Discussion: FARGO on FX @10pm Update: Season 5 w/ John Hamm
- Thread starter playahaitian
- Start date
Season 4 ...
I sort of felt sorry for Gator and the way Roy treated him
Why did Dot leave the gun to hide
I just hope the black guy Witt lives.
One of the recap shows I listen to was saying ...
- Wild to think Gator will probably see the light and think differently now (after losing 1 or both eyes). He's "The Useless Hand" (title of episode 9) - good for nothing to his dad now
- They hope that Witt is the one to save Dot in the end, but noted she saved him back in episode 1 or 2 at the gas station and in the end he might pay the ultimate price and lose his life in saving her
The guy at the hospital from around mid-season ...
Last edited:
Good screencap from this past week's episode ...
‘Fargo’ creator Noah Hawley on season 5 and adapting ‘Alien’ for TV
Fargo creator Noah Hawley’s FX anthology series is just wrapping up its fifth critically acclaimed season.
www.kcrw.com
Noah Hawley’s latest ‘Fargo’ installment twists up the series’ source material
“Fargo” showrunner Noah Hawley discusses the connections between the FX series’ new fifth installment and the Coen Brothers’ 1996 film.
www.kcrw.com
Noah Hawley: Don’t Call ‘Fargo’s’ stories “Seasons” | The Treatment
This week, Elvis Mitchell sits down with Noah Hawley, the executive producer and showrunner of the FX series ‘Fargo.’ The series debuts its fourth incarnation this month.
www.kcrw.com
Writer Noah Hawley on how fiction can create empathy | The Treatment
Writer Noah Hawley on how fiction can create empathy.
www.kcrw.com
Season finale tonight.
meh...kinda underwhelming.
season was a good.
the build up...
this was weak, I thought it would end
better than this, but it is what it is.
Mr Mook got saved!
the build up...
this was weak, I thought it would end
better than this, but it is what it is.
Mr Mook got saved!
I guess homemade chili and biscuits, I need sweet cornbread...does wonders.
Mr Mook, just needed some tlc.
Mr Mook, just needed some tlc.
‘Fargo’ Boss Noah Hawley Breaks Down That Finale Final Scene: “Right or Wrong, It’s a Beautiful Idea”
The Hollywood Reporter speaks with Hawley about debt, forgiveness and the future of 'Fargo' beyond season five: "I don't have an idea at this moment, but they seem to come."
www.hollywoodreporter.com
https://ew.com/lamorne-morris-reacts-to-spoilers-death-fargo-season-five-finale-interview-8422791
https://variety.com/2024/tv/news/la...-5-episode-9-new-girl-spinoff-1235862084/amp/
https://screenrant.com/fargo-season-5-finale-wild-lamorne-morris-tease/
https://www.tvinsider.com/1118935/fargo-season-5-finale-lamorne-morris-roy-kills-witt-raid/
Not happy
At all
Last edited:
The ‘Fargo’ Finale Remembered Its Roots and Proved the Show Can Still Surprise Us
At times, Season 5 wasn’t quite as uncanny or experimental as the franchise has shown it can be, but in the end, it led to a reconciliation far stranger and more unexpected than we could have imagined
www.theringer.com
‘Fargo’ Season 5 Finale Recap With Noah Hawley
The ‘Fargo’ creator and showrunner joins the pod to talk about this season’s themes, how he creates likable characters, and more!
www.theringer.com
‘Fargo’ Star Juno Temple Breaks Down Finale Showdown and the Unsung Heroes Behind Dot
Temple talks to The Hollywood Reporter about her season five ending: "I am truly in awe of what women survive and how they can then tell their stories."
www.hollywoodreporter.com
‘Fargo’ Boss Noah Hawley Breaks Down That Finale Final Scene: “Right or Wrong, It’s a Beautiful Idea”
The Hollywood Reporter speaks with Hawley about debt, forgiveness and the future of 'Fargo' beyond season five: "I don't have an idea at this moment, but they seem to come."
www.hollywoodreporter.com
'Fargo' Season Five Finale: Don't Go the MAGA Way
Conclusion to the fifth season of Noah Hawley’s FX series wraps things up for Juno Temple’s besieged Dot, Jon Hamm’s MAGA sheriff, and more.
www.rollingstone.com
Noah Hawley Breaks Down ‘Fargo’ Season 5 Finale and Which Season Almost Had Its Own Spinoff
Noah Hawley sat down with Variety to break down the 'Fargo' Season 5 finale and whether the series can go on forever.
variety.com
POSTMORTEM
BY ANTHONY BREZNICAN
JANUARY 17, 2024
"FARGO" — Pictured: Juno Temple as Dorothy “Dot” Lyon. CR: Frank W Ockenfels III/FXCOPYRIGHT 2023, FX NETWORKS. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
SAVE
Fargo’s season five finale delivers the epic bloodbath fans have come to expect from this series about the bleakest, coldest corners of the human psyche. But this time, it also delivers a surprisingly warm coda. There’s absolution, maybe even a bit of joy and hope. Really!
Noah Hawley, the creator of the FX show (based loosely on the darkly comic 1996 Coen brothers movie), sat down with Vanity Fair to do a postmortem on season five and its finale—titled, appropriately, “Bisquik.” He also walked us through the show’s broader themes of forgiveness, debt, and vengeance. (Fair warning: Spoilers ahead.)
