Spoilers follow for the currently airing fifth season of Fargo through fifth episode “The Tiger.â€
Noah Hawley’s Fargo adaptation has always been bloody, violent, and ruinous. It’s also always been about greed, with character motivations boiling down to rapacity and hunger regardless of time, Midwest place, or Minnesota niceness. A husband kills his wife for a second chance at love; sons plot against their mother for control of their crime family; brothers feud over a seemingly imbalanced inheritance from their father; a nurse kills her patients to better pick their pockets. The first four seasons of Fargo grew increasingly — sometimes nonsensically — elaborate, but their shared interest in a uniquely American sort of avarice was a consistent through-line.
In its fifth season, Fargo turns that dynamic on its head by focusing on debt as an instigator, a looming shadow, and a Sisyphean burden. And the moment that unlocks this entire season’s perspective on debt as a construct that corrupts comes in “The Tiger,†via a conversation between debt-collection grande dame Lorraine Lyon and Bible-thumping sheriff Roy Tillman, two people for whom exploiting others is as invigorating as breathing air.
Hawley, who writes or co-writes all episodes of this fifth season, has been judicious, even sneaky, in parceling out information about these primary characters. Premiere “The Tragedy of the Commons†introduces Juno Temple’s Dot Lyon as Rambo with a box of Bisquick, a woman who watched Home Alone and took Kevin McCallister’s success against intruders as a personal challenge for herself to go bigger and bolder with her home defense. It takes a bit to learn that Dot is so adept at escape because she used to be Nadine, the abused and oppressed wife of Roy (Jon Hamm), who in second episode “Trials and Tribulations†proclaims that “There is a natural order to things … A husband is head of his household. Under him, the woman abides.†Roy is an asshole in that way and many others, including how he tries to kill assassin Ole Munch (Sam Spruell) for failing to abduct Nadine and bring her back to Roy’s compound; he just doesn’t want to pay Ole Munch what he’s owed. But Roy’s failson Gator (Joe Keery), tasked with killing Ole Munch, is no match for the man who is revealed in “The Paradox of Intermediate Transactions†to be a 500-plus-year-old sin eater, someone paid to symbolically consume the wrongdoings of others (often the rich) so that they could ascend to Heaven. The inverse of Ole Munch — the top of the food chain to his bottom — is Dot’s mother-in-law, Lorraine (Jennifer Jason Leigh), whose gargantuan wealth is finally attributed in fourth episode “Insolubilia†to her position as the head of a collection agency. “Here’s what you need to understand about Americans,†Lorraine tells a journalist interviewing her for a profile as she sits in her office beneath a gigantic painting of the word “No.†“They don’t want a handout. What they’re looking for is an opportunity to fix it themselves.â€
As CEO of Redemption Services, whose business model is badgering debtors with endless calls and veiled threats, Lorraine is speaking only about finances in that moment, and Fargo does devote certain character arcs — like that of Deputy Indira Olmstead (Richa Moorjani) and her crummy, credit card–maxing husband — to our most recognizable form of debt. But this season also gets more abstract with its interest in religious and metaphysical debts, embodied by Roy and Ole Munch: The former thinks Dot owes him for fleeing their violent marriage and hiding for nearly a decade; the latter has become an immortal by absorbing the evils the wealthy want to pretend they never committed. This is a world in which fantastical things exist, and people believe in them; aside from Ole Munch, think of Roy saying he once saw the devil whispering in a man’s ear at a crime scene and the visions Roy and Dot share. Fargo is peeking around the edge of a barely open door leading to an impenetrably dark hallway, wondering how our psyches are damaged by the idea of not being square with someone, of being seen as beholden, of not having our affairs in order. Lorraine knows the fear of debt in others and manipulates that for her own gain; Roy fears being perceived as inadequate and wants to remove that stain by reclaiming Dot; Ole Munch has been changed by centuries of willingly absorbing what others want to hide. So in each character arc, debt becomes a means to an end: a way for Lorraine and Roy to maintain the imbalances of privilege and power that benefit them, and for Ole Munch to carve out a living in societies that aren’t kind to their underclasses. Debt can be a weapon, and like any weapon, it operates as a tool of both attack and defense.
