The series likes to complicate the politeness of midwesterners. Its terrific latest protagonist went even further.
This article contains spoilers through the Season 5 finale of Fargo.
In the latest season of Fargo, one scene is re-created from the 1996 movie on which the show is based—but with a twist.
The first episode finds Juno Temple’s character, Dorothy Lyon, known as Dot, watching TV and knitting on the couch when two masked kidnappers enter. It’s the same scenario that, in the Coen brothers’ original film, Jean Lundegaard (played by Kristin Rudrüd) finds herself in. But whereas a panicked Jean is quickly captured after she tumbles down the stairs, Dot fights back. Armed with household items, she burns the face of one of her potential captors. Although she eventually gets taken, she subsequently frees herself, booby-trapping the gas-station convenience store that she runs into for safety.
At the end of the pilot, it’s unclear what this plot inversion represents, or how we’re supposed to feel about the vulnerable yet resilient Dot. Is she a brutal killer with a smiling facade? A villain disguised as a sweetie pie? Audiences have seen the “midwestern nice” paradigm frequently in Fargo, an anthology series that loves to pull back the curtain on the politeness of rural folk. Yet thankfully Dot is far more complex than that. As the fifth season of the show confirmed in Tuesday night’s finale, she represents something more unusual for the cops-and-criminals world of Fargo, and more satisfying: Dot is her own hero. And combined with this ordinary character’s ability to survive, again and again, the show suggests that maybe there’s profundity in her decency. Dot’s cheer represents a fortitude that can match any cruelty.
When we meet her, Dot is living in Scandia, Minnesota. She has a daughter she loves named Scotty (Sienna King) and a sweetly doltish husband, Wayne (David Rysdahl), the son of rich debt collectors. After Dot accidentally stuns a police officer with a Taser during a riot at a school-board meeting, she is arrested and fingerprinted. Her whereabouts are thereby revealed to her ex-husband, the terrifyingly misogynistic sheriff Roy Tillman (played by Jon Hamm).
Meanwhile, Dot’s nasty mother-in-law (Jennifer Jason Leigh) thinks Dot just wants her son's money. We’re initially inclined to wonder whether she has a point. The tension of the early episodes is whether Dot should be feared, and whether her charming desire to cook pancakes for her daughter is just a cover. After all, the Fargo universe is filled with people who mask nefarious aims in good spirits—think William H. Macy’s Jerry Lundegaard from the original movie, or Kirsten Dunst as the hairdresser Peggy Blumquist in the show’s second season. What is slowly revealed over the course of the latest season, though, is that Dot’s ability to get herself out of dangerous situations—including being unfairly institutionalized in a mental hospital and chained up in a barn—is the result of her first escape from Roy.
The extent of Dot’s backstory is revealed in the devastating seventh episode, “Linda.” In what is ultimately shown to be a hallucination, Dot performs a puppet skit about how Roy’s first wife took her in as a frightened 15-year-old but left her vulnerable to Roy, who repeatedly sexually violated her. The final two episodes show Roy recapture Dot, but she wrests herself from him once and for all. It’s a triumph that feels rare for Fargo, a world usually filled with pyrrhic victories. In the movie, for instance, Frances McDormand’s Marge Gunderson, a female police officer with an occasionally jovial but no-nonsense attitude, solves Jean’s kidnapping case, but only after Jean is dead. The film relished how these extraordinary events are ultimately routine for Marge, who goes home to her husband and his minor troubles.
The Fargo show has offered a number of Marge-like characters, including Molly Solverson (Allison Tolman) in the first season and Gloria Burgle (Carrie Coon) in the third. Even this season finds a version of Marge in Indira Olmstead (Richa Moorjani), the cop who first arrests Dot and then tries to rescue her once she discovers what’s really going on. But whereas Marge felt revolutionary in 1996, at this point, the competent female police officer in a chaotic male environment is familiar.
Instead, Dot’s power comes from pure survivor’s instincts, and the desire to prevent the evil that happened to her from happening to her loved ones. Although victimhood could have defined her, Dot’s ruthlessness is driven by her compassion for her new family and life. Much of the pleasure of this Fargo season has come from watching her MacGyver herself out of peril with wicked smarts. But despite Dot’s savviness, the viewer is never quite convinced that she’s out of trouble, even by the season’s last scene.
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Towards the end of the finale, as Wayne prepares chili for dinner, the Lyons are visited by one of Dot’s wannabe captors. He wants retribution for the death of his partner, whom she killed in her escape. The kidnapper is a strange man, and a looming, unnerving presence. But Dot calms him down, bringing him into her kitchen, where she instructs him on how to make Bisquick biscuits. She relates to him, another lonely soul. In their last exchange, she offers him a salve for his torment. “You wanna know the cure?” she says, handing him a biscuit. “You gotta eat something made with love and joy, and be forgiven.”
In another show, the line could be trite. Yet it would be a mistake to read that interaction only as an example of Dot’s midwestern niceness; it’s more a testament to the fire that burns inside her. Just like the man in front of her, she’s been through hell. She simply knows how to liberate herself.
Fargo Comes Full Circle
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18.01.2024
The series likes to complicate the politeness of midwesterners. Its terrific latest protagonist went even further.
This article contains spoilers through the Season 5 finale of Fargo.
In the latest season of Fargo, one scene is re-created from the 1996 movie on which the show is based—but with a twist.
The first episode finds Juno Temple’s character, Dorothy Lyon, known as Dot, watching TV and knitting on the couch when two masked kidnappers enter. It’s the same scenario that, in the Coen brothers’ original film, Jean Lundegaard (played by Kristin Rudrüd) finds herself in. But whereas a panicked Jean is quickly captured after she tumbles down the stairs, Dot fights back. Armed with household items, she burns the face of one of her potential captors. Although she eventually gets taken, she subsequently frees herself, booby-trapping the gas-station convenience store that she runs into for safety.
At the end of the pilot, it’s unclear what this plot inversion represents, or how we’re supposed to feel about the vulnerable yet resilient Dot. Is she a brutal killer with a smiling facade? A villain disguised as a sweetie pie? Audiences have seen the “midwestern nice” paradigm frequently in Fargo, an anthology series that loves to pull back the curtain on the politeness of rural folk. Yet thankfully Dot is far more complex than that. As the fifth season of the show confirmed in Tuesday night’s finale, she........
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