ADVERTISEMENT
Your email
SUBMIT
BY SIGNING UP YOU AGREE TO OUR USER AGREEMENT AND PRIVACY POLICY & COOKIE STATEMENT. THIS SITE IS PROTECTED BY RECAPTCHA AND THE GOOGLE PRIVACY POLICY AND TERMS OF SERVICE APPLY.
Two of the most compelling figures in season five’s ensemble were Dorothy “Dot” Lyons—Juno Temple’s indefatigable would-be kidnapping victim, who thwarts her captors at every turn—and Sam Spruell’s peculiar Ole Munch, the kilt-wearing killer with an arcane accent who is apparently a centuries-old immortal, cursed to roam the earth over a deal he made in a moment of desperation in the 16th century. The final scene of Fargo season five brings these two elemental forces of light and darkness together in a tense philosophical battle fought over biscuits. (Again: really.)
Ole Munch is a sin eater, a title that comes from a very real 18th-century ritual in which poor people agreed to ritualistically consume the wrongdoings of various deceased individuals so that their souls might ascend to heaven. It was an indulgence afforded to the very wealthy, who off-loaded their greed onto the impoverished so that they might live an eternal life of heavenly comfort.
ADVERTISEMENT
Sin eaters are uncommon creatures in present-day America, but there is no shortage of those who have become consumed by soul-crushing debts. “This idea of debt is a thematic element that we were exploring,” Hawley says. “Down to the very last sequence in the show: What do we owe each other?”
Dot’s coldhearted corporate executive mother-in-law, Lorraine Lyon (played by Jennifer Jason Leigh), has amassed a fortune buying up people’s financial debts on a grand scale. The police officer Indira Olmstead (played by Richa Moorjani) is one of them, drowning in bills to support a man-child husband who fails to appreciate her. Another law enforcer, Witt Farr (Lamorne Morris) feels he owes Dot his life after she saved him in a deadly shoot-out.
$2.50$1 per month for 1 year + a free tote.
Subscribe Now
Then there is Jon Hamm’s malevolent Roy Tillman, a Bible-beating ultra-right-wing warlord masquerading as a sheriff, who was once married to Dot and intends to reclaim her no matter the cost. He feels she owes him too, although Dot has escaped and started an entirely new life for herself, marrying the soft-spoken, simple Wayne Lyon (David Rysdahl). One of the henchmen Dot’s vengeful ex sends to collect her is Ole Munch—and long after Tillman’s own downfall, the sin eater still comes back to settle accounts.
ADVERTISEMENT
That leads to the strange, comical ending to this bleak story that involves a mystical villain’s salvation. Allow Hawley to explain…
Vanity Fair: What do you make of the way this season resonated with viewers?
ADVERTISEMENT
Noah Hawley: My Monday morning analysis of it is that it was just the right story for this moment. There was something in Dot’s refusal to surrender to forces that were trying to pin her down and cage her. She had kept a good attitude while she was doing it, and there was some lightness and comedy to it. I think that was rewarding for people who don't want to just tune out—they're looking for a way to deal with the world and the country we're living in without going too dark, emotionally.
Even going back to the original Coen Brothers movie, the trouble and the grief and the darkness gets so heavy that it comes around full circle to absurdity.
It's the thing that comedy and horror have in common, which is tension and release. And that’s something that the Coens do so well.
There were a number of direct homages to the original Fargo movie this season. I’m thinking of when the kidnapper, Ole Munch, comes up to her sliding glass door with the hood over his head.
In the movie it wasn't a door, which I don't think any of us realized. But when you go back and look at it, it was literally just a window. So we created the door and then of course the gag, which is that he was going to smash it, but then he's like, “Let's see if it's open.”
ADVERTISEMENT
Let’s start with the ending of the final episode, and this strange, very funny confrontation between Dot and Ole Munch. He comes to exact revenge, and she very cheerfully convinces him to instead let go of his vendetta and maybe move on from his curse by eating something made with love—her homemade biscuits—and letting go of the “sins” he once consumed that damned him.
It's a trauma story, really. And they're the sort of opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of whether you let the trauma that's been done to you control your life, or whether you say, "I'm not going to be a victim to that for my whole life." What you see is that there's a lot of similarity to them, and that they both suffered abuse. And for him, it came to define his life.
And it’s what he put back into the world.
Yes, he returned that abuse to the world. And she said, "I don't want to be that person. I'm not going to be that person." She's the person at the heart of the story who is in denial about something profound, and it's destroying people's lives around her and her own life, potentially. Her house burns down, her husband's in the hospital. But she faces the truth. And so they do make it out in one piece.
Sam Spruell lurks as the “sin eater” Ole Munch in Fargo season five.
But almost not. In the final scene of the show, just as she thinks she is in the clear, Ole Munch shows up again at her house. Let’s delve into his character a bit first. Tell me about deciding to make him centuries old, to lean into that supernatural aspect. There's always been a little hint of that in the Coen Brothers work—in Javier Bardem’s Anton Chigurh from No Country For Old Men, or Peter Stomare's Gaear Grimsrud from the original Fargo.
ADVERTISEMENT
Or The Lone Biker of the Apocalypse from Raising Arizona. These elemental figures … David Thewlis's character [V.M. Varga from season three] … Some version of Billy Bob Thornton [Lorne Malvo from season one] has always been blowing around the American wilderness—whether he wore that face or not.
Stephen King does that sometimes with The Stand’s Randall Flagg, Leland Gaunt from Needful Things, creating what appear to be men but are actually deities of a sort.
