivot towards the source material in season 5. There’s a kidnapped woman with a raging capitalist in-law and a slapstick, handcuffed escape attempt. Fortunately, there’s a highly competent female police officer on the case, and a plethora of charming Minnesota-accented performances that make the horrors grimly playful.
Despite increased similarities to the film, the tone diverges significantly. The world of season 5 is spectacularly cruel and nauseatingly tense; confrontations that mirror the original Fargo are far more menacing, and the injuries sustained perpetually bleed and fester. A woman facing a break-in doesn't hesitate to incinerate her assailants, and you can smell the burnt hair fused to their faces as they approach her with clenched fists. Highly competent, cold-blooded predators glide through this world like sharks, and are worlds away from the doofus guns for hire once played by “funny looking” Steve Buscemi and peroxide blonde Peter Stormare.
Juno Temple adds Fargo to the long list of movies and shows in which she’s utterly entrancing. When we meet her character, Dorothy “Dot” Lyon she’s bearing witness to a middle-school parents meeting descending into violent chaos. Dot shields her beloved daughter Scotty and attempts an escape with a Taser to the chest of a beserk math teacher – but amid the confusion, she turns her weapon on a police officer, and Dot is carted off to jail. But it’s more than a night in a cell that worries her: Trembling as her fingerprints are taken, Temple makes it clear that Dot is not a person who can risk her existence being recorded.
Luckily/unluckily for Dot, her mother-in-law is the well-connected “Queen of Debt” (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and can quickly get her out of jail and into an AK-47-filled family Christmas portrait. But this does not mean getting away from danger, and as Dot tells Lamorne Morris’ Deputy Farr, “This isn’t the first time I’ve escaped”. Unhinged school meetings aside, the real threat comes from none other than the good ol’ fashioned patriarchy: Dot is haunted and then hunted by chauvinist nightmare Sheriff Roy Tillman, played by an against-type Jon Hamm. Hamm effectively tamps down on his natural charisma and creates a wonderfully repugnant antagonist, quoting scripture about the superiority of men and praising Donald Trump while being doted on by a much younger wife who comes to her marital bed duties asking “What do you want tonight, daddy? Helpless hitchhiker? How about angry feminist?”
As is often the case with “alpha” males, there's a disappointing son in the mix, and Stranger Things heartthrob Joe Keery is convincingly pathetic as Tillman scion Gator. It’s not all incels and bible-thumping psychopaths: Dot’s delightful and caring husband Wayne (David Rysdahl) is the heart of the show, but Hawley keeps good guys in meager supply. Where the film’s Marge Gunderson had a sweet, mallard-painting husband who would treat her to fast-food favorites while she solved crimes, Deputy Indira Olmstead (Richa Moorjani) is not so lucky, and burdened by an inconsiderate, aspiring-golfer spouse (Lukas Gage) who practices his drive in the garage while she works overtime to pay off their gargantuan debts. Gage’s knack for playing hilarious douchebags is never better than when he complains to his put-upon wife about not nurturing enough while asking if she can go on the pill even if it gives her blood clots.
While many of the inhabitants of Fargo are still “Minnesota nice,” – ”an aggressively pleasant demeanor, often forced, in which a person is chipper and self-effacing, no matter how bad things get,” per a season-opening title card – there is a despair across the land that gives the series a queasy nihilism and injects new energy into familiar plot points. Most of the characters are in way over their heads; the only person who seems to both understand and work the system is our Queen of Debt, who is perpetually two steps ahead of those who want to take her down. Leigh manages to have palpable chemistry with every screen partner, but is truly delicious when faced with the otherwise terrifying Hamm. She exposes just how small and unimpressive his hyper-masculine posturing is: “You want all the freedom and none of the consequences? You know the only person who gets that deal?” she purrs at him from across the room. “The president”, our Trump-loving sheriff replies confidently, only to be met with Leigh’s knowing and eviscerating smirk. “No. A baby,” she replies.
The six episodes screened for press set up a bloody cacophony in a final act filled with scores to settle by those armed to the teeth, and it feels likely that the violence will far outstrip previous seasons, with so little regard for the sanctity of human life across this snowy landscape. Marge Gunderson once concluded that “There's more to life than a little money, don'tcha know that? And here ya are, and it's a beautiful day. Well. I just don't understand it.” Season 5 tweaks that line so Deputy Olmstead can ask “What's the world coming to? Neighbor against neighbor, and it’s a beautiful day.” The change epitomizes the difference between the topography of that Fargo and this one. It’s not the spiralling consequences of a bad decision that rob the world of its beauty – this entire world is built on rotting foundations. It remains to be seen who will make it out alive and who will end up dead in a snowbank (or red goop in a woodchipper). But it’s clear that, for many of the characters, escape is out of the question.
