Fargo – The Tiger

Tying the whole Coen Bros/Noah Hawley world together like The Big Lebowski’s rug, this week’s narrator and Coen Bros favorite, Jason Shwartzman, takes cues from David Attenborough’s Planet Earth as he voices a deep dive into lions and what happens when one like Dot is poked. After Wayne’s electrocution sparks a house fire that leaves Dot and Scotty homeless, Lorraine Lyon steps in to protect her son–but mostly her reputation, by having her black sheep of daughter-in-law committed to a psychiatric hospital. Now the lioness is caged because Lorraine is convinced that the gas station shootout, the kidnapping, and the fire, are all due to Dot’s declined mental faculties–or at least that’s what she tells herself. The real reason the matriarch is rattling Dot’s cage is that the housewife doesn’t fit into Lorraine’s definition of a Lyon, but after Dot is strapped to a gurney and carted away by ambulance, the head of the pride learns just how hard a wild animal will fight if you try to cage them.

A Caged Lion Can Still Bite

The fifth episode of the season opens with Lorraine (Jennifer Jason Leigh), discussing how to deal with her “Dot problem.” After talking with Danish Graves (Dave Foley), she decides to have the mother of her granddaughter committed to a psychiatric hospital to get her out of the way. When Dot (Juno Temple) is awakened by the men in white trying to strap her down and cart her off she puts up a decent fight, but in the end, there are too many of them so she gives in and allows herself to be taken. “Allows” is the keyword for what she does next because the way Dot has managed to stay hidden and build this new life for herself is by flying under everyone’s radar and playing the happy pancake-making housewife. That same gimmicky persona works with the hospital staff too as we see her luring them in until one orderly (Michael Rolfe) drops his guard. The man gets a little too close to the sweet Dot, who then takes him down by a nostril grip until she can gag and strap him onto the same gurney! Dot has many skills but being resourceful is her most useful one. With the orderly down she turns fists on the floor nurse (Lori Bachynski) who interrupts her attack on the orderly. Dot knocks the woman and steals her uniform so she can slip out of the hospital unnoticed. It seems like nobody is safe from Dot if they are standing in the way of her and her freedom.

Dot isn’t the only powerful woman on this show, Lorraine Lyon-and all the horrible privilege she wields like a scythe, cuts two men down at their knees during a business meeting and it’s a reminder that like Dot, she too is a fighter who will not be forced into anything by a man. She might be a snob and an incredibly unlikable woman, but in this episode, we start to see why she is so successful when she flexes her feminist muscle and proves she isn’t some pushover. During her meeting with two male bankers who were expecting Danish negotiations to take a turn, Lorraine notices the men are unable to hide their disappointment with the smart-mouthed and condescending CEO replacement. They were hoping the deal to buy their flailing bank would be closed Danish, not a woman. We see just how savvy Lorraine is when she clocks the men’s less-than-enthused reactions and asks, “Let me guess? The last time you negotiated with a woman was over a Tia Juana blowjob?” Calling them out sets the tone for the rest of the meeting and those brutal takedowns only get worse from there. Lorraine is like a shark in bloody waters– she can smell their desperation and knows they need her more than she needs to smile through their misogyny. So, with all the class of Hannibal Lector and Gertrude Stein, she reminds them of why it is insulting to call her “lady”–which one mistakenly does, by going for their throats–or in this case, wallets. She deletes ten million dollars from the agreed-upon price because wealth and power shield her from that push off from their patriarchal glass cliff. In the end, she is proven right and the men walk away with her discounted deal, but having paid a very expensive price for their “boy’s club” behavior. Later, this could be why she doesn’t team up with Roy (Jon Hamm) when he confronts her outside of her house with surprising news: He is looking for his wife Nadine–otherwise known as Dorothy Lyon. Besides the obvious cowboy vs. city girl divide, Lorraine couldn’t be more disgusted with Roy–politically, culturally, and morally. Over a drink, he tells her he is looking for Nadine because as a wife, she owes him the debt of forever–a promise she made to him and God. Lorraine can’t make sense of his biblical blathering and while Dot is a pain. Even Lorraine is evolved enough to know the woman isn’t anyone’s property. She has the freedom of choice and she chooses to leave Roy and marry her son, Wayne– who loves his wife regardless of what his mother thinks. She digs more into Roy’s mindset about debts and promises and finds out he is a conservative Libertarian–the barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen while cleaning Daddy’s gun and keeping quiet while doing it or else, type of husband and that doesn’t sit right with Lorraine. She even makes a crack about the North Dakota rural of it all, and refers to Roy as “son” which is not much different than those condescending bankers calling her “lady.” Roy’s facial reactions seem to take the infantilizing insult similarly too–he is offended but he stays calm as he susses her out. Normally, these two would be cut from the same cloth and teaming up to fix their Dot/Nadine problem but it’s all that freedom and ownership of women talk of Roy’s that sits in Lorraine’s mouth like concrete–hardening her to his requests for help. Instead of using him to rid herself of her giant Dot headache she inadvertently protects her daughter-in-law by trying to pay him off. Roy doesnt take her bait, and when he leaves her house he leaves a trail of threats behind him but not before running into Scotty (Sienna King) and telling her to say hi to her mother. It is his way of telling his wife he is still the one in control and he can get to her family anytime he wants. He doesn’t even leave the driveway before he calls up Gator (Joe Keery) with orders to start on plan B: It’s time to drag Dot out of hiding by going after Wayne!