Certainly with Anton Chigurh [who originated in the Cormac McCarthy novel], there's something about him where you're just like, "You can't kill this guy.” He feels like Freddy Krueger on some level. In my research about debt and the philosophy of debt and the morality of debt, I came across this idea of “sin eating,” which is a very old custom in which you could buy your way into heaven by getting some poor person to eat your sins on your deathbed and therefore absolve you.
That's a bit of swagger for a show set in 2019 to suddenly go: "Now, flash back to 500 years ago..."
I know, right in the middle of a scene! And then to come back. My hope was that its audacity was its strength.
Ole Munch had a strange way of not inhabiting life in the first person.
What Sam and I talked about is that he never uses the word, "I" or "me." That there was something in the sin eating where he's sort of a man without a soul now. So there's no "me" there, no "their" there. No sense of identity.
Is there a little Game of Thrones in that too, with the “faceless men”?
I see where that echo is in terms of the language of it. But no, it was really more from that he’s a vessel now. Sam and I also had this process of understanding that he is a man with no fixed address, who just takes what he needs. There's a scene in the second hour where he smokes a cigarette, he walks outside with Gator, and we were going to have him take out a pack of cigarettes. And Sam was like, "I don't think I would own a pack of cigarettes." So he finds one on the ground that someone has discarded, and he smokes it. And he's like, "I don't think that I would bring a gun. If I needed a gun, I would find a gun." So we went with that mindset.
He builds his wings on the way down, doesn't he?
Yeah. Because of course, on some level, as he says, he didn't age. He said, "I cannot die." Whether that's literal or not, certainly he's been a cursed figure.
I took that literally because I thought a character like that would try to end his life at some point. The pain of living would become so extreme.
Yeah, I mean, he says, "For a century, I talked to no one." That was the thing with the accent. When we were building how he sounded, we were like, "This is a man who had to relearn how to speak." The name Ole Munch is Swedish. We had his “sin eating” scene set in Wales. I mean, he's definitely a where-the-hell-is-he-from? kind of guy.
Sam Spruell was so intriguing to watch. I imagine it’s difficult to play stoic, supernatural killer and still bring humanity to it.
What I love about him is the empathy in his eyes. There's something in Sam's eyes and in Munch's eyes also. There's a sense of tragedy to him. He knows how this is going to go. It's been a long time since something surprised him—but Juno’s Dot surprised him.
After she brutalizes him and his partner, he begins to refer to her unironically as “The Tiger.”
For me, he's the wild card in the story. With Fargo, you have a lot of moving pieces on a collision course. There's a version of this story in which Juno injured Munch in that first hour, and then he spends the rest of the show chasing her. Instead, they run into each other in the first hour and they don't see each other again until the very end.
That’s when he comes to Jon Hamm’s corrupt sheriff’s compound to return his blinded son.
And as he's walking away, he sees three guys leaning over a hole. So he goes over to see what that is, and turns out it's “The Tiger.” So he frees The Tiger so she can finish her fight. Then as he says, of course, that doesn't mean he's done with her.
Were you sure from the start that their final scene would work?
Thomas Bezucha, who directed the last two hours, said the last 20 minutes is a play, right? A three-act play. It starts in the living room when Dot comes home, it moves to the kitchen for the preparation of the meal, and it ends in the dining room.
David Rysdahl, Juno Temple and Sienna King in the family's joyful ending of Fargo.
The Tiger surprises Ole Munch again there, by not attacking.
And there's an echo of the scene in No Country where Kelly McDonald comes home from the funeral and Anton Chigurh's sitting in her room. And she's like, "I knew this wasn't over." And he flips a coin and tells her to pick a side. She says, "I'm not going to choose. It's not about the coin. It's about you." And he controls this scene entirely, and then he kills her. And I thought, "Well, yes, when the bad man shows up at your house and takes you hostage, that's a terrible, terrible scene."
You reverse that outcome here in the Fargo finale.
There was something interesting to me about Juno saying, "No, it's a school night. It's almost dinner. Either you're going to do what you're going to do, or you're going to wash your hands and help me make dinner, but we're having normal life here. You can end it all for us, but I'm not going to do this thing with you," this bullying, threatening thing. And of course, there's a long moment where you don't know which one he's going to choose. And then he's washing his hands…
I love how the family’s chipper interruptions constantly undermine his profound declarations.
He keeps trying to turn it serious. And of course, it's a family getting ready for dinner. It is a Marx Brothers movie. He's in the way of the silverware drawer. And Juno's trying to make biscuits and measure out a cup… He can't build the menace because there's so much cacophony of family life.
She does fight him rhetorically.
She says, "Look, you took a job that had a risk, and you can't be mad at the risk. There was always the danger that you were going to get injured. It's not my fault you came for me. It's not my fault that I hurt you.”
This starts to work on him.
Even then, you don't know. As we know, reason and violence, they don't have anything to do with each other. She could make the most eloquent case possible and he could still kill her.
The final act is at the dinner table.
It's a lot of Munch's story. It's more about him than about Dot and her family. We know them, they're good. But this man clearly is unresolved. They say grace, and then they pass him the biscuits, and they're asking him questions. They just refuse to be in the scene that he wants to be in.
It's the opposite of improv. They never say yes to his prompts.
They force him to be in their scene. There is comedy to it, but you end up with this third thing, which is hopefully meaningful: "How are we going to get past this moment where I've hurt you and you've hurt me? Are we just going to keep Hatfield-ing and McCoy-ing, this thing? And what can get us past that?" And she says, basically, “forgiveness."
