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Jon Hamm arrives as a lawman who isn’t very concerned with the law.Season 5, Episode 2: ‘Trials and Tribulations’In its persistent engagement with the Coenverse so far, “Fargo” has done best when it tweaks our expectations rather than simply reward fans with references to different movies. The premiere’s restaging of the Jean Lundegaard kidnapping from the movie “Fargo,” for example, was a dynamic way to establish Dot as someone who is surprisingly capable of dealing with a violent disruption to her morning routine.In this episode, Roy Tillman (Jon Hamm) gets an introduction that initially posits him as an upstanding rural lawman in the mold of Tommy Lee Jones in the Coens’ “No Country for Old Men.” It quickly becomes apparent, however, that he is a more unsavory man of justice.The opening monologue nods to Jones’s character, a third-generation sheriff who finds himself overwhelmed by contemporary evils. But Tillman is the type to perpetrate those evils himself under the guise of godly righteousness.His monologue is not delivered to us, in fact, but to a married couple in which the husband has violently assaulted his wife. Tillman is not enforcing the law but rather a patriarchal order that the man has disrupted by hitting his wife for the wrong reasons. In Tillman’s view, a man “only raises his hand when she forgets her place” — rather than book the husband, he has him choked as a “lesson.” The wife is then advised to, among other things, cater to her husband’s carnal needs “in order to sow harmony.”Tillman’s status as an elected official is underlined heavily for political effect here. He is a conservative North Dakotan, to put it mildly — “Jesus was a man, not some bearded lady” — and the laws of God, as he interprets them, supersede those passed by legislators.When two F.B.I. agents disrupt his hot-tub time to ask why he is not enforcing any laws, Tillman remains defiant and unabashed. But at this point, we know that Dot is his runaway wife and that Ole Munch (Sam Spruell), her one surviving abductor, had been working for him in an extremely unofficial capacity. Tillman has enough arrogance to shoo the agents away, but Ole Munch and Dot herself are still in the wind, which makes him a target, too.In another clever reversal of Coen expectations, Lorraine Lyon strongly suspects that Dot was in cahoots with the kidnappers in a ransom scheme but wound up getting cold feet. In the movie, it was Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy) who was working with his wife’s kidnappers to pry money away from his father-in-law.But Dot has no interest in Lorraine’s money. Unless Noah Hawley has another card to play, we can believe that Dot wants nothing more than to continue her life with Wayne and Scotty, and that she probably feels like her mother-in-law’s wealth and status is more hindrance than advantage. Wayne’s job as a salesman at a Kia dealership seems like enough to keep their suburban life afloat, as it presumably has for the decade they’ve been married.One obvious problem with maintaining the status quo, however, is that Dot’s story is ridiculous on its face. She has Wayne in her corner, because he is supportive and deferential to his wife in a way that would repulse Tillman. But Deputy Olmstead isn’t buying her story about the two types of blood, neither of them Dot’s, found in her home, and Lorraine is even more suspicious of her motives.Still, despite her wish to return to her role as suburban wife and mother, Dot prepares for the next siege like Dustin Hoffman in “Straw Dogs” or Nick Nolte in “Cape Fear.” In lieu of a modern security system, she enlists Scotty’s help in stripping electrical wire, shattering light bulbs into bits of glass and pounding nails into a makeshift wooden club.“Why is there is sledgehammer in the vestibule?” Wayne asks later. A reasonable question, and a funny one, too. The show’s back-to-basics approach to the fifth season, with its return to the modern-day Upper Midwest milieu of the movie, also includes a greater emphasis on comedy. That doesn’t mean it is wholly successful, as when Hawley leans too heavily on colorful words — “commode” and “hoosegow” in the last episode, “vestibule” and “boudoir” in this one. But the lighter tone and brisker pace is giving “Fargo” an energy boost so far this season. The pace has been nice and snappy.There is also much to anticipate. Multiple parties are coming at Dot from different directions now, with Tillman (and everyone else) knowing exactly where she is and Lorraine poking around Dot’s personal history, which had seemed conspicuously blank upon initial vetting. In addition to having a freshly mangled ear, Ole Munch still hasn’t received full payment from Tillman for a job that wasn’t as easy as he was led to believe.Add to that Olmstead, the F.B.I. agents and a wounded highway patrolman who is curious about the skinny woman who saved his life, and the next peaceful pancake breakfast seems like a ways off.Minnesota nice: Juno Temple, left, and Jennifer Jason Leigh in “Fargo.”Michelle Faye/FX3-Cent StampsOle Munch’s line about being “a nihilist” gives us our first “The Big Lebowski” hat-tip of the season, referencing the German hoodlums who try to pull off a ransom scheme. Which then calls to mind one of John Goodman’s best lines from the film: “I mean, say what you want about the tenets of national socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.”There’s an interesting echo between Tillman and Lorraine about what Dot “owes” them through her marital vows: “She made promises to me, my son, to have and to hold, for richer and for poorer,” Lorraine says. “And that’s a debt we’re going to collect.”There was some overwriting in Tillman’s rebuking of the F.B.I. agents while he sat in his hot tub naked: “Does my discussing matters of state in moist repose bother you?”Why in the world does a conservative county sheriff in North Dakota have nipple rings?A terrific shot across the bow from Dot in Lorraine’s direction: “No Ivy League royal wannabe is going to run me off just because she doesn’t like the way I smell. If you want to tussle with me, you better sleep with both eyes open. Because nobody takes what’s mine and lives.” More

