It’s been three years since we got a new season of Fargo, and judging by how the fourth season went over, I wasn’t sure that we’d actually ever get another one. It seems time heals all wounds though, and Hawley came back with one of the strongest seasons yet!
As far as I could tell, this fifth season had no connection with previous seasons or even the movie, though the inspiration is obviously there. Perhaps that’s the fresh blood this show needed to boost it back up to its superiority. In this season, the focus is on Dot Lyon, a devoted mother and wife who finds herself revisiting the past after she gets put into the system for tasing a cop at a PTA meeting gone awry. She didn’t think her deed deemed fingerprinting and jail time, but once she realized what was happening, she also knew that she could be in deep shit otherwise. Though she’s been living the last decade at Dot Lyon, wife to Wayne and mother Scotty, she has a dark past that now threatens to destroy her.
Not only does she have to deal with the threat of the past, but also her obnoxious billionaire mother-in-law. More on that later. Once Dot is back in the home she is kidnapped, but her takers are in over their heads when she unleashes crafty and deadly skills against them. One of the nappers, Ole Munch, is able to escape and reports back to Dot’s first husband, Roy Tillman to seek fair pay for a job that he was not fully briefed for. We learn three things here: Dot used to be Nadine, Roy is a bad, bad lawman, and Ole is some super old sin eater. You’ll just have to look up what that is for yourself or watch the series to find out.
After getting home from that ordeal, she acts as though nothing has actually happened, despite a nice cop, Witt Farr, being there to confirm what all she did (saving him in the process). Dot wants this ordeal to die in the water because she doesn’t want Roy to find her. Roy is the worst of the worst out there. Think anyone involved with January 6th’s insurrection and you have a pretty clear picture of what Roy is like. And he’s raising his son to be the same! But now that Roy has a lead as to Dot’s whereabouts, he’s not stopping until he gets her back on his ranch. Killing is not beneath Roy, even when he’s got the FBI poking around asking questions.
The amount of detail in this season is too great for me to write about here, but just know that this story is a satisfying one. Something that Fargo always manages to succeed with is writing strong female characters. We get that not just with Dot, but with her mother-in-law, and local deputy, Indira Olmstead. They represent so many different facets of what strong women can look like and by the end I would have liked each one of these ladies in my life. To be fair, everyone in the cast was great, but I tip my hat to an excellent performance from Jon Hamm. I haven’t seen him in much, but he truly played a detestable human being.
Please, for the love of god, if you haven’t watched Fargo yet – the movie or any of the previous seasons – just do it! I promise you will have absolutely not regrets. This was another fine season and I hope Noah Hawley has no plans of stopping anytime soon.