In the Flesh: Fargo s5e02 'Trials and Tribulations'

“Jesus was a man,” says Rex Tillman (Jon Hamm) in voiceover straight out of a slickly produced neoconservative tough guy political ad. “Not some lady with a beard.” Rex, we soon learn, is still legally married to Dot (Juno Temple), and his good old boy philosophy on law and morality, equal parts hardass Bible thumping and self-serving hayseed corruption, serves as a template for the rest of the episode’s entertaining ruminations on the differences between the two. Is marriage a law, or a moral contract? Does law emerge from morality, or are the two fundamentally at odds? Tillman’s view is simple. The law is whatever he wants it to be. His wife running out on him means he can send armed men to kidnap her a decade later, but a young local wife-beater gets a faceful of hot coffee and a vicious chokehold. Tillman himself welches on his debts without apparent guilt, as when he sends his swaggering son Gator (Joe Speery) to dispatch of failed hitman Ole Munch (Sam Spruell) instead of paying the killer what he’s owed. There’s more than a hint of No Country for Old Men’s enigmatic, inexorable Anton Chigurgh in Munch’s strained diction and off-putting haircut, especially in their shared adherence to a vicious but immovable code of conduct.

The YOU OWE ME sign Munch nails to Gator’s partner’s throat with a buck knife rhymes bloodily with Lorraine Lyon’s (Jennifer Jason Leigh) statement that Dot’s promise to her is a debt she intends to collect. Once all those numbers stop moving around on paper, the reality of commerce — itself a tangled matrix of laws, morals, relationships, labor, and materials — becomes unavoidable. You can’t debate a knife out of your neck or take out a second mortgage on the value of your word. Dead, alive. Is, isn’t. True, false. Tillman knows this, and Hamm plays him with the self-satisfied ease of a man smart enough to know he can move abstractions around in front of his inferiors day in and day out and still come out on top in terms of skin, cash, respect, and any other currency he cares to name. Watching him saunter out of his hot tub, bare-ass naked in front of a pair of FBI agents, only to wrap a towel printed with his own face around his waist, tells you everything about the man you could ever need to know.

Showrunner Noah Hawley’s direction here leaps nimbly between styles, from the smoky noir closeup of Munch’s cigarette burning down in the hitman’s weathered hand to the buttery golden sentimentality of the opening ranch ride. His tonal mastery is equally adept. Within the space of five minutes he goes from ominous pastoral to slapstick black comedy (Dave Foley as Lorraine’s lawyer Danish Graves and David Rysdahl as her sweet-natured pushover son, Dot’s husband Wayne, have one of the year’s funniest purely facial exchanges after Lorraine, on conference call with the two, orders Danish to slap Wayne) to merry Breaking Bad-esque montages without missing a beat. Fargo is smart, muscular genre fare, and even when it whiffs (the ‘This Is Halloween’ needle drop is a little ill-conceived) it does so with real balls. Watchin it eviscerate modern conservatism’s ghoulish incoherence is an unlooked-for treat at the end of a long, hard year.