The fates of Fargo

Published February 22, 2024 8:00pm ET



“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.

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