‘Fargo’ Season 5 Finale Recap: A Friend of the Family

“Then one day a man comes on a wealthy horse, and offers him two coins and a meal. But the food was not food. It was sin. The sins of the rich. Greed, envy, disgust. They were bitter, the sins. But he ate them all, for he was starving. From then on, a man does not sleep or grow old. He cannot die. He has no dreams. All that is left is…sin.”

“It feels like that, I know. What they do to us. Make us swallow. Like it’s our fault. But you wanna know the cure? You gotta eat something made with love and joy, and be forgiven.” —Ole Munch and Dorothy Lyon, Fargo Season 5

“Soldiers! Don’t give yourselves to brutes, men who despise you, enslave you, who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think and what to feel! Who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder! Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men, machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts! You don’t hate! Only the unloved hate, the unloved and the unnatural! Soldiers! Don’t fight for slavery! Fight for liberty!” —The Barber, The Great Dictator

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When it comes to men, I have a type. Fortunately for me, this type of man is common across the Prestige TV space: The Hound on Game of Thrones, Richard Harrow on Boardwalk Empire, Wild Bill Hickok on Deadwood, and Hanzee Dent on our very own Fargo. Simply put, I like men who have been absolutely immiserated by how good they are at killing people. 

I don’t think I’m spoiling anything when I say that whether they live or die, these characters rarely have a happy ending waiting for them. Their line of work is both physically dangerous and emotionally poisonous, making emotional survival difficult even if literal survival is achieved. That’s what makes these men such tragic figures: They are capable of seeing all this, but they’ve despaired of changing it. As Wild Bill told Charlie Utter in Deadwood: “Can you let me go to hell the way I want to?”

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In the main, I was surprised how quickly “Bisquick,” the final episode of Fargo’s marvelous fifth season, wrapped things up. Roy kills his father-in-law and militia backer Odin Little in a matter of seconds, then gets plugged in the gut by Dorothy just as quickly. He escapes and kills Deputy Whit Farr in the process, but is immediately, comically captured the moment he (literally) pokes his head above ground again. It was his son, the blinded and now repentant Gator, who tipped the feds off as to where his dad would wind up. And a long closeup on the extraordinary Juno Temple as Dorothy allows us to see her soaking in pure relief: It’s over, she’s safe, she can be with her family again. 

Not so with Roy. Gator and Karen are off to prison themselves, as is Roy, and it’s no surprise to see him sporting a white supremacist tattoo when next we see him. More of a surprise, to him at least, is the fate awaiting him in there once the dust settles. Lorraine Lyon arrives to tell him she’s bought up and forgiven the debt of every inmate in the prison but him, though of course this arrangement comes with certain reciprocities in mind. In short, Roy will be raped, beaten, and tortured for the rest of his life, the same treatment to which he subjected his wives. It’s the first and only time Roy — and actor Jon Hamm — lets fear show on his face. 

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By this point, to be honest, I was wondering how the episode was gonna fill out its runtime. Roy’s capture cut off any hope of him returning like Michael Myers to finish the job months down the line, after all, and the visit from Lorraine appeared to foreclose any future threat of his release once she revealed she was in charge of the Federalist Society. (They’re the reason we don’t have Roe v. Wade anymore! So much for girlbossing!) But I didn’t count on Ole Munch.

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There’s always something uncanny about seeing Munch, a towering visitor from another century, in an everyday setting like the Lyons’ home. It’s the same effect as seeing Robert Blake pop out of the party crowd in Lost Highway. Thanks to the performance of Juno Temple as Dorothy, you feel this, because she feels it. It comes through in her taut face, her wide and wild eyes, even though she’s trying like hell to hide it from her oblivious husband and daughter. 

Hawley and director Thomas Bezucha draw things out for a long, long time after that. Obviously they’re riffing on the end of No Country for Old Men, when the similarly freakish hitman Anton Chigurrh shows up to let a key supporting character know that no, it’s not over, not for them, not yet, not until the code is followed. You expect things to go similarly. 

But Dorothy does the smartest thing she could do, I think, certainly smarter than anything I’d have thought of. She tells Munch that look, it’s almost dinnertime, so either he washes up and joins in, or they reschedule their fight to the death for some other time. This, at least, enables him to hit the pause button on his code long enough to figure out what the hell is going on with this woman.

Over dinner, though, we find out what the hell is going on with Munch, who repeatedly tries and fails to explain the need to repay one’s debts only to wither before the unrelenting chipperness of Dot and her family. In essence it’s a miracle he’s anything approaching sane. Lifted from abject poverty and starvation by the rich to devour their sins, he became an immortal. He traveled with the Norse to North America, worked as a mercenary, lived among the indigenous people, grew his hair long, rode a horse without a saddle. Then more Europeans came, and genocide left him alone, completely alone for an entire century. How he crawled back to civilization to become a gun for hire he doesn’t say, but it sounds as if hunting is the only useful skill that remained to him. 

Munch is the worst-case scenario for men like Wild Bill, the Hound, Richard Harrow, Hanzee Dent. Unlike those men, who can and do expect to be killed at some point, Munch has no such hope left to him. He has no hope at all. 

That’s what Dorothy gives him. Why must debts be paid, she asks him, in response to his repeated mantra? (She may well ask her mother-in-law the same question.) Can’t they be forgiven instead. Can’t Munch be forgiven instead? Instead of sin, can he make a meal of joy?

So she serves him one of the biscuits he helped her make. He eats it, and for the first time, he smiles. The end.

Like I said, I have a type. It helps that I’m a misery guts myself, at least where the art I like is concerned, and so I find men like Ole Munch fascinating. But I thought I knew all the tricks these guys had to play, live or die. I’ve seen how things work out for these men, how if they’re lucky they smile in death. Ole Munch gets to smile in life, for life. I’m glad I saw it. I’m glad I watched this show.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.