Fargo (TV Program)

This episode reflects that this season is about women carving out a place for themselves in a world where the best men are dim and the worst are abusive.Season 5, Episode 6: ‘The Tender Trap’To the many reversals of Coen character types in this season of “Fargo” — Dot as a lethally capable Jean Lundegaard from the movie, Roy as a malevolent Ed Tom Bell from “No Country for Old Men” — let’s add one more: Lars Olmstead, the layabout husband of Indira Olmstead, this season’s indebted, nonpregnant spin on Frances McDormand’s Marge Gunderson. Marge’s husband, Norm, has a dream, too. He paints a mallard for a competition to get on the 20-cent stamp. He loses to his friend, but gets on the three-cent stamp, which Marge celebrates in the film’s touching denouement.But unlike with Lars, Norm’s ambitions are a not a drag on his wife. On the contrary, he makes her eggs and gives the prowler a jump. They enjoy a lunchtime fricassee together. In the end, snuggled under a blanket against the howling cold of the rural Midwest, they look forward to their first child. If anything, it is Marge who experiences a bit of wanderlust when she leaves for the Twin Cities to investigate the case and puts on makeup to meet with an old classmate for drinks. Ol’ reliable Norm will always be there to support her, but perhaps Brainerd, Minn., and its brown-gray buffet casseroles aren’t enough for a sheriff of her impeccable instincts.Indira is too good for Lars; that much is clear. When he comes stumbling inside from another night sleeping in his garage of broken dreams, he rages at Indira for not supporting him like a proper wife. The scene isn’t remotely persuasive, because there has never been any suggestion of why these two were ever wedded in the first place. He is trying to bring about a traditional marriage where, based on all available evidence, one has never existed. He runs up debt as a jobless nincompoop who imagined himself first as a rock drummer and then as a PGA Tour pro, and she takes double-shifts at the police station to work down their debt and to supply her man-child with Frosted Flakes. His gall in this moment is unmitigated, and it is also unbelievable.Yet the crude engineering of this scene does feed into a larger theme of the episode and the series itself, which has become about united women carving out a place for themselves in a world where the best men are dim and the worst are thoughtless and abusive. Indira’s fight with her husband, who somehow expects her to exchange recipes like the other wives at the country club, serves as a catalyst for her to reconsider her position on Dot. Given what Indira has been able to piece together, Dot is no longer the cop-tasing miscreant in the back of her cruiser but an abuse victim who is scraping and clawing to maintain the happiness she went through hell to achieve. That’s a woman worth fighting for.Lorraine doesn’t come around to Indira’s line of thinking naturally, which is what makes her the most intriguing character on the show. Her instinct is to support guys like Roy Tillman, because she considers herself tough and unapologetic and tends to think of society in terms of winners and losers, many of whom owe her company money. When Indira slides a thick file detailing Dot/Nadine’s documented abuse by Roy, Lorraine pushes it away. “People who claim to be victims are the downfall of this country,” she says. In her mind, Dot is still the impostor who has married her only son.Yet Roy, for all his swaggering power plays, has made it easier for Lorraine to change her mind. He only knows one way to deal with women and that’s to assert his power over them, by his authority or by the back of his hand. There might have been an angle he could have taken to get Lorraine to help him get his ex-wife back and solve her own daughter-in-law problems in the process. But her distaste for Roy and her meeting with Indira have started to alter her thinking about Dot, who isn’t the type of “victim” she lives to harass with onerous consolidation deals or threats of litigation.In the framing scenes at the Tender Trap, the strip club that gives this episode its title, one small detail stands out. When Roy confronts Vivian Duggar, the mustachioed banker “with a girl’s name” who’s selling his business to Lorraine, he brings up the fact that he’s violating a dancer’s restraining order against him. The irony is pretty rich, given what we know about Roy’s treatment of women, but it brings these men into dramatic alignment. When Lorraine uses her power in the end to ruin Vivian’s life, it serves as a coming attraction for things to come. She’s still coming around to the idea of “victims” being legitimate, but she lives to flex.Jon Hamm, left, and Sam Spruell in “Fargo.”Michelle Faye/FX3-Cent StampsWith Scotty left alone with Lars all day, the only thing she has to eat are crackers at lunch. In Lars’s defense, it appears that adding milk to sugar cereal is the limit of his domestic skills.This season of “Fargo” has been violent like the others, but even a bullet to the wrong captive’s head has nothing on the shock of Roy slapping his current wife for nipping his ear during a haircut. Her terrified acceptance of his abuse is just as startling and makes you think about how Dot/Nadine’s life with him must have been.Roy’s decision to “pay the boogeyman” — Munch — doesn’t seem like it will solve much of anything. Gator seems to know that, but taunting an unkillable hit man isn’t such a great idea, either.