You just have to choose to stop seeking retribution. It's the antidote to “an eye for an eye.”
At a certain point, you just have to say, "Sit at my table and we'll break bread and we'll talk and you'll understand me better and I'll understand you better. And then we will be forgiven."
The final shot is kind of strange, and kind of sweet: Ole Munch, grinning with a mouthful of biscuits.
It’s probably the first moment of happiness he's had in centuries. It's moving.
In terms of the humor around Dot’s character, she sets a lot of homemade traps around her home to pulverize her would-be kidnappers. Did Home Alone cross your mind while you were writing?
[Laughs.] Oh, of course. I live in the culture like everybody else. There was a little Home Alone, a little Die Hard. I liked the inventiveness of it. My favorite stories are the ones where one character beats the other by being smarter. It's all creative problem solving. She tries to buy guns; guns aren't available to her. And so she's just like, "All right—now there's this sledgehammer in the vestibule and electric wires on the windows.”
Juno is a waif of a person, so she seems very vulnerable. But Dot figures out a way to thwart these physically stronger men who outnumber her.
What I talked about with the director is, “We have to change who the shark is.” In the beginning, it's the four guys coming into the house who are the sharks, but then there's a moment where Dot becomes the shark. So we have to make that switch where suddenly they're like, "Wait. It's like Michael Myers is in the house with us.”
You also reference The Nightmare Before Christmas with the masks they wear and at least one of the songs. I was surprised to see that, mainly because Disney keeps everything fairly locked down. Were you able to get that because FX is part of the Disney company?
Well, there was a corporate process, and then in the end, we needed Tim Burton to sign off on it. And luckily, Steve Stark, who was one of our producers, also produces Wednesday, and so he was able to ask Tim directly, and Tim was very gracious and said yes. And for me, it's just that specificity is always more interesting. We could have put people in any Halloween masks, but there was something about that story, which is a favorite in my house and is both creepy and funny and has that tonal thing.
I don't know if this is coincidence or not, but Jennifer Jason Leigh plays her mother-in-law, a ruthless business woman who has gotten rich off of other people’s debt. Her accent in this called to mind another Coen Brothers film—The Hudsucker Proxy.
We talked about it and I was like, “I don't think your [character is] regional.”
Jennifer Jason Leigh as the ultimate debt-collector in Fargo.
Meaning she’s not originally from the midwest? That would explain why she has that upper class mid-Atlantic accent rather than that musical Minnesota lilt.
I certainly didn't think she would sound that way. I said, “I think you've kind of laundered whatever accent you might've had." Because of course, just like the British, there's a very specific accent that is upper crust, and then everything else sort of tells on you. And so we talked about role models, and when I said William F. Buckley to her, I didn't mean how he sounded. I meant his status, the disdain.
Not the clenched-teeth voice?
Yeah. And she took it literally. So, the first day on set, I was like, "Oh, that's really interesting. She went full Bill Buckley.” And so we worked to kind of ground it a little bit more so that it wasn't a caricature, but I think it's the power that she has. I mean, what you feel is that this is a woman who has created herself.
We're meant to feel some disdain when we first meet her. Her attitude toward her family and their well-being is off-putting, and yet we get a reversal for her later, after she looks at the pictures and sees the abuse that Dot experienced at the hands of Roy Tillman.
I use the Grinch analogy, the heart growing, but it's not that she's suddenly become a good person. It's not even that it's made her like Dot any more than she did before. She just finds it unacceptable to treat a woman that way, to treat a person that way.
The Jon Hamm character, Roy Tillman, is coded as far, far right wing, but he almost doesn’t believe in anything political except his own will and whim.
What I kind of prided myself on, or at least how I approached this story, was that everyone in this story is a Republican. You know what I mean? If I'm looking at it politically, I'm going, "Well, Dot and Wayne, they're probably socially conservative. I don't know that they're Trump voters per se, but they certainly would've voted for Romney." Jennifer, of course, is like an old school Koch brother, and then Jon Hamm represents this new strain … this idea of being a “constitutional” sheriff.
Joe Keery of Stranger Things plays his son, Gator, who is so desperate for his father’s approval he does all manner of wicked, illegal acts. But that respect never comes. It calls to mind the Trumps, too.
[It’s] this idea of having his own sort of Don Jr., for whom he has no respect.
Gator loses his eyes. Ole Munch gouges them out. There's a little bit of Gloucester from King Lear in that, right? He loses his eyes and only then he can see.
There's a moment when Dot is telling her story, and you see that Gator was a child once with a father who abused his mother, and that he was a scared little boy. And his mother left, disappeared, and he had nobody but his dad. Whether out of self-preservation or just a child's [naïveté], if a parent tells you that you need to love and respect them, you're going to love and respect them.
Joe Keery and Jon Hamm as the toxic father and son lawmen in Fargo season five.
He never learned another way, right?
Yeah. I always felt like Gator is a tragic character. I don't see him as a villain. I see him as someone who was raised in a cult. And you can't tell a son that his father is a villain if he doesn't believe it in his heart. He had to witness it. Dot tried to tell him. She was like, "He's never respected you. And the first opportunity he gets, he'll throw you under the bus."
That also happens in the firefight of the finale when Tillman sees him, blinded, weakened, and begging for help, and walks away.
Sure enough, as Jon says, “If there ever was a point to you, it's gone now.” It's such a brutal thing to say to your son. In the end, the tragedy of his character is revealed.
