Review: Fargo, “The Tragedy of the Commons” and “Trials and Tribulations” | Year 5, Episodes 1 and 2

Fargo finally returns for a fifth season that converts the horrors of modern American life into well-crafted thrills

Photo: Michelle Faye/FX

Welcome to Episodic Medium’s coverage of the FX anthology series Fargo. This first review is free for all, but subsequent reviews will be exclusively for paid subscribers. For more information and a full schedule, check out our About Page, or become a free subscriber to receive future coverage updates.

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Before we start discussing this new season of Fargo (or new “Year,” as FX likes to call them) I need to share a story, to give you a sense of where my head is at with this show.

Each month, I write a couple of columns previewing what’s coming soon to the various streaming services. This assignment requires me to spend about a week straight binging upcoming TV series, to write short descriptions of them. I’ve had this gig for years and I usually enjoy it, because it gives me a good overview of what’s worth seeing and what’s fine to skip in the months ahead. But there are times—as was the case with my columns covering November of 2023—where the sheer volume of mediocre, tedious television gets exhausting.

I say all this to explain that a month ago, while feeling a bit blue after watching hours of disappointing TV, I fired up Fargo’s Year Five premiere. And when I got to the end of the first episode—and the roughly 10-minute sequence depicting a bloody siege at a remote gas station—I was thrilled. I suddenly remembered what it was like for television to be, y’know, entertaining.

Now, pleasing crowds alone isn’t enough to make a TV show great, I know. Trust me, I won’t be giving this new round of Fargo a pass just because I thought the season’s first episode (and much of the second) was a hoot. But I’m also not going to pretend that “the hoot factor” doesn’t matter. I can tell already there’s going to be a lot for us to talk about with Fargo over the next few months. But as we scrutinize and discuss it, let’s also remember to acknowledge that Fargo’s TV creator Noah Hawley—when he’s so inclined—can construct sequences that have an all-too-rare crackle.

That explosion of raw violence which ends “The Tragedy of the Commons” bookends a much zanier bit of fisticuffs at the episode’s start. We open on a school auditorium in suburban Minneapolis/St. Paul in 2019, where an argument among the Fall Festival Planning Committee has exploded into a full-on riot. The melee creates a big problem for Dorothy “Dot” Lyon (Juno Temple), who in trying to get away accidentally tases a cop. This gets her arrested and logged in a national database, which pings some bad people who are looking for her. Neither of the these first two episodes (both written and directed by Hawley) spill the secrets of Dot’s past. Episode one is mostly about establishing who she is now.

Photo: Michelle Faye/FX

Dot’s primary profession is to be a “Mama Lyon” to her gender-bending daughter Scotty, while devoting the rest of her non-homemaking energies to volunteering at the school. (When she finds out that her punishment for her part in the riot will include community service, Dot jokes that she’ll have to squeeze it in around the 50 hours a week of unforced community service she already does.) She also takes care of her meek, spacey husband Wayne (David Rysdahl), who runs his own car dealership yet still has to answer to his mother Lorraine (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a super-rich, super-cynical businesswoman. Lorraine Lyon is both embarrassed by and suspicious of Dot’s arrest—feelings which intensify when Dot gets kidnapped.

I’ll get back to the kidnapping, because we have to talk about: 1. How much it resembles the movie Fargo; and 2. How it sets up the premiere’s incredible final sequence. But to get the rest of the roll call out of the way, let’s jump ahead briefly to the second episode, “Trials and Tribulations,” which introduces the character who looks to be the season’s primary antagonist. Dot’s kidnappers, it seems, were hired by Roy Tillman (Jon Hamm), a North Dakota lawman who self-identifies as one of those horrifying “constitutional sheriffs” who don’t feel obliged to follow or enforce the laws drafted by the federal government. Sheriff Tillman rules his Stark County ranching community like a king, with his unduly cocky son Gator (Joe Keery) by his side. He also claims that Dot is his runaway wife.

A few more key players are introduced in these two episodes. We meet the one-eyed Danish Graves (Dave Foley), the in-house lawyer Lorraine leans on to fix any problems. Dot gets arrested by Deputy Indira Olmstead (Richa Moorjani), a diligent policewoman—with a dope of a husband, Lars (Lukas Gage), who wants to be a golf pro. And Lamorne Morris plays Deputy Will Farr, a North Dakota cop who crosses paths with Dot when she escapes her abductors in that brutal gas station siege.