“When he was a boy, my son wanted to be a ballerina. I told him the male of the species is called a ballerino, but he couldn’t be swayed.” Wayne’s father never goes anywhere without his vodka gimlets, it would appear.That’s a lovely piece of acting by Richa Moorjani as Indira when Wayne asks her, “Have you seen my wife? She was supposed to visit me today.” Dot and Wayne’s marriage may be a legal fraud that’s falling apart, but her eyes pool with envy over their partnership.“When a man digs a grave, he has to fill it. Otherwise, it’s just a hole.” It sounds a little like Noah Hawley wants to tackle a serialized version of “A Fistful of Dollars” next.Does Indira agree to work for Lorraine? She seems disinclined by nature to trade the sturdiness of applying the law to doing security detail for a rich woman she can’t trust, but $192,000 is a lot of debt. More

Dot proves once again that she can’t be caged. She and Lorraine may have more in common than they think.Season 5, Episode 5: ‘The Tiger’Although her accent as Lorraine Lyon suggests Amy Archer, the fast-talking journalist who likes to tout her bona fides (“I’ll bet my Pulitzer on it!”) in Joel and Ethan Coens’s “The Hudsucker Proxy,” Jennifer Jason Leigh is projecting power as a kind of entitled boredom. She doesn’t merely walk into a room. She makes an entrance, like royalty. And when her commands are not heeded, she either calmly asks for the heads of those who defy her or she goes for the throat herself. She doesn’t raise her voice. She is steady, calculating and vaguely put out.There are two tigers, Lorraine and Dot, in this week’s drum-tight episode, even though a voice-over narrator, who speaks of tigers in a nature-doc parody throughout the show, seems to be referring only to Dot. And while that narration says nothing about a sisterhood between tigers, this episode engineers an unexpected alignment between the two, who have been at odds, to put it mildly. The opening sequence, which shows Lorraine deep in thought in her office, is a helpful little recap of where their relationship stands: She seems to recognize that Dot is formidable, a “wolf in sheep’s clothing,” and genuinely committed to her son.But perhaps she is more ally than adversary.Two connected scenes appear to redirect Lorraine’s perspective on the situation. The first takes place at a lunch meeting between two bank executives who had been negotiating with her lawyer, Danish Graves, on a deal to sell to her company. (The numbers being “pretty sweet” nods to the sale Jerry Lundegaard tries to arrange in “Fargo” the movie.) Lorraine wants to expand her Redemption Services from the debt business to the credit business, because “everyone loves a lender, not so much the repo man.” But she quickly realizes that her counterparts across the table have no interest in dealing with a woman, so she leaves them with new numbers that are not sweet at all.Later, she gets a visit from Roy Tillman, who she suspects has come to shake her down for money to let the Dot situation go. When Roy surprises her with a demand to get Dot back as his biblical property, Lorraine’s mood shifts exactly as it did with the bank executives. His claim to have felt relief when Dot resurfaced gets a skeptical “uh huh” from Lorraine that’s a fine example of how well Leigh plays the tiger, with a laconic half-interest that masks a deadly ferocity.“Listen, slick,” she tells Roy, “nothing would make me happier than to put that woman in a box marked ‘return to sender,’” but she bristles at his retrograde demands. She and Dot may be at odds, but they’re aligned in fighting men who wish to own them.Based on what we know about Lorraine, she wouldn’t necessarily be unfriendly to a guy like Roy, a “constitutional sheriff” who stumps for limited government and probably has his own holiday pictures of the family posing with assault rifles. You would almost mistake her for a progressive in the way she sizes him up as a libertarian who abhors taxes and the social safety net, even though she operates a predatory business that surely benefits from weakened oversight. By the same token, she wouldn’t necessarily be unkind to the shady bankers in the earlier scene if they had negotiated with her in good faith. She just won’t be disrespected. Or underestimated.None of this is to say that Lorraine feels a sudden warmth toward her daughter-in-law. But at this point, Dot needs all the help she can get. She spends most of this gripping hour on the run after Lorraine and Danish claim power of attorney over