Fargo – The Tender Trap

With only four episodes left, Fargo is heading into the finale with all of their plotlines converging into one overall theme: A throwdown between powerful women and weak men. With the absence of Dot in this episode, the other female characters step forward to take the trash out– one horrible husband at a time. Leading this pride of Lionesses is head Mama Lyon, Lorraine, who uses her considerable wealth and power to make life harder for men like Roy and Mr. Duggar–the banker who dared call her “lady.” As Lorraine plots from behind her desk, Officer Olmstead proves herself worthy of the woman’s respect, and the response she gets from Lorraine turns into a surprising offer that could fix one of Indira’s problems. “The Tender Trap,” is title describing exactly what goes on in this episode– lost men lured to their dooms by the sweet siren songs of the deadliest creatures on Earth: ticked-off women.

Roy Sets His Sights on a Different Lyon

We open on Sheriff Roy Tillman (Jon Hamm) still reeling from  his less-than- enthusiastic meeting with Lorraine Lyon (Jennifer Jason Leigh), where the matriarch dismissed him without agreeing to hand over Dot (Juno Temple). Now Roy has paused his search for Dot to deliver a message to Lorraine by way of her pocketbook. Roy searches out Vivian Dugger (Andrew Wheeler)– the banker and man Lorraine also dismissed after calling her “lady” at the Tender Trap strip club. Vivian and his pals are drunk and rowdy and probably celebrating the fact Lorraine agreed to buy their flailing bank at all–even with the millions she pulled off the price tag after she felt disrespected. Their good times come to a screeching halt when they run into the Sheriff talking about certain laws Dugger is breaking by being near one of the strippers who filed a protection order against him. He isn’t welcome at the Tender Trap, but like all the men on this show, he couldn’t care less what women or the law say. As his friends flee to their cars, Roy strips Dugger–literally and figuratively, of his clothes and his plans to sell Lorraine his bank at a discounted price. This is Roy’s version of payback–his way of putting the female CEO in her womanly place. If Vivian Dugger doesn’t do what Roy is ordering him to do, then he might wind up buried 6 feet under in the frozen North Dakotan ground. If he wants to live to see another lap dance, he will call off the buy-out.

Speaking of getting buried under a heap of financial problems, we check in with Indira (Richa Moonjani) who still can’t pay her bills thanks to her immature moocher of a husband, Lars (Lukas Gage) All this guy does is play games and spend money; he can’t match his wife’s responsible adult energy or understand why he should have to. This is why it’s a bad idea to leave Scotty (Sienna King) with him, but the cop has no choice, Officer Olmstead is the only person in the house working so she can’t be late. While Scotty finishes off her breakfast, Lars–who is insulted by his wife asking him to babysit, goes on a meninist rant about needing a wife who cooks and cares for him. His complaints are clueless, misogynistic, and lack awareness of how little he deserves this cheerleader/maid/mommy/sex worker, he seems to think a wife is supposed to be. He degrades her sexually, professionally, and financially until Indira can’t take it anymore and escapes to work. Hopefully, Scotty is smart enough to care for herself because Lars can’t be trusted.

Bad Luck Problems

Lars the Useless is in good company on this show because Gator (Joe Keery) and one of Roy’s ranch hands, Bowman (Conrad Coates) screwed up another kidnapping and this time it’s Wayne’s. We see them in Roy’s abattoir–a red beaten-up shack of a slaughterhouse, where the two pound the tumor-riddled guts out of that mouthy cancer patient (Steven McCarthy) Dot switched out for her husband. Gator fell for those swapped street signs on Halloween, so Dot took a chance that he would fall for the swapped nameplates on the hospital room doors too, and it worked. It doesn’t start to dawn on him that they grabbed the wrong guy until the screaming man insists there was a mistake. Meanwhile, up at the house, Roy is sitting in the kitchen getting a haircut from his wife, Karen (Rebecca Liddiard), while the two comment on their support for Trump, who is whining on TV about liberal witch hunts. The twice-impeached reality show hosts’ rantings are cut short by a commercial for Wayne Lyon’s Autos, and this causes Roy to flinch in anger and his wife to knick his ear. Instantly, he backhands the woman across the face for “losing sight of the task at hand” and then calls his very young daughters “welfare queens” for watching TV when they should be working. Enter Gator who tries to lighten the mood with news about Nadine’s husband waiting for Roy in the abattoir. There is just one problem, Roy takes one look at the man and knows he isn’t his wife’s new husband. Gator messed up and rather than return the man to the hospital and risk the feds finding out and ruining his election chances, Roy just causally shoots the man in the head! He tells Gator he, “has a bad luck problem. Somewhere out there there is an upside-down horseshoe with your name on it.” Roy can’t have any bad vibes swirling around the election, so the two men are off to pay the boogieman what he is owed. This string of bad luck has Ole Munch’s (Sam Spruell) name written all over it.

