In the Flesh: Fargo s5e04 'Insolubilia'

Tiny Tim’s breathless, shrieky cover of ‘I Got You Babe’ blares as Gator (Joe Keery) and his fellow kidnappers, sporting The Nightmare Before Christmas masks, slip into the Lyon household intent on capturing Dot (Juno Temple). It’s an unnerving song, a nails on the chalkboard squealer tackling a feel-good staple, foregrounding the unsavory domestic elements at play in this ill-fated attack. Director Donald Murphy makes hay out of the Home Alone-like scenario, giving us fake-outs, tension, and satisfyingly kinetic impacts as Gator and co. blunder through Dot’s carefully laid booby traps. The rooftop escape sequence is something special, breathless and genuinely frightening, the moment Dot rolls a limp, unconscious Wayne (David Rysdahl) off the edge of the roof a heart-in-your-mouth nailbiter. This woman, resilient beyond belief and utterly relentless, is out past the buoys and struggling to stay afloat. Death is getting closer, nipping at her heels with each near miss. Her child, placed in harm’s way. Her husband, electrocuted by one of her own traps. The FBI sniffing around.

And speaking of the FBI, agents Joaquin (Nick Gomez) and Meyer (Jessica Pohly) run into a brick wall when their superior lazily declines to investigate corrupt neocon sheriff Roy Tillman’s (Jon Hamm) possible passing on of police arms and ammunition to a vicious right-wing militia. Whether the guy’s a Trumpist psycho or just incompetent and disinterested is an open question, but six of one’s as good as a half dozen of the other. The director’s flagrant negligence is mirrored by Roy’s self-interested brand of country justice. When the sheriff goes to visit the wife-beater he lectured back in episode 2, he takes the scumbag’s obvious disinterest in changing as an opportunity, executing the man in the exact same kind of High Noon shootout he told his son only happens in the movies and pinning Ole Munch’s (Sam Spruell) crimes on the corpse. The wife gets a stipend in exchange for her silence, her alternative clear in every line of Hamm’s face, in the creak of his leather gloves as he pulls them on, in the blood splattered hot over the trailer wall.

As for Munch, he lets Roy’s family off with a warning, inscribing an arcane sigil over the sheriff’s sleeping daughters and then departing the Tillman house. Perhaps the episode’s most interesting element, though, is Dorothy’s refusal to speak to the police or to the FBI after facing a direct attack on her family. It’s a sharp challenge to the notion that Fargo is copaganda, especially with this the second season in a row to feature a bluntly horrific lawman (Hamm’s Tillman, following Timothy Olyphant as season 4’s Mormon U.S. marshal Dick “Deafy” Wickware), and a reminder that most people, upon seeing the cops, don’t think about mysteries solved and crises averted. They think about prisoners beaten to death in the backs of vans, of evidence misplaced, of stalkers and rapists allowed to roam free, of the wanton violence and cruelty of the police themselves. Dorothy doesn’t turn to law enforcement not just because it was a cop, her former husband, who beat and terrorized her, but because she sees the writing on the wall. At best the law enforcement system doesn’t give a shit. At worst, it wants you dead.