“The most I ever felt, I felt for that woman,” Roy confesses. It’s safe to wager Dot never felt the same.
Season 5, Episode 9: ‘The Useless Hand’
“You Hitler at the Reichstag or Hitler in the bunker?”
You never want to get a question like that from your father-in-law, even when you’ve been using your post as the county sheriff to funnel money into their far-right militia for some imagined holy war against “the deep state.” But the question itself, posed to Roy Tillman, suggests the answer: Roy has always been Hitler in the bunker — just as Hitler himself was inevitably Hitler in the bunker — yet he has flashed enough tough-guy charisma to bring other “patriots” into his orbit. He has been cosplaying Ammon Bundy for votes, money and unchecked power, but sometimes an actor immerses himself too deeply into a role. And now he has the feds surrounding his ranch.
Throughout the season, we have seen examples of Roy’s brutality and psychopathy, the ease with which he follows his impulse toward extreme violence. But Dot, in a scene where she is cornered by his current wife and trying to speak to their shared experiences, has it right: “He’s weak.” If anything, that weakness makes him more dangerous, especially as his options start to become more limited and he evokes the Masada, an ancient fortress where Jewish rebels made their last stand against the Roman Empire. (As the legend has it, the two-year siege ended in a mass suicide by the rebels.) Last week, Dot was correct in saying that Roy had no plan for what to do after bringing her back to the ranch, other than treating her like a horse that needed to be broken.
Much of this week’s episode takes place during this last stand at Tillman Ranch, as federal agents roused by Danish’s disappearance and Dot’s kidnapping finally have urgent cause to hold Roy accountable. Amid the chaos that follows, the show takes full stock of Roy as a fake cowboy, driven by feeling rather than calculation, despite the power he has been able to accumulate. A rational leader would know that shooting the lawyer and right-hand of Minnesota’s billionaire debt queen would not go unanswered, but he was embarrassed and angry and wanted to put this smug slickster in his place.
As for Dot, he confesses, “The most I ever felt, I felt for that woman.” That’s when he decides to kill her, too.
Of all the fine casting choices this season, Jon Hamm may be the savviest, because memories of “Mad Men” have us trusting in his relative infallibility on the job, even if his Don Draper proves dramatically less certain off the clock. Hamm is such a magnetic cult of personality that comedies like “30 Rock” and the underrated “Confess, Fletch” have made a point of turning him into a grinning buffoon. “Fargo” has done likewise, but much more gradually, as Roy’s biblical authority over Stark County has loosened along with his grip over his emotions. His plea to his patriots, “After they murder me, they’re coming for you next,” has the ring of Trumpian victimization to it. And they will dutifully follow him off the cliff.
Roy’s desperation raises the stakes for a thrilling penultimate episode that finds Dot scrambling for safety on the ranch, having seen where he buries the bodies. She can’t have anticipated being in the crossfire between the feds and a militia stocked with heavily armed weekend warriors, but she knows enough about Roy’s state of mind to see where things might be headed. When she works her way back into the house, which is full of little trap doors and hidden passageways that she knows enough to exploit, she gets a call in to Wayne before Karen puts a rifle on her.
Given how much the season has been about adversarial women finding common cause, it’s a relief that Dot’s attempt to bond with Karen fails. The show has already gone perhaps too far in softening up Lorraine, and it risks flattening the female characters if they’re all of a similar mindset. The threat that Dot represents to Karen, who rages about how the bedroom hasn’t changed since she left (“We sleep in your filth”), suggests that Roy is bored by his current wife’s compliance. That’s why he needs her to role-play in bed.
As Dot finds herself the bleakest possible hiding spot while Witt Farr and a band of agents strike out to locate her, poor Gator comes stumbling back into the picture, led along by Ole Munch, who enacts his own version of biblical justice for when Gator killed his host-of-sorts and made off with his money. Roy knows right away that his son has made a grave mistake, but shows only disappointment when Munch drags Gator back to the ranch by his neck, having carved out his eyes with a hot knife. With no mother or mother-figure left in his life, Gator had opted to please his father, and his reward is to be abandoned in the fog, unable to summon any sympathy from a hard, narrow, narcissistic idol. His childlike pleas for “daddy” are carried off into the mist.
Munch does show mercy to the woman who mangled his ear, however. With Roy’s men closing in on the “grave” where she imagines no one will find her, Munch does his part to liberate her by taking them out and lifting her to freedom. “To fight a tiger in a cage is not a fair fight,” he tells her. His beef with Roy appears to be settled. Or maybe he just respects her agency. And prowess.
3 Cent Stamps
A very small Coen reference of note in this episode: While negotiating for his life at Munch’s shack, Gator offers all sorts of illicit goods, including drugs, a flamethrower and finally prostitutes. “Sure gets lonely out here,” he says, echoing a line from a witness in “Fargo,” who remembers Steve Buscemi’s character soliciting prostitutes for himself and his cohort in their lake hide-out.
“An old woman watches young men play a game. She drinks. She drinks because her own son has spit the nipple from his mouth. She bothers no one. And yet, you killed her.” Munch’s centuries-old, biblical sense of justice is also quite stilted.
“What’s the point of being a billionaire if I can’t have someone killed?” Lorraine probably isn’t the first person to say a line like that.
Funny advice for Dot on the phone. Lorraine: “Now put your big-girl pants on and get in the fight.” Indira, with the saner follow-up: “Dorothy, don’t get in the fight.”
The Trump-era commentary comes through in Meyer’s clarifying the meaning of the term “witch hunt” to Roy: “You know what a ‘witch hunt’ is, right? Not witches hunting men, but men killing women to keep them in line.”
Source: Television - nytimes.com