The Bait and Switch

When Gator and the North Dakota boys show up to the hospital it throws a wrench into Dot’s escape plans. Now she needs to protect her innocent and confused second husband from whatever her first husband has planned for him. We see how far she will go to protect Wayne and Scotty when she wanders into the room of a ranting patient we saw abusing the staff in the previous episode. The man starts ranting the second she walks into his room so she smothers him with his jacket until he goes unconscious. With him out cold, she can switch the nameplate on his room with Wayne’s. It’s the same move she pulled on Halloween with the street signs, and just like the last time, Gator and the boys fell for it. They pounce on the comatose complainer while she sneaks into Wayne’s (David Rysdahl) room and learns her husband is feeling better but still not back to 100 percent. Most of what he says doesn’t make sense but they still manage to sneak in a sweet and loving moment before her plan hits an FBI-sized snag. The two agents investigating Roy, Joaquin (Nick Gomez) and Meyer (Jessica Pohly), track Wayne down in the hospital and they stop his wife in the hallway before she and Wayne can make their escape. Gator, while trying to maneuver the complainer down the other end of the hallway, sees Dot talking to the agents and knows he can’t do anything with them there. Gator and Dot make eye contact but nobody flinches. Instead, he wheels the decoy away and she does her best to answer the FBI’s questions without revealing too much.

The other cop being fed nonsense in this episode is Officer Indira Olmstead (Richa Moonjani), who has the unfortunate job of being on the receiving end of Lorraine’s ego. The officer is at the Lyon mansion to talk about Dot’s escape from the hospital with questions as to why Lorraine would lock her up against her will. So much for Lorraine’s ideas on freedom and strong women, she deflects the question and dives into a long soliloquy about debt. She lets Indira know she is aware of her debts and likens herself to a zoo keeper trying to contain the animals for their good. She doesn’t see herself as some predatory leech living off the hard-earned money of desperate people, but that of a lender–someone who gives to help humans better themselves. To her, debt collection is altruism–it’s helping people be their best selves and they thank people like Lorraine for it. She sees debt as some sort of test of humanity’s fortitude and ability to evolve and she sees herself as a God granting a lucky few the opportunity to grow. It’s offensive and dripping with privilege–something that pours out of Lorraine like poison in every interaction she has with Indira. Instead of questioning Lorraine’s role in this, she expects the officer to find Dot but neither of them knows that while they are having their uncomfortable back and forth Dot is sneaking into that very house to check on Scotty. When mother and daughter reunite, she hears Roy is at the house and that’s close enough for her. She takes her daughter and the two climb out the window and escape to find help in a very surprising place.

When Indira gets home from her meeting with Lorraine she is shocked to find both Dot and Scotty there and asking for her help. For some reason Dot trusts Indira, and so she begs her to watch Scotty while she finishes what she needs to do to keep her family safe. At first, the cop refuses–they are fugitives and she isn’t going to lose her job and freedom for this privileged housewife. Dot has no choice but to tell her the entire story about Roy and how he took her in at fifteen years old and married her at 17. That catches the officer’s attention, but it’s when Dot alludes to the abuse she escaped from “they never hit you when it’s going their way. You know? It’s only when they’re weak and pretending to be strong. When they need something to climb on to feel big” that changes Indira’s mind. The line is delivered with years of pain just hovering beneath the surface of Dot’s face. Indira must’ve thought so too because after her husband, Lars (Lukas Gage), walks in talking about more golf purchases adding to their sizable debts, she agrees to watch Scotty and let Dot end this once and for all. She keeps Lars in the dark and introduces Dot as her friend who needs a babysitter for a little while, assuming he will be too consumed by his video games to catch the news about a fugitive kidnapping. The last shot of the episode is of Dot climbing into a car with a license plate that reads “Wayne’s Motors.” It looks like Nadine is going to get the jump on Roy and fight him on his turf because the child bride is heading home a ticked-off lioness and she won’t be whipping up pancakes, but cooking up some freedom from the shackles of Roy Tillman!