The fifth season of Fargo so far, summarized briefly, via bullet point, with spoilers so we can get to the GIFs of goons getting walloped by booby traps
- Juno Temple plays a Minnesota housewife named Dot Lyon who, we realize very quickly, has some sort of secret
- The secret — surprise — is that she’s living under an alias because she fled her menacing husband, a militia-adjacent North Dakota sheriff named Roy, played by Jon Hamm, who enforces laws in his own sometimes extrajudicial manner and also has nipple rings
- Roy finds out where she has been hiding and sends his loser failson Gator, played by Stranger Things star Joe Keery, to collect her and bring her home after a first attempt went sideways and got the state authorities involved
- She’s known they’re coming for a while now and has been booby-trapping her house to prepare for their arrival
There’s more going on, too. Jennifer Jason Leigh is playing the CEO of a scummy debt collection agency who is Dot’s mother-in-law and has the kind of snobby New England accent where words like “what” and why” become “hhhhwhat” and “hhhhwhy.” There’s a mysterious madman out for revenge who is leaving demonic symbols on the walls and is either 500 years old or haunted by things from 500 years ago. Lamorne Morris from New Girl is a state trooper who got shot. Dave Foley from NewsRadio has a sparkly eyepatch. It’s a good time. Dark and violent and sometimes a little spooky but a good time.
Which brings us to last night’s episode. We’ve seen this all coming for a while. Hell, they teased it all in a little video before the season even started.
Last week set it all up, with Halloween night upon them and trick-or-treaters out in masks and Juno Temple swapping street signs to throw the goons off the scent. There were a slew of Nightmare Before Christmas references in that episode, because why not do that if you’re showing a Halloween episode around the holidays? But this week was straight Home Alone. Let’s investigate.
Here’s Juno Temple hiding in a closet and spraying mace in a home intruder’s eyeballs through his mask and then kicking him down the stairs.
Here she is triggering a trap she set up a few episodes ago, where some sort of sledgehammer is tied up on the ceiling and set loose and swings down to mash a goon in the face…
… which is like a bloodier version of the thing in Home Alone where the Wet Bandits get clobbered by swinging paint cans.
(It really is kind of wild in hindsight that Harry and Marv didn’t end up in the hospital or the grave after the events of the first movie. Go back and watch it sometime. They get kagonged with paint cans and shovels and irons. They fall down multiple flights of stairs. They step on rusty nails and tar and have encounters with tarantulas. In any reasonably realistic universe, they would have concussions and broken ribs and probably tetanus. It’s a silly thing to get stuck on in a movie that is basically a live-action version of the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote set in an upper-class Chicago suburb, but it’s worth noting here because the depiction of these kinds of booby traps in this episode of Fargo is probably the more accurate take on it all.)
Here’s the guy who got sprayed with mace also getting damn near decapitated by tumbling attic stairs.
It wasn’t just the bad guys who got bonked or otherwise injured by the series of traps. Even Dot’s own husband, a simple little goober named Wayne who really has no idea what is happening and basically just blows around like one of those inflatable stick figures you see outside car dealerships in the gusts of wind created by his domineering mother and jungle cat wife, gets caught up in the chaos by touching an electrified window, which both fries his entire body and starts a fire that turns the family home into a smoldering pile of ash.
It was all really very fun. Again, dark and creepy and violent, but fun. There’s still a lot that needs to play out here. The state troopers aren’t buying Dot’s story. There’s a demon running around who is hellbent on destroying Sheriff Roy. The FBI is looking into Roy, too, and his ties to various militias he’s been arming with government weapons. Jennifer Jason Leigh still has a lot of lines to deliver with that delightful little accent she’s using. It’s all very exciting. I missed Fargo a lot.
But let’s just stop here and focus on what is important today: Juno Temple is basically Kevin McAllister now. Please make a note.
