Review: Fargo, “Bisquik” | Year 5, Episode 10
Drop dough by spoonfuls onto ungreased cookie sheet. Bake 11 to 13 minutes or until golden brown. Serve warm.
When this Fargo season started, I wrote that I’d be keeping a wary eye throughout these episodes to see if the show’s creator Noah Hawley would disappear too far into mind-bending esoterica, as he did in Season Four and in the later seasons of Legion. Well, it turns out I needn’t have worried. I know some of you have had some problems with the paranormal presence of Ole Munch and with the rug-pulling narrative trickery of Puppet Dot, but I consider both of those well within Fargo’s acceptable bounds, given both what the show has done before and given its ties to the Coen brothers’ larger cinematic universe.
Instead, what surprised me was how direct Season Five is. The story moves in a fairly straight line from start to finish, with multiple episodes—including this week’s finale—anchored by lengthy, finely crafted, genuinely suspenseful and thrilling action sequences. Hawley has said he wanted to get back to basics with this Fargo run and I’d argue he succeeded. He ran a show that was impressively polished and easy to enjoy.
I was also taken aback by how bluntly political this season turned out to be. My feelings about this are more mixed. The kinds of aggressively right-wing characters this season mocked and vilified are certainly no heroes of mine. But I’m also wary of art that panders to my biases, and I can’t deny there were times in these episodes (including the finale) where I rolled my eyes at how hard Hawley and company were hitting their points.
All of the highs and lows of this year’s Fargo were evident in “Bisquik,” a season finale with an unusual shape. The first third of the episode wraps up last week’s nerve-wracking standoff, and then the rest consists of a succession of epilogues, the last of which runs so long that viewers have no choice but to reckon with what it means. It’s this season’s most important scene, really; and how you feel about it may well determine whether or not you think Fargo Season Five ended well.