After all the harm he caused her, Dot still shows Gator mercy in the end.
Someone asked me, do I think that Dot will do what she said and go visit him [in prison]? And I said, "Yeah, I think so." That story of forgiveness is important to her. They'll bake cookies, and then go and visit. And she'll say, "We have to forgive him because he's sorry." We went in this country from turn-the-other-cheek Jesus, to warrior Jesus in the last decade.
In that final episode, Lamorne Morris’s deputy Witt Far goes into a cave and confronts Jon Hamm’s brutal Roy Tillman. I was assuring my wife: “Don’t worry. It's a tenet of Fargo that if you're pure of heart, and you do the brave, good thing, you will survive. I think he's going to be okay.”
Right. Yeah, yeah.
I was very wrong. Why did you feel he had to die?
It's a good question of why he had to. The audience knows in the moment that [Dot] doesn't finish him off, that something terrible is going to happen. So what I chose emotionally was to play the tragedy. Roy gets away. We know the moment the villain escapes that someone is going to die.
I was in denial about it.
The reality is, he had the opportunity. They were alone in this cave. He turned around. [Tillman] had a knife. Probably he should have just shot him then and there. But he was committed to the concept of justice, of putting the handcuffs on him and taking him in. He wasn't having the same fight as Jon Hamm. I think we are all finding ourselves in that moment of like, "Okay, well if one side's going to fight dirty, and the other side is going to always follow the rules, how's that going to end?"
Fargo Season Five Finale: Noah Hawley Explains That Peculiar Ending
Sin eaters, tigers, and debt—oh, my! A deep dive into the darkest corners of the FX series.BY ANTHONY BREZNICAN
JANUARY 17, 2024
"FARGO" — Pictured: Juno Temple as Dorothy “Dot” Lyon. CR: Frank W Ockenfels III/FXCOPYRIGHT 2023, FX NETWORKS. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
SAVE
Fargo’s season five finale delivers the epic bloodbath fans have come to expect from this series about the bleakest, coldest corners of the human psyche. But this time, it also delivers a surprisingly warm coda. There’s absolution, maybe even a bit of joy and hope. Really!
Noah Hawley, the creator of the FX show (based loosely on the darkly comic 1996 Coen brothers movie), sat down with Vanity Fair to do a postmortem on season five and its finale—titled, appropriately, “Bisquik.” He also walked us through the show’s broader themes of forgiveness, debt, and vengeance. (Fair warning: Spoilers ahead.)
ADVERTISEMENT
Hollywood Daily
Film, TV, and entertainment industry news. Plus, every Friday, a special Awards Insider edition.Your email
SUBMIT
BY SIGNING UP YOU AGREE TO OUR USER AGREEMENT AND PRIVACY POLICY & COOKIE STATEMENT. THIS SITE IS PROTECTED BY RECAPTCHA AND THE GOOGLE PRIVACY POLICY AND TERMS OF SERVICE APPLY.
Two of the most compelling figures in season five’s ensemble were Dorothy “Dot” Lyons—Juno Temple’s indefatigable would-be kidnapping victim, who thwarts her captors at every turn—and Sam Spruell’s peculiar Ole Munch, the kilt-wearing killer with an arcane accent who is apparently a centuries-old immortal, cursed to roam the earth over a deal he made in a moment of desperation in the 16th century. The final scene of Fargo season five brings these two elemental forces of light and darkness together in a tense philosophical battle fought over biscuits. (Again: really.)
Ole Munch is a sin eater, a title that comes from a very real 18th-century ritual in which poor people agreed to ritualistically consume the wrongdoings of various deceased individuals so that their souls might ascend to heaven. It was an indulgence afforded to the very wealthy, who off-loaded their greed onto the impoverished so that they might live an eternal life of heavenly comfort.
ADVERTISEMENT
Sin eaters are uncommon creatures in present-day America, but there is no shortage of those who have become consumed by soul-crushing debts. “This idea of debt is a thematic element that we were exploring,” Hawley says. “Down to the very last sequence in the show: What do we owe each other?”
Dot’s coldhearted corporate executive mother-in-law, Lorraine Lyon (played by Jennifer Jason Leigh), has amassed a fortune buying up people’s financial debts on a grand scale. The police officer Indira Olmstead (played by Richa Moorjani) is one of them, drowning in bills to support a man-child husband who fails to appreciate her. Another law enforcer, Witt Farr (Lamorne Morris) feels he owes Dot his life after she saved him in a deadly shoot-out.
Subscribe Now
Then there is Jon Hamm’s malevolent Roy Tillman, a Bible-beating ultra-right-wing warlord masquerading as a sheriff, who was once married to Dot and intends to reclaim her no matter the cost. He feels she owes him too, although Dot has escaped and started an entirely new life for herself, marrying the soft-spoken, simple Wayne Lyon (David Rysdahl). One of the henchmen Dot’s vengeful ex sends to collect her is Ole Munch—and long after Tillman’s own downfall, the sin eater still comes back to settle accounts.
ADVERTISEMENT
That leads to the strange, comical ending to this bleak story that involves a mystical villain’s salvation. Allow Hawley to explain…
Vanity Fair: What do you make of the way this season resonated with viewers?
ADVERTISEMENT
Noah Hawley: My Monday morning analysis of it is that it was just the right story for this moment. There was something in Dot’s refusal to surrender to forces that were trying to pin her down and cage her. She had kept a good attitude while she was doing it, and there was some lightness and comedy to it. I think that was rewarding for people who don't want to just tune out—they're looking for a way to deal with the world and the country we're living in without going too dark, emotionally.
