Why ‘Fargo’ Season 5 Doesn’t Feel Like ‘Fargo’ Anymore

Dorothy Lyon (Juno Temple) and Roy Tillman (John Hamm) in Fargo Season 5 In the fifth season of Noah Hawley’s Fargo series, based off of the 1996 Coen Brothers film of the same name, many of the Fargo isms we’ve come to expect from the show remain, but the show itself has become an entirely different beast.

Fargo isms—for lack of a better term—are things like subtle (or not so subtle) references to the movie; the exaggerated Minnesota accents; the over use of the word “commode”; and the presence of characters who live outside the boundaries of cultural expectations and the law. In Season 1, the character who lived outside the lines was Billy Bob Thornton’s Lorne Malvo, a trickster demon of sorts who created chaos and mayhem wherever he went.

He left a trail of bloody footprints in the snow, and ruined lives and lifeless corpses followed in his wake. In Season 3, V.M. Varga was the nefarious beast that defied laws of man and god. David Thewlis’s villain was not so much trickster, but he was still very much a demon—and perhaps even more grotesque than Malvo—who existed outside the imagination of the poor saps who fell for his plotting and scheming.

The closest thing to a similar character in Season 5 is Sam Spruell’s Ole Munch, who is (possibly, we’re not quite sure yet) a centuries old sin eater. Whatever he is, he exists even further outside the laws and customs of humankind than Roy Tillman (John Hamm) the central villain of the series—a man who’s built his own little theocratic fiefdom, ruling over his rural county like a king or warlord, with impunity.

In many ways, Tillman is just a thug who’s gotten away with it long enough to think he’s invincible. The reappearance of his runaway child bride Nadine/Dorothy (Juno Temple) has put that theory to the test, as Tillman suddenly finds himself facing not just a vengeful Munch, but also the deep pockets of Dorothy’s ruthless mother in law, Lorraine Lyon (Jennifer Jason Leigh) the CEO of a giant debt collection agency.

Mr. Tillman good to see you again. It’s all a pretty great setup but something is missing from this season and every week I find myself trying to figure out what exactly that is—and why Season 5 pales in comparison to the first couple seasons, despite the great acting and obviously terrific production values.

I write this as someone who really enjoyed the first couple of episodes. With each subsequent episode, however, I find myself less and less impressed. In Episode 7, we followed Dorothy as she took a trip to dreamland, wandering to Camp Utopia where Tillman’s first wife, Linda, had set up a retreat for battered women.

Here, we got a bunch of Roy and Dorothy’s backstory—which was quite horrible and violent—in the form of a rather clever puppet show. The fact that it was entirely a dream sequence, however, felt like a cheap trick. A narrative gimmick that Fargo ought to be above using. In Episode 8, bizarrely, Dorothy seems to still not realize that this was all just a dream.

She tells Roy’s son Gator (Joe Keery) that she found his mom and can take him to her. It’s not until she spots the windmill in the back of Tillman’s estate that she realizes everything was a dream. I found this puzzling because in last week’s episode, she wakes up in the diner before getting into the accident in the parking lot (which I assumed we’d learn more about but never did) though I suppose we can excuse that because of whatever head injuries she probably sustained.

Another thing that bugged me about this latest episode was Lorraine’s right hand man and lawyer Danish Graves (Dave Foley) who decides to go to Tillman’s ranch alone after state trooper Witt Farr (Lamorne Morris) tells him that Tillman has Dorothy and she doesn’t have much time. He knows this is a man who has resorted to kidnapping and murder to get Dorothy back, and yet heads to his compound alone without even telling anyone about it ahead of time.

“If you’re so smart,” Tillman says before shooting him in the stomach, “why are you so dead?” I would like to know why the writers took an otherwise very smart character and made him do something this stupid also. It takes me out of the show when a character makes such obviously boneheaded choices.

Why are you so dead? More than anything, I think Season 5 isn’t clicking with me because the characters are so flat and one dimensional. Season 1 was a terrific examination of Lester Nygaard (Martin Freeman) whose weakness made him do terrible things. Nygaard is, initially at least, a very sympathetic character.

But the very slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that make us empathize with him are the same things that drive him to make terrible choices, over and over again, until he sinks under the weight of all his selfish, often despicable, decisions. Roy Tillman, on the other hand, is just a Very Bad Man™.

A lot of people online keep complaining that this season is “woke trash” but I don’t think that’s the problem. Tillman’s character is simply little more than a caricature. He lacks the oozy, unexpected wickedness of Varga. And unlike Nygaard, we feel no empathy toward him. Nygaard faces humiliation at every turn.

His wife mocks him without mercy. His old high school bully torments him. Lester’s life is unbearable before Malvo shows up. It’s his deal with the devil and its consequences that make Lester’s story so gripping. But Tillman is just a cartoon devil to begin with. He’s a wife beater and a wife murderer, but his reasons are Just Because I Can, which isn’t particularly compelling as far as stories go.

A good chunk of modern day politics are tossed into the mix, but these do nothing to shed any light on why Tillman is the way he is. They just let us know that he is a Trump guy, which isn’t particularly shocking or revealing in any meaningful way. Meanwhile, Dorothy is a classic heroic figure, fighting the good fight with gusto.

She’s smarter and more clever and often a better fighter than anyone around her, though I’m not really sure why or how she got this way. She ran away from Tillman when he nearly beat her to death as a teenager, and she’s spent the next decade creating a new life and identity for herself, and being a suburban housewife and mother.

But even setting aside her knowledge of guns, booby traps and all the rest, she’s just the opposite side of the same coin Roy Tillman can be found on. Good and evil. Black and white. I thought Fargo was better when there were at least some shades of grey. It’s not that this series hasn’t had heroes and villains before.

Francis McDormand’s Marge Gunderson was clearly a heroic figure in the film. But William H. Macy’s Jerry Lundegaard wasn’t a cartoon villain. And Marge’s husband Norm (John Carroll Lynch) wasn’t a cartoon Deadbeat Husband™ like the loser in police officer Indira Olmstead’s (Richa Moorjani) caricature of a bad marriage.

Do you even know how to call for backup, dude? Fargo has always been outlandish and over the top, and it’s certainly toyed around with caricature and larger than life villains before Season 5. But this season seems incapable of dealing with anything beyond caricature. Maybe that’s the subject matter.

It’s hard to do domestic violence in anything but the starkest black and white terms. I get that. But maybe domestic violence isn’t the right subject matter for a show like Fargo to begin with. I’m still curious to see what happens, but mostly just with Munch and Gator at this point. Tillman isn’t even remotely redeemable.

Dorothy is clearly going to tap her ruby slippers and make it home. Indira is leaving that loser in the dust. Lorraine is getting a bit of redemption, though perhaps a little comeuppance, too. At the end of the day, what happens to Gator is the only particularly interesting thing left in this story—that and Munch’s role in all of it.

I discuss all of this in my latest video: What say you, dear readers? Do you share any of my complaints? I’m still entertained and I still look forward to this season each week, but it’s leaving me a bit cold. Let me know your thoughts on Twitter and Facebook ..