her and have her committed to a psychiatric ward. By sticking Dot in a different wing at the same hospital where Wayne is recovering from “a serious electrical event,” the show engineers a tense set piece in which Dot pauses mid-escape to protect her husband from being kidnapped. It’s a sign of Roy’s respect for her cunning that he has abandoned a third attempt to capture her and decides to go after her family instead.This leads to yet another unlikely allegiance between women, as Dot turns to Olmstead for help protecting Scotty, who stands to be another target for Roy’s henchmen. Dot gambles wisely that Olmstead’s feelings on this case haven’t yet settled, despite her being the deputy who initially picked her up for tasing one of her colleagues. These are two women who have known imperfect marriages, after all, as Olmstead is reminded in the steady thumping of shanked golf shots that must pulse in her head like a migraine. As the Marge Gunderson of this season, Olmstead has sound instincts and a sympathetic nature that makes her persuadable.Lingering over all these developments is a big question that “Fargo” seems content in putting off for as long as possible: Who is Dot, anyway? Or, more to the point, who is Lorraine? How did this reedy housewife from suburban Minnesota acquire a certain set of skills like Liam Neeson in the “Taken” movies? For now, it’s helpful for Dot to have powerful women like Lorraine and Olmstead in her corner. But tigers are inscrutable, too.3 Cent StampsCutting to the wounded orderlies after Dot promises to maim them is a funny touch, but even better is when Juno Temple lets out a Minnesotan “shoot” once she has been strapped to the gurney.A fine mic drop moment from Lorraine, who likens Roy’s desire for “freedom with no responsibility” to his wanting to be a baby, though again, she would probably pull the lever for him at the ballot box.Wayne’s bathroom talk (“I just went. Poop came out.”) suggests the path to neurological health remains long for him.Lorraine implores Olmstead to look for Dot with the line, “Are you going to look for her, or are you going to sit drinking coffee in the one house in the state where I know that girl ain’t at?” Coen-heads will recognize that line from the great Trey Wilson in “Raising Arizona.”Dot drives away in a car with DLR plates. Another “Fargo” classic. More

Halloween provides the perfect disguise for a home invasion. Of course, this is “Fargo,” so nothing goes quite as planned.Season 5, Episode 4: ‘Insolubilia’One of the strengths of “Fargo” this season is the way it has drawn closer to the Coensverse by re-contextualizing major pieces of it, rather than by tucking in referential Easter eggs for fans to collect. (Although it has done plenty of that, too.) The first attempt to abduct Dot, for example, closely mirrors the sequence in the Coens’ “Fargo” where Jean Lundegaard has her morning routine disrupted by intruders, though Dot proves far more capable of defending herself. She is determined, beyond all reason, to be like Jean, the housewife and P.T.A. mom who carves out a little time to knit in front of weekday talk shows. But she cannot escape who she really is.Roy Tillman has no interest in escaping from his past. He is building it out into a corrupt, theocratic fief across North Dakota and the open expanses of the Upper Midwest. He is a third-generation lawman, just like Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) in “No Country for Old Men,” but he doesn’t share Bell’s fears about facing a world of overwhelming evil because voters have put him in a position to perpetuate it. Whatever justice might be achieved in this season of “Fargo,” it is going to happen despite him and the tremendous political and tactical arsenal he has at his disposal.Late in this week’s episode, Roy is framed exactly like Bell at the end of “No Country,” as a retired Bell sits at home in front of a windowsill with his wife, recalling bleak, dead-haunted dreams about his father. Only here, the windowsill is in another couple’s mobile home and Roy expresses no misgivings about the violence he is about to unleash. We had seen him in an earlier episode counseling this same couple about an incident of domestic violence that Roy chose to manage in typically extralegal fashion, with a threat to the husband about his behavior and, let’s say, some antiquated advice on how his wife might fulfill her duties.As he smugly holds court on a Biblical passage relevant to this situation, Roy anticipates everything that is about to happen, just as he anticipated the likelihood of the husband’s getting physical with his wife again. He knows that he can goad this “beta man” into trying to shoot him, and he knows that he’ll be the quicker draw. He also knows that he can count on the wife to support his cover story: that the man he just shot is Munch, who had come home bragging about killing a state trooper and wounding another one. On Roy’s turf, the best way to cover up his connection to dead bodies is with