Even going back to the original Coen Brothers movie, the trouble and the grief and the darkness gets so heavy that it comes around full circle to absurdity.
It's the thing that comedy and horror have in common, which is tension and release. And that’s something that the Coens do so well.
There were a number of direct homages to the original Fargo movie this season. I’m thinking of when the kidnapper, Ole Munch, comes up to her sliding glass door with the hood over his head.
In the movie it wasn't a door, which I don't think any of us realized. But when you go back and look at it, it was literally just a window. So we created the door and then of course the gag, which is that he was going to smash it, but then he's like, “Let's see if it's open.”
ADVERTISEMENT
Let’s start with the ending of the final episode, and this strange, very funny confrontation between Dot and Ole Munch. He comes to exact revenge, and she very cheerfully convinces him to instead let go of his vendetta and maybe move on from his curse by eating something made with love—her homemade biscuits—and letting go of the “sins” he once consumed that damned him.
It's a trauma story, really. And they're the sort of opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of whether you let the trauma that's been done to you control your life, or whether you say, "I'm not going to be a victim to that for my whole life." What you see is that there's a lot of similarity to them, and that they both suffered abuse. And for him, it came to define his life.
And it’s what he put back into the world.
Yes, he returned that abuse to the world. And she said, "I don't want to be that person. I'm not going to be that person." She's the person at the heart of the story who is in denial about something profound, and it's destroying people's lives around her and her own life, potentially. Her house burns down, her husband's in the hospital. But she faces the truth. And so they do make it out in one piece.
Sam Spruell lurks as the “sin eater” Ole Munch in Fargo season five.
But almost not. In the final scene of the show, just as she thinks she is in the clear, Ole Munch shows up again at her house. Let’s delve into his character a bit first. Tell me about deciding to make him centuries old, to lean into that supernatural aspect. There's always been a little hint of that in the Coen Brothers work—in Javier Bardem’s Anton Chigurh from No Country For Old Men, or Peter Stomare's Gaear Grimsrud from the original Fargo.
ADVERTISEMENT
Or The Lone Biker of the Apocalypse from Raising Arizona. These elemental figures … David Thewlis's character [V.M. Varga from season three] … Some version of Billy Bob Thornton [Lorne Malvo from season one] has always been blowing around the American wilderness—whether he wore that face or not.
Stephen King does that sometimes with The Stand’s Randall Flagg, Leland Gaunt from Needful Things, creating what appear to be men but are actually deities of a sort.
Certainly with Anton Chigurh [who originated in the Cormac McCarthy novel], there's something about him where you're just like, "You can't kill this guy.” He feels like Freddy Krueger on some level. In my research about debt and the philosophy of debt and the morality of debt, I came across this idea of “sin eating,” which is a very old custom in which you could buy your way into heaven by getting some poor person to eat your sins on your deathbed and therefore absolve you.
That's a bit of swagger for a show set in 2019 to suddenly go: "Now, flash back to 500 years ago..."
I know, right in the middle of a scene! And then to come back. My hope was that its audacity was its strength.
Ole Munch had a strange way of not inhabiting life in the first person.
What Sam and I talked about is that he never uses the word, "I" or "me." That there was something in the sin eating where he's sort of a man without a soul now. So there's no "me" there, no "their" there. No sense of identity.
Is there a little Game of Thrones in that too, with the “faceless men”?
I see where that echo is in terms of the language of it. But no, it was really more from that he’s a vessel now. Sam and I also had this process of understanding that he is a man with no fixed address, who just takes what he needs. There's a scene in the second hour where he smokes a cigarette, he walks outside with Gator, and we were going to have him take out a pack of cigarettes. And Sam was like, "I don't think I would own a pack of cigarettes." So he finds one on the ground that someone has discarded, and he smokes it. And he's like, "I don't think that I would bring a gun. If I needed a gun, I would find a gun." So we went with that mindset.
He builds his wings on the way down, doesn't he?
Yeah. Because of course, on some level, as he says, he didn't age. He said, "I cannot die." Whether that's literal or not, certainly he's been a cursed figure.
I took that literally because I thought a character like that would try to end his life at some point. The pain of living would become so extreme.
Yeah, I mean, he says, "For a century, I talked to no one." That was the thing with the accent. When we were building how he sounded, we were like, "This is a man who had to relearn how to speak." The name Ole Munch is Swedish. We had his “sin eating” scene set in Wales. I mean, he's definitely a where-the-hell-is-he-from? kind of guy.
Sam Spruell was so intriguing to watch. I imagine it’s difficult to play stoic, supernatural killer and still bring humanity to it.
What I love about him is the empathy in his eyes. There's something in Sam's eyes and in Munch's eyes also. There's a sense of tragedy to him. He knows how this is going to go. It's been a long time since something surprised him—but Juno’s Dot surprised him.
After she brutalizes him and his partner, he begins to refer to her unironically as “The Tiger.”
For me, he's the wild card in the story. With Fargo, you have a lot of moving pieces on a collision course. There's a version of this story in which Juno injured Munch in that first hour, and then he spends the rest of the show chasing her. Instead, they run into each other in the first hour and they don't see each other again until the very end.
That’s when he comes to Jon Hamm’s corrupt sheriff’s compound to return his blinded son.
