‘Fargo’ Season 5 Episode 5 Recap: Talking Heads

“I was 17. Fifteen when they took me in. But that’s another story.” Oh.

“They never hit you when it’s going their way, you know? It’s when they’re weak, and just pretending to be strong, and they need something small to climb on to feel big.” Oh.

While its Kill Bill-style title card (“Chapter Five: The Tiger,” the first such card of its kind) and corny nature-show narration might lead you to suspect otherwise when the episode begins, this is not an especially over-the-top episode of Fargo in the end. No, in the end it drills down into the “six kinds of hell” Dorothy Lyon has crawled through to get to her husband and daughter: a life of abuse at the hands of Roy Tillman, and seemingly others, so horrific it takes a visible force of effort for her even to talk about it. Indeed, if talking about it weren’t the only condition under which Deputy Olmstead would agree to take in Scotty while Dorothy takes care of business, she clearly would never talk about it again.

There’s a fun, drawn out, multi-stage mental hospital escape sequence(s) serving as the spine of this episode. Briefly: Dorothy gets involuntarily committed by Lorraine and Danish; breaks free of her restraints and takes out or evades a series of orderlies and nurses; narrowly dodges Roy’s men Gator and Bowman (Conrad Coates); gets inadvertently saved by FBI Agents Joaquin (Nick Gomez) and Meyer (Jessica Pohly), who are unaware she’s currently in the process of escaping; and finally flees through a bathroom window, snatches Scotty from Lorraine’s estate, and drops her off at Olmstead’s, whom she trusts. (It’s the kind eyes.)

But the real strength of this episode is in conversations, like the one in which Dot/Nadine timorously reveals her wounds to the deputy, as Juno Temple makes Dot seem brittle enough to crack and Jeff Russo’s score does its best old-school Carter Burwell. Between that and her tenderness with Wayne, a man she really loves even though she was lying to him all this time, you can see that her competent violence is a matter of necessity and survival, not bloodlust or badassery. Dorothy has done all this because what else can she do?

Lorraine Lyon is the real chatty Cathy here. In a series of chats that explore her ideas of money, status, and above all power, she is alternately charming and repulsive, entertaining and infuriating, right on and dead wrong. 

Take the first such conversation, in which she dresses down a pair of bankers whose shady outfit she wants to purchase in order to get into the credit business as well as the debt business, the thinking being that people like lenders more than repo men. The two bankers make it clear they’re unhappy that Danish, the point person on the deal, isn’t present for the lunch meeting. (He’s busy having Dorothy forcibly committed in order to give Lorraine control over Wayne’s treatment and money.) Interpreting this more or less correctly as veiled sexism, she verbally annihilates them like she’s the Rock cutting a promo in 1999, knocks $10 million off her price just for one guy’s condescending use of the word “lady,” and exits, leaving them literally slackjawed. 

It’s a fascinating speech because of its hollowness. Of course these men shouldn’t discount Lorraine just because she’s a woman. They should discount her because she’s an abominable piece of shit! She’s a wealth hoarder who ruins lives for a living, including the lives of many women, which is a lot more important in terms of liberation than making sure some guy doesn’t call you “toots” or whatever while you determine how best to get people into credit card debt together. Lorraine is the dead end of girlbossing.

Her next chat is with the season’s other antagonist, Sheriff Roy Tillman. Despite both being creatures of the right, they instantly despise one another. Roy can’t fathom or stomach an arrogant irreligious woman in power whose only way of making sense of the world is by buying or selling parts of it. He’s got the Constitution, the Bible, and his God-given wisdom as a man serving as his guides, and she doesn’t. It’s that simple.

For her part, Lorraine clearly sees Roy as an unserious person, an oafish adherent of the latest craze for wingnuts who don’t understand all the “freedom” bullshit is just what people like Lorraine market to the hoi polloi in order to keep their own taxes low. (The show sidesteps the many billionaires who’ve revealed themselves to be true believers in their own bullshit, though.) She calls him “slick.” She calls him “son” (a word he later uses on the white-haired Danish). “You want freedom with no responsibility,” she says. “Son, there’s only one person on earth that gets that deal.”

“The president,” Roy says, like an eager third grader.

“A baby,” she says, grinning like Smaug after Bilbo walks right into his verbal trap. “You’re fighting for your right to be a baby.” Absolutely brilliant encapsulation of the Molon Labe mindset, delivered by an actor for whom this episode is essentially a three-course meal. “The sheriff was just leaving,” she tells Danish after this incident. 

“Oh was I?” he responds, with frighteningly obvious anger. Sure enough, he orders her son’s kidnapping the moment he leaves. Lorraine is lucky to have Dorothy around to switch nameplates around on hospital rooms and thus save him, or else she’d have learned where giving a man like Roy Tillman lip leads you.

Lorraine’s final chat is with Olmstead. Having already done oppo research on the deputy, Lorraine tells her the facts: She’s $192K in debt. Almost all Americans owe money, she says. It’s all a big zoo, debt is the cage, the debtors like Olmstead are the animals, and “You’re talking to the zookeeper.” The way she runs down the ease with which you can find yourself chained up, the way paying for all the things you need to pay for to succeed in America (a house, college, medical expenses, your basic credit card) almost automatically means living beyond your means, and thus walking into one of Lorraine’s cages of your own volition, is beautifully depressing.

But there’s one more conversation I want to highlight. When Danish exits the house, he’s stopped by a security guard, who demands to see his ID. Never mind the fact that Danish is leaving rather than arriving, that he’s the most instantly recognizable human being in Minnesota, or that he hired the guy: Orders are orders, and the man carrying the gun has been given orders, so Danish must show ID.

Now, Danish manages a “Don’t fucking do that to me again” afterwards that I think will actually take — he is the boss at the end of the day — but it’s a fascinating exchange nonetheless because it shows how power actually works. It’s as simple as Lord Varys’s old parable from Game of Thrones, about the soldier surrounded by a king, a priest, and a rich man, each of whom orders him to kill the others. Who has the power in that situation? Whomever the man with the sword believes has the power. 

Danish is rich. Danish has political clout, both via Lorraine and likely some of his own. But in that moment, the man with the gun does not believe Danish has the power, and thus he does not. Will Roy and Lorraine come to learn similar lessons?

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.