Fargo Season 5 Premiere Recap: Never Underestimate a Minnesota Housewife
Fargo’s Dot Lyon just wants to make pancakes for her daughter, but instead, she gets caught up in a whirlwind of guns-blazing action in Tuesday’s Season 5 premiere — and she more than holds her own.
When we meet Dot (played by Ted Lasso’s Juno Temple), she’s shielding her daughter Scotty from a school board meeting that turned into an all-out brawl. On her way out, she’s grabbed from behind and turns around to hit the guy with a stun gun — and it turns out he’s a cop. Dot is put in handcuffs and hauled away in a police cruiser, telling the cop Indira (Never Have I Ever’s Richa Moorjani) that she was just protecting her child: “Don’t come at a mama lion when she’s got her cub.” But that doesn’t stop her from getting booked and fingerprinted. Dot nervously asks if the fingerprints are in a national database. Hmmm… what’s she so afraid of?
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When her nice-guy husband Wayne (David Rysdahl) bails her out, Dot plays the whole thing off as a misunderstanding. They have to head right to see Wayne’s mom Lorraine (Jennifer Jason Leigh), though, and take Christmas card photos holding assault rifles. (“It’s about strength,” Lorraine declares.) Lorraine is incredibly wealthy and a bit cruel, labeling Scotty a “cross-dresser” for wearing a suit and referring to Dot as “the outlaw” after her arrest. Back at home, Dot tucks Scotty into bed and promises to make her silver dollar pancakes, and Wayne asks his wife if she wants to “take a tumble,” but Dot says not tonight, so he watches Blue Bloods on his iPad instead — and in her dreams, she has a vision of sheriff Roy Tillman (Jon Hamm) praying at the family dinner table.
The next morning, Dot makes pancakes, but Wayne takes Scotty to school before she can serve them. So she knits and watches TV… when she notices a creepy guy in a burlap sack mask walking up to her back door. He’s brandishing a hammer, and Dot runs and hides as he enters the home, but he sees a line of string from her knitting that leads upstairs. His name is Ole Munch (played by Sam Spruell), and he’s joined by a second masked man, with Ole handing him the hammer. They head upstairs to find Dot’s knitting on the floor, but no sign of her. They slowly approach the bathroom, and when the second guy opens the door, Dot blasts him with a blowtorch she made with hairspray and a lighter, setting his head on fire. She gets Ole to back off, too, and makes a run for it, but she trips on the stairs and falls all the way down. The intruders think she’s knocked out, but when Ole checks on her, she surprises him by swinging at him with an ice skate, slashing his ear. Go, Dot!
They corner her, though, and by the time Wayne and Scotty get home, the front door is wide open and the house is empty, with blood on the floor. A panicked Wayne calls the cops, and Indira examines the scene, finding a burnt-up ski mask. Lorraine’s lawyer Danish (Dave Foley) thinks it’s a kidnapping and is expecting a ransom demand, but Lorraine isn’t happy to shell out big bucks for “some low-rent skirt my son knocked up.” Indira has her own problems at home: She faces a stack of past-due bills while her husband is paying thousands of dollars to pursue his doomed dream of being a pro golfer. We catch up with Dot in the back seat of Ole’s car, with his partner complaining about his burnt face. She says he should go to the hospital to prevent an infection, but Ole has no intention of stopping. He might have to, though, when a cop car pulls up behind them and flashes its lights. (They’re driving a stolen truck, by the way.)
Once they pull over, Dot opens her car door and runs off into the snowy night, and Ole and his partner open fire on the cops, killing one and sending another one fleeing. The fleeing cop is named Witt Farr (played by New Girl’s Lamorne Morris), and he radios for help as he takes shelter in a nearby gas station. Dot is in there, too, scanning the shelves when Witt takes a bullet in the leg and limps inside. He helps Dot free herself from her hand restraints, and she goes to work, grabbing glow sticks and bags of ice while Witt tends to his wounds. In the bathroom, Dot hears a crash, and she enters to find the window broken and the guy with the burnt face whimpering in a stall. She throws ice on the floor, and when the guy emerges, she smacks him in the face with a bag of ice, and he slips on the floor and cracks his head on the toilet seat. Damn.
Ole tosses a trash can through the gas station’s front door and makes his way inside, casually shooting a clerk who tries to scare him off with an air horn. Witt fires at him but misses and is out of bullets, so he takes cover while Ole closes in on him, using a mirror he picked off the shelf to look around corners — but Dot sneaks up on Ole and cracks him in the head with a shovel, knocking him out cold. She hurries back to Witt and helps him fashion a makeshift tourniquet to stop the bleeding. Where did she learn all this, he asks? “It’s not my first getaway,” she admits. But when she returns to Ole, he’s vanished, and by the time backup arrives and Witt gets to his feet, Dot is gone, too.
Wayne puts Scotty to bed and then falls asleep, waking up when he hears something in the kitchen. He peers in to see Dot nonchalantly whipping up another batch of pancakes. He notices she’s bleeding, but she insists she’s fine. She just went out somewhere to clear her head, is all. But what about the scorched ski mask? Oh, she just put their winter clothes too close to the hair curlers, she says. In fact, she claims she wasn’t abducted at all. Seems like there’s a lot we still don’t know about Dot, huh?
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