A Return To Fargo-tten Brilliance

Fargo-tten Brilliance

With its fifth season, Fargo regains its superlative status because it has returned to twisting, turning and toppling our ideas of archetypes, writes Joshua Muyiwa.

FARGO is back, baby! And it’s top-notch! After the lull of the fourth season – starring Chris Rock – which packed way too much story and breadth of history into 10 hours, this time around, there aren’t any mistakes. For Fargo's fifth season, creator Noah Hawley returns to the sinister structure of its eponymous muse — the Coen Brothers’ cult classic from 1996. It’s cold, cold-blooded, and coolly crafted.

While the previous seasons of Fargo have been slow simmers that boil over into a climax, in this one, we are thrown bang into the middle of the action. We’re in suburban Minnesota – it’s 2019 – at a local school board meeting that has blown up into a full-on fight. The spark that lit this meltdown at the meeting isn’t revealed yet (we’re five episodes in, at the time of writing this review) but within this chaos the camera shows us a mother tasering a maths teacher. From there, we snowball into the signature stylings of this show: where good people do very bad things for a good reason.

That mother is homemaker Dorothy “Dot” Lyon (Juno Temple of Ted Lasso fame) and her violent outburst at the school board meeting earns unwelcome attention, setting the season in motion. The man bringing the heat is Roy Tillman (Jon Hamm), an outlaw sheriff who only holds the American Constitution and God’s Laws as sacred. He’s chilling in his beliefs but the comic relief for this main antagonist comes with his horseshoe-shaped nipple piercings. This curious, comforting character detail helps to remind us, the audience, that we are watching a scripted television show with the volume on reality turned up to the maximum and not a well-made documentary on present-day America. With these two main players revealed on this character-studded chessboard of the battle between the sexes — the broad theme of this season — the games begin.

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From then on, showrunner Hawley’s foot doesn’t ease off the pedal for even a minute. Within the first hour of this season, Dot’s skittish agitation (perfectly portrayed by Temple) moves from board meeting fight to an attack at home to a violent shootout at a gas station and ends with her calmly making Bisquick pancakes for her daughter in bloody, bare feet. The season’s epigraph defines “Minnesota nice” as “an aggressively pleasant demeanour…no matter how bad things get,” and Temple brilliantly allows for her portrayal of Dot to be the most perfect human embodiment of this way of being in the world.

The connection between Dot and Roy isn’t immediately revealed. It’s still clear: one is the hunter, the other is being hunted. Though these roles aren’t set in stone, the show allows for them to interestingly blur at times. Don’t be afraid, this cat-and-mouse game has other players too and they more than deliver: Danish Graves (Dave Foley), the eyepatched lawyer sidekick to boss lady Lorraine Lyon (Jennifer Jason Leigh), the CEO of the largest debt collection agency in the US, also Dot’s mother-in-law; police officer Indira Olmstead (Richa Moorjani), trying to fit into the shoes of Frances McDormand’s dogged Marge Gunderson; and Ole Munch (Sam Spruell), a killer in a kilt. While each of these quirky characters get to throw their punches and waltz in the moonlight, it is quite clear that their presence is to highlight aspects of the duo at the centre – Dot and Roy.

With this fifth season, Fargo regains its superlative status because it has returned to twisting, turning and toppling our ideas of archetypes. Dot earns our empathy but she’s also a fighter and isn’t going to go down easy. Roy doesn’t remain a caricature of cowboy conservatism alone. Each of these characters is able to straddle across many columns of human characteristics. Just like this show, Dot too, is evidence that there’s always wiggle room even in an old, well-told and repeated story. Fargo is a reminder: every day, every one of us is reworking, remaking and reconstructing old stories, avoiding their pitfalls and finding footing on firmer ground.

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