Lastly (for now), we have Ole Munch (Sam Spruell), the leader of Dot’s two-person kidnapping crew. A stoic man with a crude haircut and a knack for killing, Ole leaves a trail of blood throughout his failed Dot mission. When Sheriff Tillman orders Gator to get rid of Ole by taking him to the “fixin’ place,” Ole easily eludes Tillman’s goons’ attempted execution. He later kills one of Gator’s underlings, leaving a note for Sherrif Tillman: “YOU OWE ME.”

The relentlessness and eccentricity of Ole may remind Fargo fans of some the show’s past force-of-nature hired guns: Season One’s Lorne Malvo, Season Two’s Hanzee Dent, et cetera. And of course all of these characters call back to several similar unstoppable hitmen in Joel and Ethan Coen’s movies: like Raising Arizona’s Leonard Smalls and No Country for Old Men’s Anton Chigurh. Ole though seems more Chigurh-y than usual, with his weird hair and his poetic musings. And as for his kidnapping plan…?

Photo: Michelle Faye/FX

Look, Noah Hawley’s take on Fargo has always openly—and sometimes cheekily—referenced not just the Coens’ Oscar-winning 1996 classic but the brothers’ complete filmography. Still, there’s no denying that this particular season of Fargo is already aggressively “Fargo-y.” Wayne Lyon is a car dealer, just like William H. Macy’s character Jerry Lundegaard in the movie Fargo. Jerry has to deal with an obnoxious, rich father-in-law, similar to Dot’s mother-in-law in this Fargo season. And when Dot gets taken from the Lyons’ pleasant suburban home, the kidnappers peer into her sliding glass doors and startle her while she’s knitting, just like what happens to Jerry’s wife Jean in the film. (Jerry and Jean also have a son named Scotty, the same as Wayne and Dot’s tomboy daughter.)

Is all of this distracting? I suppose you could say that. You could also call it “fun.” That’s how it hit me, anyway. In the early Fargo seasons, I appreciated how Hawley was able to tell his own complicated stories, laced with his own preoccupations, while also copying (sometimes uncannily) much of the Coens’ visual style and dry humor. In just these first two Season Five episodes there are already so many memorable and amusing moments… though if I had to pick a favorite throwaway scene, I’ll take the one where Wayne, post-riot, asks Dot if she wants to “take a tumble” and she politely declines, reminding him that she just got of the hoosegow and then “washed my pits in your mom’s commode like a French lady.”

Or is that a throwaway scene? Wayne’s mellow response to the rejection—“Will it bother ya if I watch Blue Bloods?”—is a funny line, which grounds the episode in a particular time and place. But it also speaks to the season’s larger themes. It’s no coincidence that Season 5 is set just a few months before Covid shuts the world down, in the final year of the Trump presidency—or that it begins with a screaming match at a school. Society as we know it is getting meaner. (Deputy Olmstead: “What’s the world comin’ to, neighbor against neighbor?” Dot: “I agree with you there.”)

This is how we end up with a bully like Lorraine Lyon, who has her family pose for her annual Christmas card with assault weapons in their hands, and who thinks of Dot as “some low-rent skirt my son knocked up” (and is thus clearly trying to swindle Lorraine somehow). It’s also how we get Sheriff Tillman, who lectures his constituents about the “natural order to things”—“Jesus was a man, not some bearded lady,” he opines—and who insists that, “If a man is pure his actions are only ever good.” And, yes, it’s how we get Wayne—and maybe Dot, and maybe even Deputies Farr and Olmstead—who tacitly support the world the Lorraines and Tillmans are building by laying low within the culture it spawns. Watching Blue Bloods is a choice.

Photo: Michelle Faye/FX

If anything is keeping me from being whole-heartedly enthusiastic about this new Fargo season so far—besides the way that “Trials and Tribulations” slows the action way down from the tighter, brisker “The Tragedy of the Commons”—it’s that I remember how Fargo Year Three and Four petered out. I also remember what happened to the confounding later seasons of Legion; and I remember Hawley’s lousy 2019 movie Lucy in the Sky. Throughout the last half-decade of his career as a writer-director-producer, Hawley has frequently shown a tendency to disappear too far into his own head… especially when he’s trying to say something relevant.