other dead bodies.Roy’s extralegal tendencies have drawn the attention of Meyer and Joaquin, the two F.B.I. agents itching to impose law to the lawless lawman. But their appetite for justice isn’t shared by their overseer, who tells them, “Maybe he loses the election and the whole thing goes away.” The political allusion to Donald Trump here is unmistakable: Should the law be applied to Roy as if he were any other citizen, or do the voters get to decide whether his alleged sins are forgivable? In Roy’s case, as in Trump’s, there’s the considerable threat of “what happens next” that separates him from an ordinary candidate for prosecution. The agents are reminded that Roy is “the most powerful sheriff in North Dakota” and he is connected to “the most powerful militia in the Upper Midwest.” A lost election might guarantee a quieter withdrawal from public life.Yet the voters may not have a voice in this matter, after all. This week, we learn that Dot, formerly Nadine, was Roy’s second wife. And despite her valiant attempts to deny her identity and everything that has happened to her, Dot has been identified as the woman on the surveillance camera who outwitted Munch and his partner and saved Witt Farr, the wounded state trooper. In the aftermath of a home invasion that left her husband electrocuted and their home burned to cinders, Dot tries to brush off the whole thing as a case of bad wiring and refuses to acknowledge Witt, who wants to thank her for saving his life.The obvious question for Witt and Olmstead is why Dot would deny such acts of valor ever happened. Surely the Roy connection will give them some clues.Another big question to consider: What is supposed to happen if Dot/Nadine is brought back to Roy? He does not want her killed but returned, and she has proved to be an exceptionally wily captive. Perhaps that speaks to a key parallel between Dot and Roy, which is that they will deny reality if they have the opportunity to manipulate it to their own ends. Roy believes himself mandated by God and the voters to manage his domain as he sees fit, like tagging one gunshot victim as Munch and burying another before he can be verified as the victim of a “car accident.” Dot still refuses to loosen her grip on a domestic utopia that is now literally turned to ash. Perhaps the two are made for each other, after all.3 Cent StampsThe Gator-led assault on the Lyons’ den is thrillingly staged, from the half-silly/half-menacing “The Nightmare Before Christmas” masks to the small twists on expectations. Although Dot is able to fend off her attackers, some of her home security innovations backfire, like the lightbulb rigged to work as an alarm and the exposed wiring that ends up electrocuting her husband.Roy and Dot are both rooted in spiritual conviction, which the episode puts in pointed contrast. At the chapel on his ranch, Roy refers to the crucified Jesus as “old friend” while recalling an incident in which he watched Beelzebub himself whisper into the ear of a killer. In another scene, Dot assures a shaken Scotty that “the wicked stick to the darkness while we get to stay in the light.”Shrewd juxtaposition between Olmstead’s call from a predatory “debt-relief specialist” and Lorraine’s spin job to a Forbes reporter on Redemption Services, the business that netted her $1.6 billion in profit the previous year. Perhaps the funniest moment of the episode is the way Jennifer Jason Leigh quietly nods, “of course,” when a lackey whispers in ear that her son’s house has been burned down.“With all due respect, we’ve got our own reality.” — Danish Graves, giving voice to the episode’s thesis.Munch asks for “pancakes,” affirming him as a much smarter (and chattier) version of Gaear Grimsrud in the movie. More

Dot’s pursuers seem to be on the verge of being pursued themselves.Season 5, Episode 3: ‘The Paradox of Intermediate Transactions’The Coen brothers filmography is speckled with a specific type of abstract character, a dark and indomitable force of nature who isn’t quite human and operates on a code that is known only to him. Think Leonard Smalls (Randall “Tex” Cobb) in “Raising Arizona,” a mercenary biker who seems manifested from a nightmare, or Charlie Meadows (John Goodman) in “Barton Fink,” a gregarious insurance man who presents himself as “the common man” but reveals a second identity that is exceptionally uncommon. Then there’s the gun-for-hire Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) in “No Country for Old Men,” who asks his victims to “flip a coin,” but always seems in control of their fate regardless. He may represent Death itself, but his agenda has an odd rigor and consistency to it.We have seen these types in Noah Hawley’s TV “Fargo,” too, like David Thewlis as a mirthless, ruthless British business V.M. Varga in the third season or Billy Bob Thornton as the hit man Lorne Malvo in the first season, a satanic figure who believes people are primal beasts and acts accordingly. And now for this new season, Hawley has offered Sam