Yahoo News Fargo season 5 ending explained: What the hell did that all mean?
Fargo season five final-episode spoilers follow.
After four seasons of stylish and quirky but inessential Midwest drama, Noah Hawley did something extraordinary with Fargo season five. With Juno Temple and Jon Hamm as the twin, magnetic poles electrifying a remarkable cast – Jennifer Jason Leigh, Sam Spruell and Joe Keery among them – it took the visual and verbal language of the Coen brothers, stripped out some of that brittle archness, and used it to skewer the misogyny and violence that formed the USA.
The snowy landscapes and relentlessly cheerful Minnesota citizens of Fargo blended with the explosive violence of No Country For Old Men and the European nihilists of The Big Lebowski, forging something thoroughly new and exciting.
But how did it end? Unexpectedly, of course!
Fargo season five ending explained
Coming into episode ten, you would have been forgiven for thinking the 47-odd minutes of the finale would likely revolve around Dot's rescue from the ranch where she was held captive. The SWAT team had assembled, Roy had drawn his line in the sand and a hailstorm of bullets was the inevitable result. Or so the apocalyptically-minded Roy hoped.
Any other show would have dedicated the better part of its runtime to just such an action spectacular, but Fargo, as it so often does, went the other way.
In a short series of shots that faded to black, we saw the hapless, blinded Gator stumble through an underground rat-run to safety beyond the fence. Roy murdered his father-in-law Odin (note the straight line drawn between the first Europeans in North America and the violent ethos they sired). Dot shot him in the gut with a rifle before taking cover with the feds, while Roy escaped down the same tunnel as Gator, only to encounter the lovely Trooper Farr (Lamorne Morris)… and kill him. (#JUSTICEFORFARR).
Then Roy was captured as he emerged from his hole. Siege over.
Dot met with Gator and forgave him, reunited with her husband and daughter Scotty, and made friends with Lorraine, who by now had a newfound understanding of her daughter-in-law, the tiger.
So with half an hour left to go, what would the finale be about?
It would be about a year later, for one thing.
Dot and Olmstead visited Farr's grave, noting pointedly that he had six sisters: "Can you imagine? No wonder he was so nice."
Lorraine (Jennifer Jason Leigh) had her own visit to make: with an unrepentant Roy in the Federal Penitentiary, where, along with gaining a new White-Power tattoo, he seemed to have embraced the inmate way of life.
"Prison is the way the world should be," he smugly informed Lorraine. "A natural order. No apology. Men separated by race, races stacked with the strong on top. You f**k the weak, you kill your rivals, sleep with one eye open."
It's a neat summary of his fascist ideology, but one that Lorraine dismissed with her customary hauteur. "Yes well, I just came by to say I hope you've settled in, because now your real punishment will begin."
The punishment, as she outlined with perfectly controlled delight, was the revelation that as a debt-buyer, she effectively owned everyone in the prison, and that she had decided that henceforward, Roy would be alive for a "very, very long time", but that he would feel "everything your wives felt. Every blow, each humiliation. Fear."
And that was that for Sheriff Roy Tillman. Buh-bye, don't let the cage door hit you on the way out. Seeing Lorraine, Olmstead and Dot triumphant was a victory over misogyny that even the puppets of Dot's dream-refuge couldn't have manifested.
But what remained of the episode was what made it truly extraordinary. For twenty whole minutes, we sat in Dot's kitchen-diner with her family and Ole Munch, the terrifying, kilted spirit of violence who has haunted the series from the beginning.
Hit man Munch (Sam Spruell, his bowl-cut marking him out as kin to No Country for Old Men's Anton Chigurh) paid a visit demanding vengeance from "the tiger". Dot had taken his flesh – his ear, specifically – and his code demanded that flesh be taken in return.
Fortunately Dot and Scotty were, as always, uniquely unflappable, and husband Wayne (David Rysdahl) was too goshdarn nice to imagine what kind of horror was sitting on their sofa. And so Dot – filmed to look as angelic as only Juno Temple could – calmly engaged Munch in a conversation about vengeance, fate and free will.
While he recounted his 500-year history of violence ("for a century he spoke to no one"), Dot gently connected the season's themes of debts – Lorraine's monstrous trade, let's not forget – and forgiveness, reminding Munch that he always had a choice.
Surrounded by the simple domesticity and love of the Lyon family, Munch wrestled titanically behind that waterfall-freezing face with the truth of his own demons: that like the Welsh sin eater of episode three he had been made to suffer for the sins of the powerful, and that he could choose to lay his burden down.
So was he immortal after all, or just a bit mad? It doesn't really matter. Either way, he was a metaphor for centuries of European violence in North America, from the Vikings to the massacre of Native Americans, to its toxic relationship with guns. This history achieved its ultimate form in Sheriff Roy Tillman, a Christian fascist rising from the underbelly of American libertarianism. ("You want freedom with no responsibility," purred Lorraine to Roy earlier in the series. "Only one person on Earth gets that deal. A baby. You're fighting for your right to be a baby.")
Thanks to a Bisquik biscuit baked with love and joy (and honey), Munch was able to lay down his burden, cast off the sins of the powerful, and be as free as Dot. His hideous mug, transformed by joy, his tombstone teeth clagged up with Bisquik, was the perfect final shot. Choose life.
Fargo seasons one to five are available to stream on Prime Video.
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