I’ll be keeping an eye on that as this season plays out, for sure. But these two episodes get off to such a promising start, featuring sharp performances and—for the most part—vividly drawn characters, who seem more than capable of supporting the old Fargo formula without too much dreary repetition.

Of course it helps that Hawley can still direct sequences as exciting as Dot’s kidnapping—in which she improvises a flamethrower to try and fight off Ole and his ill-fated partner—and her episode one-ending escape, which sees her using motor oil, bagged ice and a glow-stick to best Ole and his stooge. Taking the resources at hand doing something amazing with it? Let us never take that for granted.

Stray observations

• Coens Corner, Episode One! This is where each week I’ll catalog as many references as I can spot in each episode. The premiere features a lot of Fargo easter eggs, including the opening definition of “Minnesota Nice” (a concept so central to the movie that it’s even the name of the behind-the-scenes featurette on the Fargo DVD) and Deputy Olmstead’s Marge Gunderson-like comment “It’s a beautiful day.” We also get a touch of O Brother, Where Art Thou? in the Ralph Stanley song playing over Dot’s prison montage, a bit of Blood Simple in Deputy Farr’s starkly lit highway traffic stop, and some Raising Arizona in the way Sheriff Tillman seems to reach Dot in a dream (a la Leonard Smalls). And while it doesn’t count as a reference per se, we have to acknowledge that Jennifer Jason Leigh was a Coens heroine once, in The Hudsucker Proxy.

• Coens Corner, Episode Two! Ole refers to himself as “a nihilist,” similar to the decadent Germans in The Big Lebowski. There’s another Big Lebowski reference in the speculation over whether Dot “kidnapped herself.” And the episode gets super Fargo-y when we visit Wayne’s Kia dealership, where we hear about the “heck of a deal” on TruCoat and hear Wayne on the phone talking about VIN numbers… two seemingly minor but actually revealing story elements in the movie Fargo.

• The music in these two episodes mostly falls in a proggy place: Yes’s “I’ve Seen All Good People,” Rush’s “Working Man,” Grand Funk Railroad’s “Paranoid.” It’s not exactly the stuff of 2019, but we’ll see if there’s a reason for this choice.

• Set design as character-building: Dot has a full drum kit in her living room. Lorraine has a huge painting in her office that just says “NO.”

• We’ll have plenty of time in the weeks ahead to talk about the performances and the characters but I can’t put these two episodes to bed without bringing up how good Temple and JJL are at playing the thorny relationship between Dot and Lorraine. Initially, Lorraine seems to have the upper hand, responding to Dot’s interest in holding a fundraiser for the school library (to expand “thrillers and mysteries… Lee Child and the like”) by sighing, “Can’t you just give money like a normal person?” But later, post-kidnapping, when Lorraine tries to pay Dot to leave Wayne forever, Dot hisses, “I’ve climbed through six kinds of hell to get where I am. Nobody takes what’s mine and lives.” (She then adds, “Dinner Sunday? I’ll bring my blue salad.”)

• Okay, we also have to talk about how good Stranger Things’ Keery is as Gator, who has internalized his father’s lessons about policing yet has none of Sheriff Tillman’s elan. He may roll his eyes at the idea of “protect and serve”—“I ain’t in the service industry,” he scoffs, before taking a hit on his vape pen—but the last time we see Gator in episode two, he’s complaining about the spice-level of a hunk of jerky and having trouble opening a Mountain Dew. Tough guy, huh?

• And, yes, we have to tip a cowboy hat toward the amazing Hamm, who has two showcase scenes as Sheriff Tillman in episode two: one where he gives a wife-beater a set of dos and don’ts for marital assault, and one where he sits naked in an outdoor hot tub (pierced nipples on full display) and tells two visiting FBI agents that he rules Stark County by following “justice and tradition… the law has very little to do with it.” (He then dismisses Agent Joaquin and his female partner by calling them, “Jo-queen” and “Mrs. Jo-queen.”)

• I’m bad at remembering Fargo’s references to its own previous seasons so if you spot any characters or locations that are callbacks to the earlier years, please drop them into the comments.