Spoilers follow for the Fargo season-five finale episode, “Bisquik.â€
In a season of Fargo grounded in recognizably quotidian concerns — financial debt, crappy husbands, political and religious division — immortal hired gun Ole Munch didn’t fit in, and that was a good thing. As in previous seasons of the FX anthology series, showrunner Noah Hawley sprinkled various nods to Coen brothers’ creations and conventions in this fifth go-round inspired by their 1996 film, and Munch initially felt like a spin on Javier Bardem’s villain from No Country for Old Men, a figure who exists outside of time and society’s rules. Munch is a collection of contrasts: violence incarnate in his church-lady outfit of cardigan sweater and midi wool skirt; a pillar of honor even as he kills off Sheriff Roy Tillman’s henchmen and then blinds his son, Gator; a man who fuels himself with both pancakes and pages ripped from the Bible. He haunts the Upper Midwest as Anton Chigurh did the Southwest, spouting ominous philosophies like “The things that happen, happen — who lives, who dies. You don’t yell at the boulder for being a rock,†and Sam Spruell’s rigid posture and croaky voice amplify the character’s complete otherness. Here is someone who’s lived through hundreds of years of trauma and knows that humanity really isn’t worth shit — and Fargo defangs him with one bite of a biscuit.
In finale episode “Bisquik,†after eye-for-an-eye-ing Gator, freeing Dot from the pit where she was about to be murdered, and essentially finishing his business with the Tillmans, Munch disappears into the smoke and mist hovering over the separatists’ compound. “Bisquik†then jumps forward a year as Dot and Scotty return home to find Wayne entertaining a “fella who just came to the door.†Munch is someone who operates via transactions, and he can’t move on, his slightly anxious affect implies, until they’re completed, which is why he’s calling on Dot again. “A man frees a tiger so the tiger can finish her fight. This does not mean the man has finished with her,†Munch says to Dot in his typical third-person style, but only the two of them really understand the life-or-death terms of their discussion.
Wayne and Scotty are clueless; they don’t know Munch was hired by Roy to abduct Dot, that she outsmarted him during their gas-station showdown, or that Munch killed men so that Dot may live. When Dot and Munch have their own tête-à -tête about debt, what is owed and what must be paid, they’re really speaking to the audience: Dot pleasantly but firmly counters Munch’s grand intonations about how “a man’s flesh was taken; now, a pound is required in return†with the argument that “the better thing, the more humane thing†is for debt to be forgiven. Their postures in the scene underscore the forcefulness of Dot’s will. She’s sitting on a couch surrounded by the family she’s resourcefully protected over and over again, leaning forward to calmly deliver her rejection of Ole Munch’s request to restart their duel, while Munch is alone on an armchair opposite, his body angled slightly away from her, his facial expression frozen in a kind of disbelieving side-eye. He can’t believe that she’s pushing him away from his original mission into a position of pardon and purgation, and he also can’t believe that it’s working.
Spruell’s Ole Munch is already distinctive because of his costuming — that fur-lined red jacket he takes from Irma (Clare Coulter), the woman he half-forces, half-persuades to treat him like a son; that “haircut like the Three Stooges,†as Roy puts it — but there’s an intensity to him that suggests all of these aesthetics are an afterthought. Here, enmeshed in so much familial ease and intimacy, Spruell brings awkwardness and discomfort to Munch, and the scene milks humor out of the disconnect between who he usually is and who the Lyons are turning him into. He looks surprised by his own hand accepting the beer offered by goodhearted Wayne, then irritated with Scotty’s help once he’s enlisted by Dot to mix biscuit dough; none of this is going how he planned.
Fargo uses Munch’s skepticism about all this unironic Minnesota niceness to further one of the season’s closing arguments about the transformative power of kindness. In this season’s final few episodes, characters who seem stuck in their ways unexpectedly change when others offer them a little generosity, a little grace, and a little push. Lorraine softens toward Dot when Deputy Olmstead challenges her to see her daughter-in-law as someone who has endured something terrible and come out stronger. Dot lets go of her animosity toward Roy’s first wife, Linda, after a fantasy sequence in which Linda, with the aid of some puppets, helps Dot process what she lived through under the Tillman roof. Gator drops his allegiance to Roy when Dot promises to visit him in prison and offers to bring along a batch of oatmeal-raisin cookies, remembering they’re his favorite. Excluding the 2019 timing of this season, those turns are simply humanist growth; within that context, though, these interactions take on a more moralistic tone. Set against this season’s Trump-coded elements — what is separatist Roy, who we see sympathetically watching the 45th president on TV, doing during his standoff with the FBI if not waging his own mini January 6? — those moments seem like Fargo telling us to take another chance on people who may seem too far gone. And while that’s well-intentioned sentimentality, it makes for a clumsy ending for Munch, who represented so much more in this story than personal politics.
Munch is a heightened version of everything all the season’s other characters believe they are. His consumption of the wealthy’s spiritual debts make him adjacent to nobility as Lorraine thinks she is; his hundreds of years on Earth make him closer in experience to whatever gods may exist than Roy will ever be. As he tells Scotty over bowls of chili, he’s endured war, famine, loneliness, fear; he’s a survivor, like Dot, and a warrior, unlike Gator. His very existence is sensational, and Fargo treats him both like an aberration (unsettling musical cues from The Shining playing as he lounges in a room bathed in harsh red lighting; his ritualistic trespass upon Roy’s home while smeared in blood and mud) and like someone with a code so pure that it’s nearly sacred (punishing Gator for killing Irma and fleeing the scene; defending Dot against an unfair number of attackers). There is no gray zone for Munch: A person who helps him is an ally, a person who crosses him is an enemy, and everyone else is just meat.
All of that is so strikingly deviant that it makes Munch seem almost alien — someone with such an unwavering sense of moral fairness and such commitment to defending that ideology that it’s jarring to see him walking among these regular people with their normal life spans, credit-card debt, and Kias. The season turns to him more than once to deliver karmic justice and to hint at metaphysical mysteries that Lorraine, Roy, and Dot, so certain about their roles in their little corner of the world, will never grasp. Maybe Munch was envisioned as a Chigurh type, but the writing of the character and Spruell’s performance make him more than an analogue. Munch becomes the nexus for the season’s theme of debt, the embodiment of how being subject to obligations handed down by others makes for a ghastly burden that one simply can’t will their way out of. For Fargo to spend its final act reducing this mesmerizingly spectral character to another “be kind†lesson feels hollow, like the series wrenching itself back to an inoffensive portrait of homeyness and comfort at the last moment.
Think of how Ole Munch devotes himself to revenge when Gator kills Irma and leaves her, Godfather style, with oranges rolling from her grocery bag and through the blood oozing from her head, and how Wayne neuters Munch’s viciousness by handing him a bottle of orange soda as they sit in the Lyons’ living room — that effervescence and that fizz bubbling away the man we knew. In that tableau, the box of Bisquick as a Chekhov’s gun is too cute, Munch’s expression when he bites into the biscuit Dot says will “cure†him with its “love and joy†too ecstatic. The suggestion that this is the last time he’ll bare his teeth isn’t the spiritual payoff Fargo makes it out to be.