In the Flesh: Fargo s5e05 'The Tiger'

It’s corny to have Jason Schwarzmann, season 4’s Josto Fadda, return to provide David Attenborough-style narration for Nadine’s ordeal. The writing is corny. Schwarzmann’s voice is wrong for the part, which demands gravitas and bluster he just doesn’t possess. That’s about where my complaints with ‘The Tiger’ begin and end. I’ll forgive good work a lot of fumbles, and Fargo’s fifth season is rapidly angling to place itself among the historically strong anthology series’ best outings. Elsewhere you’ve got Dot Lyon (Juno Temple) getting involuntarily committed by her mother-in-law Lorraine (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and fighting her way out of the hospital tooth and nail in a riveting suspense sequence. Disguises, swapping the name plates on the rooms, physically biting and clawing the hulking orderlies who drag her out of Lorraine’s home, sneaking back into the hospital to protect a still addled Wayne (David Rysdahl) from sheriff Tillman’s (Jon Hamm) goons — it’s a great piece of suspense filmmaking and it runs like clockwork from start to finish, believably hinky but masterfully smooth.

Elsewhere, Lorraine tears into the scenery in what plays as a sort of nightmare girlboss slideshow, a collection of vignettes in which she makes a series of superficially correct statements to even more interpersonally despicable people. Are the good old boy bankers she’s intent on buying out by leveraging their financial misdeeds against them rotten, sexist pricks for complaining that her aide de camp Danish Graves (Dave Foley) isn’t at their meeting? Absolutely. What does her evisceration of them over lunch mean for all the women she spends her days squeezing the life out of in order to make her debt collection company hum? Not a goddamn thing. As mentioned previously, the woman has her own daughter-in-law committed without even trying to suss out why Dot is acting erratically. That Lorraine is slightly more palatable than her business rivals or swaggering Christofascists like Tillman pushes the viewer to consider what, exactly, makes her hands-off financial tyranny more acceptable to us than Tillman’s brutality or the smug, chuckling camaraderie of boardroom seat-fillers.

Lorraine’s verbal sparring match with Tillman is a thing of beauty. Leigh’s evident disdainful pleasure in leading the sheriff by the hand to the conclusion that instant gratification and universal deference are granted only to babies (“The president?” he ventures when asked who satisfies the terms) is a genuine pleasure. No one plays cruel like Leigh, and here she is dressing down a wife-beating Trumpite psycho like he’s her belligerent preschool student. The show’s giving us exactly what we want, but it’s a poisoned gift, a reminder that this kind of thinking only cuts so deep if it refuses to engage with economic and social realities. A woman standing on your throat is gonna leave you just as dead as a man, and the quiet Conservatism of the respectable business elite is just as lethally corrosive as Tillman’s blood and soil crusader mindset.