Until “The Tiger,†Lorraine and Roy seemingly share a similar worldview that links money and propriety. Lorraine has a grudge against Dot, whom she thinks married to her son only for his inheritance; when Dot lets her daughter Scotty eat a Snickers bar for breakfast, Lorraine sniffs, “Are we on welfare?†Lorraine had previously called Scotty a “cross-dresser†for wearing a suit for their annual Christmas card portrait, and Dot a “low-rent skirt,†so her filter when it comes to her family is basically nonexistent. And the way she speaks about women and girls isn’t that different from Roy, who while counseling a young married couple tells the beaten wife to “be deferential†and gives her a wad of cash to ease the abuse she’s suffering. Later on, when speaking about his desire to get Dot back, Roy says (with Hamm unleashing flinty “That’s what the money is for!†eye contact) of the woman who invented a new identity to get away from him, “She made vows to m … Interest accrued, until the debt could no longer be paid with money.†A woman is a man’s property, Roy argues, and her disappearance isn’t just a divergence from what he believes to be the natural order but also currency leaving his pocket. As an analog to how Lorraine talks about repaying debt as a way of controlling your own destiny — a principled act — Roy considers his re-appropriation of Dot as something righteous. This is him righting her wrong by taking back what he’s owed; this is trafficking of the body as an extension of prosperity theology.
What’s so satisfying about the altercation between Lorraine and Roy in this episode is that it subverts our expectations of which characters in this narrative are going to clannishly orient themselves with each other, and it snaps together the series’ disparate depictions of debt into one coherent portrait of provocation. Roy and Lorraine are each connected by marriage to Dot, each complain about the changing social mores of the time, and each consider themselves outside the bounds of polite society. It would make sense for them to get along. When facing off against each other, though, their individual worldviews — specifically, their understanding of debt as shaped by their gender, profession, and class — demonstrate the scope of Fargo’s presentation of how the impression of being unfulfilled, of being taken advantage of and put in arrears, unnerves and unmoors us.
Squeezed together in Lorraine’s at-home office — Leigh sporting a luxe black suit, overripe transatlantic accent, and unimpressed glare, and Hamm in his cowboy hat, big suede coat, and manspread stance — they are like two American archetypes trapped in a cage. It’s the girlboss versus the cowboy as they trade barbs from their unique positions of privilege. Roy reminds Lorraine that he’s a sheriff, and she responds by calling him “Slickâ€; he sneers that she’s “high and mighty,†and she laughs that his libertarian defense of “freedom with no responsibility†makes him not as powerful as the president but as immature as a baby. He has the law on his side and his zealous belief in the Bible dictating a woman’s submission driving him. She has affluence in her corner and her multibillion-dollar corporation giving her legitimacy. And their different perspectives on debt, with Roy’s focus on what he’s owed as dictated by God and Lorraine’s on the power money has to erase problems, shape their insults toward and assumptions about each other.
Director Dana Gonzales keeps the two in individual mid-closeups as they try to outplay each other, neither yielding an inch in the frame: as Roy calls Lorraine’s son “a thief†for marrying Dot when she was already married to him, implying that he’s owed something because of those years Nadine was away; as Lorraine offers him “a fuck-off fee†to leave, dismissing his godliness as pompousness. Roy’s condemnatory “So that’s who you are†is meant to be an indictment of Lorraine using money to maneuver her way out of this jam, and an assertion that the religious debt he believes he’s owed is grander and more monumental than cash. But Lorraine counters by turning his misuse of the Bible against him with a smirking, “While we’re talking about property rights … Dorothy is my son’s property now.†God’s law has no bearing in these modern times, Lorraine states. Whoever has the most has the most, even if that possession is another person’s debt, and having the most is what matters.
Those are contrasting opinions, but together they embody one of Fargo’s core concerns this season. What’s more impactful, the demands of capitalism or the demands of God, and how is the debt accrued from those impositions a force of metamorphosis? Were Lorraine and Roy always like this, or did they become harder, crueler, less compromising versions of themselves because of how society equates bankruptcy with weakness? Did Ole Munch become a monster (and a nihilist, in a particularly Coen Brothers–influenced touch) through a centuries-long combination of both demands, of taking on the wrongdoings of the rich while suffering the indignity of poverty facilitated by those very same people? Those are questions that Fargo may or may not answer in its remaining five episodes. But there’s no ambiguity in how “The Tiger†latches its claws into the argument that our fear of debt is actually our fear of victimization, and our fear of victimization can be our first step toward exploiting others. The desire for absolution — be it financial, religious, or cosmic — is this season’s critical commonality, and so, too, is its high price.