And as he's walking away, he sees three guys leaning over a hole. So he goes over to see what that is, and turns out it's “The Tiger.” So he frees The Tiger so she can finish her fight. Then as he says, of course, that doesn't mean he's done with her.
Were you sure from the start that their final scene would work?
Thomas Bezucha, who directed the last two hours, said the last 20 minutes is a play, right? A three-act play. It starts in the living room when Dot comes home, it moves to the kitchen for the preparation of the meal, and it ends in the dining room.
David Rysdahl, Juno Temple and Sienna King in the family's joyful ending of Fargo.
The Tiger surprises Ole Munch again there, by not attacking.
And there's an echo of the scene in No Country where Kelly McDonald comes home from the funeral and Anton Chigurh's sitting in her room. And she's like, "I knew this wasn't over." And he flips a coin and tells her to pick a side. She says, "I'm not going to choose. It's not about the coin. It's about you." And he controls this scene entirely, and then he kills her. And I thought, "Well, yes, when the bad man shows up at your house and takes you hostage, that's a terrible, terrible scene."
You reverse that outcome here in the Fargo finale.
There was something interesting to me about Juno saying, "No, it's a school night. It's almost dinner. Either you're going to do what you're going to do, or you're going to wash your hands and help me make dinner, but we're having normal life here. You can end it all for us, but I'm not going to do this thing with you," this bullying, threatening thing. And of course, there's a long moment where you don't know which one he's going to choose. And then he's washing his hands…
I love how the family’s chipper interruptions constantly undermine his profound declarations.
He keeps trying to turn it serious. And of course, it's a family getting ready for dinner. It is a Marx Brothers movie. He's in the way of the silverware drawer. And Juno's trying to make biscuits and measure out a cup… He can't build the menace because there's so much cacophony of family life.
She does fight him rhetorically.
She says, "Look, you took a job that had a risk, and you can't be mad at the risk. There was always the danger that you were going to get injured. It's not my fault you came for me. It's not my fault that I hurt you.”
This starts to work on him.
Even then, you don't know. As we know, reason and violence, they don't have anything to do with each other. She could make the most eloquent case possible and he could still kill her.
The final act is at the dinner table.
It's a lot of Munch's story. It's more about him than about Dot and her family. We know them, they're good. But this man clearly is unresolved. They say grace, and then they pass him the biscuits, and they're asking him questions. They just refuse to be in the scene that he wants to be in.
It's the opposite of improv. They never say yes to his prompts.
They force him to be in their scene. There is comedy to it, but you end up with this third thing, which is hopefully meaningful: "How are we going to get past this moment where I've hurt you and you've hurt me? Are we just going to keep Hatfield-ing and McCoy-ing, this thing? And what can get us past that?" And she says, basically, “forgiveness."
You just have to choose to stop seeking retribution. It's the antidote to “an eye for an eye.”
At a certain point, you just have to say, "Sit at my table and we'll break bread and we'll talk and you'll understand me better and I'll understand you better. And then we will be forgiven."
The final shot is kind of strange, and kind of sweet: Ole Munch, grinning with a mouthful of biscuits.
It’s probably the first moment of happiness he's had in centuries. It's moving.
In terms of the humor around Dot’s character, she sets a lot of homemade traps around her home to pulverize her would-be kidnappers. Did Home Alone cross your mind while you were writing?
[Laughs.] Oh, of course. I live in the culture like everybody else. There was a little Home Alone, a little Die Hard. I liked the inventiveness of it. My favorite stories are the ones where one character beats the other by being smarter. It's all creative problem solving. She tries to buy guns; guns aren't available to her. And so she's just like, "All right—now there's this sledgehammer in the vestibule and electric wires on the windows.”
Juno is a waif of a person, so she seems very vulnerable. But Dot figures out a way to thwart these physically stronger men who outnumber her.
What I talked about with the director is, “We have to change who the shark is.” In the beginning, it's the four guys coming into the house who are the sharks, but then there's a moment where Dot becomes the shark. So we have to make that switch where suddenly they're like, "Wait. It's like Michael Myers is in the house with us.”
You also reference The Nightmare Before Christmas with the masks they wear and at least one of the songs. I was surprised to see that, mainly because Disney keeps everything fairly locked down. Were you able to get that because FX is part of the Disney company?
Well, there was a corporate process, and then in the end, we needed Tim Burton to sign off on it. And luckily, Steve Stark, who was one of our producers, also produces Wednesday, and so he was able to ask Tim directly, and Tim was very gracious and said yes. And for me, it's just that specificity is always more interesting. We could have put people in any Halloween masks, but there was something about that story, which is a favorite in my house and is both creepy and funny and has that tonal thing.
I don't know if this is coincidence or not, but Jennifer Jason Leigh plays her mother-in-law, a ruthless business woman who has gotten rich off of other people’s debt. Her accent in this called to mind another Coen Brothers film—The Hudsucker Proxy.
We talked about it and I was like, “I don't think your [character is] regional.”
Jennifer Jason Leigh as the ultimate debt-collector in Fargo.
Meaning she’s not originally from the midwest? That would explain why she has that upper class mid-Atlantic accent rather than that musical Minnesota lilt.
I certainly didn't think she would sound that way. I said, “I think you've kind of laundered whatever accent you might've had." Because of course, just like the British, there's a very specific accent that is upper crust, and then everything else sort of tells on you. And so we talked about role models, and when I said William F. Buckley to her, I didn't mean how he sounded. I meant his status, the disdain.
