‘Fargo’ Season 5 Episode 4 Recap: Home Invasions

This one’s a banger. Thrilling, sad, cringe-inducing, bizarre, rousing, grim, and centered on tremendous performances by Juno Temple and Jon Hamm, it’s exactly as good as I’d hoped I’d get out of Fargo Season 5, with these ingredients.

The episode begins with the much-anticipated dual home invasions, first by Gator and his crew against Dot/Nadine and her family, then by the blood- and mud-drenched Ole Munch against Roy’s. The former is yet another stellar cat-and-mouse sequence from a show that has excelled at them from one season to the next. (Remember that shootout in the fog in Season 1, or the chase through the forest into the bowling alley in Season 3?) Nadine properly Home Alones the Nightmare Before Christmas–masked kidnappers, but in the process her real name is revealed to her husband Wayne. He gets badly electrocuted by one of her booby traps while they attempt to flee and winds up hospitalized after the resulting house fire enables them to escape and forces Gator to call off the pursuit. 

Roy gets off comparatively easy. In a marvelously scored scene that draws upon the primal power of seeing Jon Hamm with a gun, Roy discovers his kids unharmed…but a rune drawn in blood on their wall. 

In a weird way, though, this violation gives him the power to do what he does in the episode’s closing act. Roy goes to visit Joshua and Lenore, the abusive husband and abused wife to whom he gave his dubious counsel when first we met him. When it becomes apparent that Joshua has not changed his ways, the Bible-citing sheriff taunts the man into drawing a gun. Staring down the barrel doesn’t faze him, not after his home was invaded by something that may be more spirit than man. “You?” Roy sneers. “Like a paper airplane in the rain.”

What follows seems to go basically as planned. The mockery finally drives Joshua into firing, but Roy outdraws him, hitting him in the neck and leaving him to slowly choke on his own blood. Roy tells Gator that they’ll pin all of Munch’s crimes on the dying man in order to get the other agencies out of their way. Lenore will go along with it, Roy says, because it means an end to the abuse, and the start of a lifetime of friendship — and financial gratitude — from ol’ Roy Tillman. It’s all Lenore can do to contain her terror of the man until he departs.

When he does so, he literally rides off into the sunset, in a gorgeous, drawn-out wide shot that makes a mockery of this symbol of heroism by situating an evil man in the saddle. Writer-showrunner Hawley and director Donald Murphy serve up images of the high weirdness like this on a regular basis; Munch monologuing about how real freedom is surviving from one day to the next in the bath while his terrified, involuntarily landlady listens in confusion and fear is another case in point. 

A lot of this stuff is a world away from the Coens, I think, even the Coens at their most horror-adjacent. With all its slow zooms and centered compositions and analog synths — this moment really positions Roy as a standard Kubrick madman in every respect save the angle of his eyes toward the camera — this episode riffs on Kubrick as much as anyone else. (It has this in common with The Idol, which is really good, don’t believe the hype!) But it’s perfectly consistent with Fargo the show, which has gone full X-Files and full Twin Peaks at various times in the past. If it wants to do The Shining, by all means.

Roy’s terrifying speech to Lenore is an episode high for me, one of the two points in my notes where I simply wrote “ooooooh-wheeee.” The other is very different. It comes when Dot/Nadine visits Wayne in his hospital room (dodging Lorraine, Danish, Olmstead, and Farr in the process) after he awakens from his electrocution during the home invasion. While he’s barely coherent or aware of himself and his surroundings, she attempts to coach him into believing a sanitized version of what occurred, to no apparent success or failure. But it’s the way he smiles when he repeats the phrase “my wife,” as if he’s seeing her for the first time and can hardly believe his luck, that gets to him. “Move over, you,” she says finally, tears welling in her eyes, as she scoots him over to lie next to him and cuddle. Tears welled in my eyes too, let me tell you. Not a bad range of emotional experiences for one episode at all, no sir.

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.