In the Flesh: Fargo s5e03 'The Paradox of Intermediate Transactions'

Two brewing bloodbaths, arms and armaments in limbo, a piece of evidence that is and isn’t, a wife offering sexual roles to a silent husband, and a hitman who might be a lunatic or might be a 500-odd-year-old Welsh sin eater; it’s fair to say that the third hour of Fargo’s fifth season puts a lot of pieces on the board. It might be more setup than action, but you can’t accuse it of being boring. The whole thing clips along at a tremendous pace, building a dreadful tension like the slow, sinuous build of composer Béla Bartók’s ‘Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta’, a cue Hawley swipes from The Shining — where it soundtracks Danny Torrance climbing into his increasingly demented father’s lap — to great effect here. ‘The Paradox of Intermediate Transactions’ is inflected throughout with nods to the horror genre, from clear echoes of The Witch in Ole Munch’s (Sam Spruell) sacrificial ritual to the reappearance of artifacts from The Nightmare Before Christmas and the use of Jack Hylton’s ‘Bogey Wail’ over Dot Lyon’s (Juno Temple) nighttime rearranging of local street signs. Munch’s unusual haircut even recalls the bell-like headpiece of the titular construct in Paul Wegener and Henrik Galeen’s partially lost 1915 horror masterpiece The Golem.

The other thread here concerns the working class and the rich. Tyrannical neocon sheriff Rex Tillman (Jon Hamm) plays Tennessee Ernie Ford’s wage slavery folk song ‘Sixteen Tons’ as he drives, the lyrics famously claiming that the poor are made of muscle and blood while others, according to legend, are made from mud, again invoking the specter of the golem. Lorraine Lyon (Jennifer Jason Leigh) puts it in much plainer language when she tells officer Indira Olmstead (Richa Moorjani) that the police exist to keep people who have nothing away from those who have everything, while the clerk (Brendan Fletcher) at Gun World (dressed as a pirate for Halloween but sporting an unelated eyepatch as a consequence of a hunting accident) tells a sticker-shocked Wayne (David Rysdahl) that you can’t put a price on peace of mind after Dot sets her mind on buying a small arsenal. Clearly, though, you can. The gun store’s entire reason for being depends on it. Elsewhere, Munch — or his ancestor/past life/historical doppelganger — eats and drinks the sins of a wealthy landowner at the behest of the man’s surviving relatives, ensuring the man’s placement among the elect at the expense of his own soul.

Spruell has the perfect face for an immortal wanderer, haggard and lined as old driftwood, and his smokehouse ritual has more than a trace of old world Germanic shamanism about it, runes streaming over his naked body as he chants in a guttural double voice. Elsewhere we meet a bastardized modern echo of that particular strain of brutality in the person and — more importantly — name of Odin Little (Michael Copeman), a far right militant counting on Rex to arm his militiamen for what may or may not be preparation for the January 6th Insurrection. “1776,” he intones like a prayer, his own ravaged face deeply shadowed in the firelight. There’s a clever little thematic echo between the episode’s invocation of the Norse god, who famously traded his eye for knowledge and power, and the one-eyed clerk at the gun store, an implicit questioning of what men like the clerk have gained in trade for their own eyes, and what men like Odin are selling them. Damn, it’s fun to see something this dense and lively on TV again.