After drifting steadily away from its source of inspiration over the years, “Fargo” appears to be creeping back.Season 5, Episode 1: ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’After drifting steadily away from its source of inspiration — Joel and Ethan Coen’s 1996 neo-noir thriller about the bloody unraveling of a criminal scheme in Minnesota and North Dakota — “Fargo” appears to be creeping back.Over its past few seasons, the series has been mostly a regional crime show with period trappings, seasoned with references to “Fargo” and a host of other Coen brothers movies. (Last season, set in the gangland Kansas City of the early 1950s, tipped its fedora most frequently at “Miller’s Crossing.”) Now we open in Minnesota in 2019, a setting contemporary enough that the politically-connected pose for Christmas photos with assault rifles.The new episode begins, inauspiciously, by citing the end of “Fargo,” when Marge Gunderson, the pregnant small-town sheriff played by Frances McDormand, philosophizes with the dead-eyed pancake enthusiast (Peter Stormare) in back of her squad car. Only here, the cop is Deputy Indira Olmstead (Richa Moorjani) of the Scandia police department and the perp is Dorothy Lyon (Juno Temple), more commonly known as Dot, who has been picked up for tasing a police officer during a melee at the middle-school board meeting. Dot claims it was a case of “wrong place, wrong time” for her victim — and she appears to be right about that — but Olmstead is unmoved. “What’s the world coming to?” she wonders, before adding a quote lifted directly from Gunderson: “It’s a beautiful day.”Moments like these are when the TV “Fargo” is at its worst, glibly referencing a scene that takes moral stock of all the pointless tragedy that had unfolded for, as Gunderson put it, “a little bit of money.” In the movie, Gunderson’s lament follows a bloody and stupefying sequence of events spinning out from a ransom plot. But here, Olmstead is shaking her head over a P.T.A. dust-up that climaxed with an accidental tasing, which gives it no resonance beyond adding another Coens homage to an episode that is absolutely loaded with them.The series’s creator, Noah Hawley, who wrote and directed this first hour, has been oddly undiscerning about his quotations throughout the show’s run. But “Fargo” is most effective when it pivots unexpectedly off the Coens rather than merely tipping its hat.In the season premiere, Hawley pulls off a sequence that lifts directly from the daytime abduction in the movie, which leans into the serio-comic folly of a housewife scrambling to evade two subprofessional kidnappers. Many details are the same, but Dot is far more capable than was poor Jean Lundegaard, whose desperate terror was mostly played for laughs. Beyond their Midwest domestic habit of knitting while watching talk shows, Dot and Jean have little in common.We got a sense of Dot’s capabilities in an earlier scene at the police station, when she frets about her fingerprints pinging some national database. She seemed content to let her mother-in-law, Lorraine Lyon (Jennifer Jason Leigh, using her haughty accent from the Coens’ “The Hudsucker Proxy”), clean up the cop-tasing incident, but the kidnapping later makes clear that Dot is capable of handling things on her own.So as her colorful past finally catches up to her in the form of her abductors, she’s ready to fight back with a lighter, a can of hair spray and an ice skate. Later, she improvises an escape from them during a showdown at a gas station convenience store.More intriguing than Dot’s ability to wriggle out of such a dangerous scenario is her determination to pretend that it never happened. During the time she was under capture, her ineffectual husband, Wayne (David Rysdahl), had contacted the police and enlisted his deep-pocketed mother, who assumes she will be on the hook for ransom money. (“I don’t know why they think I’d break the bank for some low-rent skirt my son knocked up,” Lorraine says bitterly.)Yet when Dot returns home in the wee hours and immediately sets to whisking the Bisquick for her daughter Scotty’s breakfast, she acts as if nothing is amiss. She’d gone away to clear her head, she tells Wayne, and she doesn’t even suggest an explanation for the two different blood types, neither hers, the police found on the floor.Dot’s behavior connects back to the definition of “Minnesota nice” offered in the beginning of the episode, in which “a person is chipper and self-effacing, no matter how bad things get.” What’s missing from that definition is the fact that “Minnesota nice” also can refer to the passive-aggressive hostility that is often nestled beneath the surface sweetness, though perhaps that is a side of Dot we will discover later.For now, she’s a question mark to everyone who knows her, despite her desperate desire to return to the Jean Lundegaard-style role she had fashioned for herself. But she can’t play the chipper Minnesotan for long.Sam Spruell in “Fargo.”Michelle Faye/FX3-Cent StampsAmong the many Coen references: Dot’s booking at the police station is scored with “Gloryland” by the bluegrass musician Ralph Stanley, whose rendition of “O Death” is featured in “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”References to the Coens’ “Fargo,” specifically, are even more strikingly abundant: Leigh’s accent may recall her performance in “The Hudsucker Proxy,” but she is filling in the role of Jerry Lundegaard’s rich, tightfisted father-in-law. “Scotty” is the name of Jerry and Jean Lundegaard’s only son, but here she’s a girl. While Olmstead seems to be the series’s equivalent to Marge, her husband is into playing golf rather than designing postage stamps; he also seems far more self-absorbed than the solicitous Norm Gunderson. The goon dabbing his severed ear with a paper towel recalls the injured kidnapper played by Steve Buscemi and, in perhaps the funniest nod, the tourniquet Dot uses on the wounded cop (Lamorne Morris) is secured by an ice scraper, which is a source of great frustration for Jerry.How much you like this episode may relate to how funny you find the word “commode,” because it is used as a punchline three times. Another colloquialism to watch: “hoosegow.”Wayne joking about voting twice for the attorney general is another hint that this season of “Fargo” may be engaging with contemporary politics in a way previous installments have not. More