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.

Michelle Faye/FX

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.

But let’s start with the standoff, which sustains a steadily mounting tension throughout, by dangling the possibility that something will go awry and somebody will die. Will it be Gator, who stumbles his way through the fog to his dad’s underground bunker/tunnel, then emerges just beyond shouting distance of the hubbub on the ranch? Will it be Dot, who has to shout “I’m the hostage!” when the law enforcement officers see her with a rifle in her hand, just after shooting Roy in the stomach? Will it be Roy, who gets into an altercation with his father-in-law Odin and then slashes the old man’s throat? Or will it be Deputy Witt Farr, the one person I most wanted to see survive?

Damn it, it’s Witt.

Our man does go out like a hero, facing down Sheriff Tillman and remaining unfazed with Roy calls him “son” and says he’s “an emissary of the lord.” (Witt never did let the Tillmans get under his skin, no matter how much they sneered at and belittled him.) The deputy shoots the sheriff, but gets stabbed at the same time, and succumbs to his wound. This is exactly the kind of scenario that Dot had been trying to avoid, where innocent people die while trying to help her. Deputy Farr brings an end to the crisis, but pays a price.

And so we move on to the three epilogues. The first is short, and mainly answers a couple of lingering questions. One year later, Dot and Indira meet at Witt’s grave, where we learn that the deputy had no romantic partner and no children, just a mom and six sisters and a cat named Lucky—who is now being cared for by Indira, who is still working for Lorraine Lyon. As for Dot, now that she’s not in hiding any more she’s playing more of a role in Wayne’s Kia business, helping her husband strategize for expansion. They’re thriving.

We then take a trip to prison, where Lorraine wants to talk with Roy, who was captured and jailed thanks in part to Gator cooperating with the feds. The scene between Lorraine and Roy is in some ways an extension of their earlier meeting at her house, reinforcing that these two dwell in very different wings of the far right (even if they both voted for Trump and both have their respective state’s governor on speed-dial). For example, when Lorraine talks about donating to the Federalist Society, Roy’s lost, because he’s more of a frontline grunt than a boardroom power-broker. It’s a fascinating dynamic.

I have to say though that for the most part the prison epilogue falls flat for me. It lands too much on that pandering side that I mentioned earlier. Yes, it’s satisfying to see Roy acting as cocky as usual—boasting that he likes how prison represents a “natural order” where the races are divided and the strong kill and defile the weak—only to learn that Lorraine has once again leveraged her debtors’ ledgers to coax cons in every cell block into making the ex-sheriff’s life a living hell. But I still feel like the pivot to Lorraine The Avenger Of Abused Women in the last third of this Fargo season was a bit abrupt. It’s fine. It serves a narrative purpose. But it’s simplistic.

Which brings us to the third epilogue. I won’t drag this out and keep you guessing, I’ll just say it: I loved the third epilogue. I found it delightful and moving even though I could argue it’s also kind of shallow and mainly aims to please. With this scene, I don’t care so much. It hit me in just the right way

The ostensible aim of this final epilogue is to wrap up the story of Ole Munch, who—as I suspected—did not free Dot in the last episode with the intention of letting her get on with her life, undisturbed. When Dot and Scotty come home from the store, looking forward to Wayne’s famous chili, they find Ole sitting across from Wayne in their living room, waiting to talk to Dot. He begins their conversation ominously, saying, “A man’s flesh was taken, now a pound is required in return.”

But a big part of why this scene worked so well for me is that Dot and Wayne and Scotty refuse to let Ole get a good monologue going. Sure, he’s able to tell a little bit of his story—how he came across the seas in the age of the carrier pigeon, having never seen a mountain, and how he spoke to no one for 100 years—but he keeps getting interrupted, by Wayne offering him a pop or a beer, or by Dot saying that she could use his help making drop biscuits. It’s as if the people Anton Chigurh were stalking in No Country for Old Men ignored his coin-tossing bullshit and instead invited him to hang out and watch football.

This season began with a definition of the term “Minnesota Nice,” followed by a PTA riot that was expressly intended to deflate the whole notion that middle Americans are any kinder or less bitterly divided than any other Americans these days. But the season ends by expressing a somewhat naive yet still downright inspiring reaffirmation of “pleasantness” as a divine state of being. Isn’t better to spend an evening with the Lyons, listening to Wayne’s dad jokes and learning fun facts about chimpanzees, rather than fussing and fighting all the dang time?

This is essentially the challenge Dot puts before Ole. What if he were less concerned with balancing the cosmic ledgers and more willing to forgive debts. Wouldn’t that make his life easier, as well as the lives of the people he’s felt bound to hurt?

The episode—and the season—ends with Ole describing his origins as a sin-eater, saying he only took the job because he was broke and hungry. So Dot—freely and without obligation—offers him a hot buttermilk biscuit. “Eat something made with love and joy, and be forgiven,” she says. He does, and he is. Big smile. Roll credits.

Hokey? Absolutely. But in this increasingly harsh world, any warmth is welcome. The cold is killing us.

Stray observations

• Coens Corner! The Tillmans’ escape hatch in the middle of an open field is reminiscent of the tunnel out of the prison in Raising Arizona.

• Anyone seen a man in a dress come through here, haircut like the Three Stooges?

• There’s a sweet moment between Dot and Gator when she promises to bring him cookies in prison and asks, “You still like oatmeal raisin?” That boy went bad when he no longer had a mother figure baking for him.

• I truly love how unperturbed Wayne seemed by almost everything that happened around him this season. Even when Ole is telling a story about how men drowned in their seats while rowing across the ocean in longboats hundreds of years ago, Wayne just says, “Jeez.”

• Thank you all for joining in the conversation this season and adding so much value to these reviews. The last batch of episodes coincided with a lot of holiday obligations on my end, plus the crucial final stages of a big project that I’d been working on all last year, so I wasn’t able to be as active in the comment section as I wanted to be. But I read every comment and found so many of them genuinely entertaining and edifying. Great job, gang! I hope to see you again in a few years, if Hawley comes up with an idea for another Fargo story.