“She made vows to me,” intones Roy Tillman, Jon Hamm’s brutal, chilling North Dakota sheriff in the fifth and most recent season of Fargo, Noah Hawley’s FX television show modeled on the 1996 film by Ethan and Joel Coen. “A pledge, in sickness and in health. Consider it a debt unpaid, leaving me in limbo. … She hid from me nine, 10 years. Interest accrued — until the debt could no longer be paid with money.”
The arc of the season, set in 2019 in Minnesota and North Dakota, traces Tillman’s monomaniacal effort to collect on his debt and return into his clutches the abuse survivor Nadine, a resourceful, heroic woman played by Juno Temple of Ted Lasso fame, whose performance is nothing short of a revelation.
Classic themes of debt, curses, and fate suffuse the latest installment of the series, its finest since its second season, as heroes, villains, and bystanders alike reckon with their inner demons, with resignation and defeat, and with perseverance in the face of seemingly insuperable obstacles. Season Five reprises these traditional notions rooted in the show’s — and the film’s — DNA, while also pushing them to potential resolution.
Previous seasons of Fargo have traversed time and place, bouncing across decades and plotlines, all loosely intertwined. The new installment pays homage to the original movie more explicitly than any of its predecessors. The action is split between the Twin Cities and a small town across the state line in North Dakota. In the opening episode, Dorothy, the wife of a Minneapolis car dealer (who even touts the benefits of TruCoat), is kidnapped. The dealer and the abductee have a child named Scotty, and Scotty’s wealthy, stingy grandparents suspect foul play.
The grandmother, Lorraine Lyon, played brilliantly and sneeringly by Jennifer Jason Leigh, runs a national debt consolidation empire, fittingly enough, and enjoys airtight political connections all the way up to “the orange idiot.” At the outset, she demeans Dorothy as “some low-rent skirt my son knocked up” in the presence of Wayne, her hapless son, shortly before Dorothy daringly escapes her captors. (No spoilers here: all of this action occurs in the series’s first 30 minutes.) Lorraine, with her affected, mid-century-modern, Katharine Hepburn-like accent, is vulture capitalism personified, a ruthless operator with bigger cojones than any man on the screen.
We also meet Indira Olmstead (Richa Moorjani), a crafty and dedicated detective tasked with tracking down Dorothy’s kidnappers. But Indira is saddled with debts of her own, or, more precisely, obligations racked up by her ne’er-do-well husband. Throughout the show, collectors from Lorraine’s agency hound her for repayment. “You tuck your kids in at night,” Lorraine tells her menacingly, “never telling them that they’re in the cage, too, because when you die, your debts become theirs.”
And then there’s Ole Munch, the kidnapper-for-hire, a creepy, ancient, mysterious mountain of a man who fails to corral the plucky Dorothy and spars all season long with Tillman and Gator, his instantly hateable son from his first (pre-Nadine) marriage, depicted flawlessly by Stranger Things’s Joe Keery. Munch’s origin story begins ages ago in Wales, where his own debt burden requires him to sell his soul. “In forgiveness of your debts to man,” the priest intones in a flashback, “will you consume his Lordship’s sins to God?” Thenceforward, Munch (Sam Spruell) lives a seemingly doomed life.
Meanwhile, Hamm’s Tillman becomes convinced that Munch’s failed abduction attempt has cursed him and his family, which includes his now-third wife, whom he also abuses, his two daughters, whom he ignores, and his militant father-in-law, with whom he plots a Ruby Ridge-type act of resistance to the federal government. Gator urges his father, who plays a blend of Sheriff Joe Arpaio and John Wayne, not to pay his way out. “‘Here’s your money, please lift the curse?’ I don’t think so,” Gator opines, to which Tillman responds: “We’re bailing water out of a sinking boat. We need to take luck out of the equation.” Tillman’s obsession with debt, curses, and fate blinds him to the self-induced dissolution of his family and career. Toward the end of the season, the sheriff brushes aside a challenge to his authority with, “Son, my destiny is at the other end of that tunnel.”
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In typical Hawleyan, Coenian fashion, further abductions — some grimly successful, others hilariously not — ensue, with plenty of collateral damage along the way. The High Plains accents are flawless (even from the British actress Temple). Crosses and double-crosses abound, alliances shift, clever legal and political dirty tricks rear their heads, and dream sequences (or were they?) blur the line between real and imagined.
But unlike in previous seasons, some of the characters manage to overcome their fates, to curse their curses, to confront — if not necessarily repay — their debts. “Then I heard / That Gospel story,” we hear sung in the background, as the season nears its denouement. “How He came down / From His throne in glory / And He paid the debt / For you and me.” For this cast of well-hewn characters we meet on either side of a frozen state line, a higher power forgives their burdens. Drawing on these themes and their lessons, not to mention just making some good TV, Hawley channels the best of the Coens.
Michael M. Rosen is an attorney and writer in Israel and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