Spruell as Ole Munch, who seemed at first like a highly seasoned contract killer — nothing like the rank amateurs played by Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare in the movie — but who takes a leap to the mythic in the third episode. His clients are now his targets and it is safe to say they don’t know much about him.Neither do we, frankly, even after the episode makes an unexpected leap to early 16th-century Wales, when Munch or a Munch-like ancestor takes part in a sin-eating ritual. He’s asked, “In forgiveness of your debts to man, will you consume his lordship’s sins to god?” And so he does, a poor man collecting coins for absorbing a rich man’s wrongdoings so he can ascend to heaven.That is the spiritual burden his earthly humility has forced him to take on, perhaps. In 2019 Munch has accepted coins to do a dirty job for Roy Tillman, who was neither clear about the difficulties of the work nor honorable about paying the money he owed. That has turned Munch into a 21st-century debt collector, owed much more than money.Though Hawley owes the Coens a debt of his own for his open-ended lease on their audacity, he keeps moving the season forward with a confidence that often tilts into swagger. When Munch lays in bed listening to a police radio, the show samples a music cue from “The Shining,” if to suggest that he is an eternal presence like Jack Torrance at the Overlook Hotel, where Jack was told he had “always been the caretaker.” That’s terrible news for Munch’s mother, who looks uncomfortable with the prospect of her creepy son occupying the rocking chair upstairs indefinitely. And it is even worse news for Roy and his half-wit son, Gator, who underpaid, undermined and underestimated Munch and now have to anticipate his revenge.But first, Gator has to prove to his father that he is not a loser, which isn’t easy for a kid with a Confederate flag posted over his bed. All this business with Dot comes as the Hillmans appear to stocking munitions for an insurrection-to-be-detailed-later, but Dot has prepared herself for a second abduction attempt.Last week she enlisted Scotty’s help to improvise a security system like Macaulay Culkin in “Home Alone.” This week she switches up the street signs to confuse the Hillmans and brings her husband on a trip to Gun World, where she racks up $5,000 worth of weapons before learning about a federally mandated waiting period. Her cheerful Midwestern pivot to the clerk (“Let’s take a look at that pepper spray then”) echoes the opening scene of the movie, when Buscemi gets impatient with Jerry and asks to “take a look at that Cierra” he stole off the lot.Dot’s insistence on digging into this domestic life that she has built with Wayne and Scotty puts her in a fascinating spot, because those are the only two people who accept her absurd denials. She has been unmasked as a fraud to the police and to her mother-in-law, and she has the Hillmans and various contract goons who are not only after her, but know exactly where she lives. We do not know what her former life was like as “Nadine,” Roy Tillman’s wife, but their relationship now feels a lot like Uma Thurman and David Carradine’s in the “Kill Bill” movies, in that epic revenge is all that stands between the heroine and the peaceful, normal life she thinks she deserves.Getting there will be a blood bath, it would appear. The episode ends on the sort of cliffhanger that leaves you wishing for back-to-back hours like the premiere. Gator and his crack team of masked yahoos have found Dot, despite their confusion over the mixed-up street signs, and Munch has reverted to a scary, primal state to stalk his prey. One sequence seems set up for folly, the other for a disturbing spasm of violence. That’s a balanced “Fargo” diet.Lamorne Morris in “Fargo.”Michelle Faye/FX3-Cent StampsUsing the phrase “Antecedently on …” for “Previously on …” sequence continues to be an eye roller. This show can get too cute for its own good.Roy’s preoccupation with Dot keeps him from getting aroused by a truck full of sexual role-playing costumes, like “helpless hitchhiker” or “angry feminist.” (It says something about Roy’s view of women that those specific types turn him on.)Another small callback to the movie: Dot tells Wayne that Scotty “signed off on” the change in costume to zombie hunters. This is what Jerry tells his father-in-law’s lawyer about the parking lot deal.The return of Witt Farr, the North Dakota state trooper injured in a shootout at the convenience store, suggests a possible lifeline for Dot. Witt catches Gator pocketing evidence from a case file and isn’t intimidated by the young man’s threats.The overt politics of the season come out in a spicy monologue from Lorraine, who’s annoyed that the police are still asking questions about Dot. In her estimation, their job is to “separate those who have money, class and intellect from those who don’t.” They’re not supposed to interrogate people like her. More

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