‘Fargo’ Season 5 Finale Recap: Debts

Season 5, Episode 10: ‘Bisquik’

The show may be called “Fargo,” but setting aside the Upper Midwest setting and colloquialisms, this fifth season has been more in conversation with a different Coen Brothers thriller, “No Country for Old Men,” their faithful rendering of the Cormac McCarthy novel. From the beginning, Roy Tillman has served as a malevolent twist on Tommy Lee Jones’s Ed Tom Bell in “No Country,” both hailing from a long line of county sheriffs patrolling arid stretches of countryside occasionally pocked with outlaws.

Bell worries about an encroachment of evil that his predecessors never faced and that he feels increasingly powerless to contain. Tillman is that evil, a Black hat with a badge.

And then there’s Ole Munch, a contract killer who doubles as an ageless arbiter of justice, impossible to outwit and nearly as difficult to mollify. He has been the season’s answer to Anton Chigurh, the mirthless and equally style-challenged assassin of “No Country.” Both cling rigidly to codes that seem obscure to the mortals they hold in judgment. Both seem part of the American landscape, manifested rather than born. But Munch has shown the capacity for fairness and mercy, and his 500-year journey from Wales to chili night is rooted in humility. In a season where debt — and its flip-side, forgiveness — has been at the front of the creator Noah Hawley’s mind, Munch is always acutely aware of what’s owed.

Munch’s appearance in the Lyon house at the end of this moving final episode stands in contrast to the scene in which Chigurh waits for Carla Jean Moss (Kelly Macdonald) at her home weeks after killing her husband, Llewelyn (Josh Brolin). Chigurh had threatened to kill Carla Jean if Llewelyn didn’t surrender the cash, and now he has come to make good on his promise, even though Llewelyn is already dead and she has nothing to do with any of this sordid business.