Not the clenched-teeth voice?
Yeah. And she took it literally. So, the first day on set, I was like, "Oh, that's really interesting. She went full Bill Buckley.” And so we worked to kind of ground it a little bit more so that it wasn't a caricature, but I think it's the power that she has. I mean, what you feel is that this is a woman who has created herself.
We're meant to feel some disdain when we first meet her. Her attitude toward her family and their well-being is off-putting, and yet we get a reversal for her later, after she looks at the pictures and sees the abuse that Dot experienced at the hands of Roy Tillman.
I use the Grinch analogy, the heart growing, but it's not that she's suddenly become a good person. It's not even that it's made her like Dot any more than she did before. She just finds it unacceptable to treat a woman that way, to treat a person that way.
The Jon Hamm character, Roy Tillman, is coded as far, far right wing, but he almost doesn’t believe in anything political except his own will and whim.
What I kind of prided myself on, or at least how I approached this story, was that everyone in this story is a Republican. You know what I mean? If I'm looking at it politically, I'm going, "Well, Dot and Wayne, they're probably socially conservative. I don't know that they're Trump voters per se, but they certainly would've voted for Romney." Jennifer, of course, is like an old school Koch brother, and then Jon Hamm represents this new strain … this idea of being a “constitutional” sheriff.
Joe Keery of Stranger Things plays his son, Gator, who is so desperate for his father’s approval he does all manner of wicked, illegal acts. But that respect never comes. It calls to mind the Trumps, too.
[It’s] this idea of having his own sort of Don Jr., for whom he has no respect.
Gator loses his eyes. Ole Munch gouges them out. There's a little bit of Gloucester from King Lear in that, right? He loses his eyes and only then he can see.
There's a moment when Dot is telling her story, and you see that Gator was a child once with a father who abused his mother, and that he was a scared little boy. And his mother left, disappeared, and he had nobody but his dad. Whether out of self-preservation or just a child's [naïveté], if a parent tells you that you need to love and respect them, you're going to love and respect them.
Joe Keery and Jon Hamm as the toxic father and son lawmen in Fargo season five.
He never learned another way, right?
Yeah. I always felt like Gator is a tragic character. I don't see him as a villain. I see him as someone who was raised in a cult. And you can't tell a son that his father is a villain if he doesn't believe it in his heart. He had to witness it. Dot tried to tell him. She was like, "He's never respected you. And the first opportunity he gets, he'll throw you under the bus."
That also happens in the firefight of the finale when Tillman sees him, blinded, weakened, and begging for help, and walks away.
Sure enough, as Jon says, “If there ever was a point to you, it's gone now.” It's such a brutal thing to say to your son. In the end, the tragedy of his character is revealed.
After all the harm he caused her, Dot still shows Gator mercy in the end.
Someone asked me, do I think that Dot will do what she said and go visit him [in prison]? And I said, "Yeah, I think so." That story of forgiveness is important to her. They'll bake cookies, and then go and visit. And she'll say, "We have to forgive him because he's sorry." We went in this country from turn-the-other-cheek Jesus, to warrior Jesus in the last decade.
In that final episode, Lamorne Morris’s deputy Witt Far goes into a cave and confronts Jon Hamm’s brutal Roy Tillman. I was assuring my wife: “Don’t worry. It's a tenet of Fargo that if you're pure of heart, and you do the brave, good thing, you will survive. I think he's going to be okay.”
Right. Yeah, yeah.
I was very wrong. Why did you feel he had to die?
It's a good question of why he had to. The audience knows in the moment that [Dot] doesn't finish him off, that something terrible is going to happen. So what I chose emotionally was to play the tragedy. Roy gets away. We know the moment the villain escapes that someone is going to die.
I was in denial about it.
The reality is, he had the opportunity. They were alone in this cave. He turned around. [Tillman] had a knife. Probably he should have just shot him then and there. But he was committed to the concept of justice, of putting the handcuffs on him and taking him in. He wasn't having the same fight as Jon Hamm. I think we are all finding ourselves in that moment of like, "Okay, well if one side's going to fight dirty, and the other side is going to always follow the rules, how's that going to end?"
Last edited:
Sidebar...
I don't think in that final scene that Dot husband was unaware or naive at all.
He knew EXACTLY what was going on the whole time and deliberately being so friendly and accommodating.
He WAS controlling the situation playing dumb.
I don't think in that final scene that Dot husband was unaware or naive at all.
He knew EXACTLY what was going on the whole time and deliberately being so friendly and accommodating.
He WAS controlling the situation playing dumb.
The reality is, he had the opportunity. They were alone in this cave. He turned around. [Tillman] had a knife. Probably he should have just shot him then and there. But he was committed to the concept of justice, of putting the handcuffs on him and taking him in. He wasn't having the same fight as Jon Hamm. I think we are all finding ourselves in that moment of like, "Okay, well if one side's going to fight dirty, and the other side is going to always follow the rules, how's that going to end?"
* this is deep and telling. If you play by the rules against an opponent (Trump) who is always cheating WTF you think is going to happen?
* this is deep and telling. If you play by the rules against an opponent (Trump) who is always cheating WTF you think is going to happen?
The ‘Fargo’ Finale Remembered Its Roots and Proved the Show Can Still Surprise Us
At times, Season 5 wasn’t quite as uncanny or experimental as the franchise has shown it can be, but in the end, it led to a reconciliation far stranger and more unexpected than we could have imagined
theringer.com