Over at the hospital, Officer Indira Olmstead finds out about the Wayne switcheroo because the missing cancer patient’s wife is freaking out. She learns from the floor nurse that the two FBI Agents who were there to talk to Dot the day the patient went missing are also back and they cornered Wayne (David Rysdahl) and his very sauced father, Wink, in the hospital lounge. Too bad for Agent Meyer (Jessica Pohly) and Agent Joaquin (Nick Gomez) that Wayne’s mind is “still a little sideways” from that electrocution, so he can’t answer their questions about the house fire or make much sense of their story about Nadine. They tell him she stole the name Dorothy from a tombstone to escape her first husband–the Sheriff of Stark County, Roy Tillman. Wayne never heard of this guy, and before he can get a grip on what the federal agents are saying, Indira interrupts to pull the agents away. This is her case, not theirs, and she wants them to fill her in on what they know.

Pay-offs and Prophecies

While they wait for Ole Munch to show up, Roy tells Gator they need to start focusing on the election; Nadine can wait. “We need to take luck out of the equation. End of story,” he says while the two wait on the Sin Cake Eater to show up. When Ole does, he is dressed in his mother’s coat and sporting a kitchen bowl haircut. Roy kicks a bag of money plus interest at Munch’s feet and then goes on a rant about his ex–the tiger, as Ole referred to her, being more like a tick that needs to be suffocated and extracted. Almost apologetically he tells Munch he couldn’t break her, no matter how hard he tried so,“maybe it’s time to let her be?” This election means too much to him to allow her to ruin it. Munch–like some prophet of payback says,”when a man digs a grave he has to fill it. Otherwise, it’s just a hole.” Who is he talking about? Who is going into that forever dirt nap? Maybe Gator, who put a tracker on Ole’s 30-year-old Ford Tempo and then threatens the man one last time with an, “I’ll see you soon, asshole.”

Over at the local diner, the two FBI agents fill Indira in on what they know about Nadine and Roy Tillman. They tell her Roy piqued their interest when he bought millions of dollars of weapons with tax-payer funds and then gifted them to his father-in-law’s “take back America from the wokes” militia. An armed mob of anti-government vigilantes? It really is an election year and it sounds like Roy is counting on that mob to secure his win! The agents know Dot/Nadine has information that can take Roy and the militia down. She can point to where the proverbial bodies are buried, but the feds don’t seem to care about the danger they’re putting Dot–the victim in. Indira reminds them of this but her concerns fall on deaf ears. For Dot’s sake, she keeps quiet about what she knows and also doesn’t reveal Scotty’s whereabouts.

Crushing the Patriarchy One Angry Woman at a Time

Back at Olmstead’s house, Lars bails on babysitting duty and leaves Scotty alone with some crackers and a drumset to practice on. We already know Scitty is a drummer in her school band so she spends the entire day banging on Lars’s expensive skins. At least the drums are getting good use, because when Indira comes home she tells Scotty the set was another one of Lars’ “next big breaks,” purchased to gather dust in her garage.

Cutting to Lorraine’s office, Danish (David Foley) has bad news: Roy Tillman threatened Vivian Dugger and now the banker is pulling out of their deal. She almost smirks knowing this is a sad little flex by Roy. She refused to help him with Dot and now this is his version of payback. For a guy who keeps talking about the importance of his election, ticking off the politically connected Lorraine seems like a bad move. Once again, common sense takes a backseat to the bruised egos of weak men and that’s why the women of Fargo are destined to succeed!

After realizing she can’t rely on Lars to keep Scotty safe, the officer brings her, along with Nadine’s file, to Lorraine’s house. There she tears into the woman for not seeing Dot for the fighter she is. She tosses Lorraine the file–who shoves it out of her way, and says she wants Lorraine to have the full picture before she judges her daughter-in-law.  She really stands up to Lorraine and that bravery impresses the business woman. She offers Indira a white-collar job as head of her security team with a large salary, benefits, and a way to get out from under her debt. “Name your price,” she says, and explains how she can use her policing skills to run a team of worldwide agents to protect the Lyon’s share A.K.A. Lorraine and her family’s lives. Indira agrees to think about it if Lorraine thinks about reading that file. Twenty-four hours or the deal is off the table for both women. Before Lorraine can consider what Indira said, she sends Danish to the Tender Bar to deliver a message to Vivian Dugger. In the middle of a lap dance Danish hands the man the phone with Lorraine on the other end rescinding her offer for the buy-out. The deal is officially off; she is dumping her millions into buying another bank. In the meantime, she sent the SEC to dig through Dugger’s businesses and his personal books– including the stuff with the stripper, while putting a deep-freeze on his assets. She also lets him know she had his son kicked out of school. She ends the phone call with mockery saying, “Your worst mistake was thinking death was the worst thing that could happen to you.” The sheriff won’t kill him, but poverty might.

Once that is done, Lorraine takes Indira’s advice and opens Dot’s file. Inside are numerous police photos of a beaten and brutalized woman and they tell the tale of a woman who is stronger than Lorraine ever noticed before. This realization changes something in her, and we see her eyes almost darken to pools of black. This lioness is hungry and first on the menu is Roy and that election!