FULL SEASON REVIEW, NO SPOILERS
"This is the first episode!" I hear you say. Yes this is the first episode of season 5 and if the rest of this season had managed deliver on this episode's promise you'd be reading a different review from me with probably a higher score.
I love Fargo, I loved Season 4 and still do (obviously I love the other 3 incredible seasons). I love the movie, I love the weird little offshoots of its cult status, like Kumiko Treasure Hunter and I even watch the pilot of the unaired sequel series starring Edie Falco as Margaret Gunderson (played masterfully in the original film by Frances McDormand) from time to time. That pilot is MUCH worse than any episodes in this season if you were wondering, but the benefit is it's only an hour of failure instead of 10 hours.
Fargo (1996) is a movie that explores a lot of philosophical ground, key amongst them: the relationship between the brutal real world with the fragile ego of human beings. So many plot conflicts begin in this franchise with a character's mistaken belief that they are something which they are not, and when they open the doors to that world they think they want so badly, they discover within an unspeakable, unfathomable, almost supernatural evil which devours them and everything around them whole.
Fargo's showrunner Noah Hawley understands this concept and the many others visited by the original Coen Bros. Classic. He's successfully retold them and recontextualised them, built them up further and dug even deeper with real deftness and intelligence for 4 whole seasons up until now.
The show has, in my opinion, had a representation problem when it comes to genuine women's voices and female appeal. Missing out on the nature of femininity and its strengths being explored is a missed opportunity, considering the original movie very well represents gender nuance of both the masculine and the feminine at once (more on that in a minute). Putting the girls at centre stage should have been a cakewalk for this series, but it failed and its failures in handling this with the same nuance as the masculine only serves to highlight what an oversight this was to miss and what an afterthought great Fargo characters like Marge Gunderson and Molly Solverson must be in Hawley's canon. Hell, the most three dimensional character in Season 5, though he's not very well realised (no one is this season), is Roy Tillman, Jon Hamm's misogynist-in-chief. He gets much of the screen time, almost all of the action and shines brighter than any other character in the story. That's not a hallmark of a well implemented examination of womanhood. I'm not even sure this season passed the Bechdel test.
Going back to Marge Gunderson - Frances McDormand's hero in Fargo (1996) - she stands out as a direct contrast to William H. Macy's Jerry Lundergaard, a man who believes himself capable of committing a heinous crime for money, only to find that the realities of crime and criminals is far beyond his naive small town reckoning. On first glance, homely Marge Gunderson shares this gentle naiveté but, unlike Jerry, when she finally comes face to face with evil she doesn't cosy up to it. She opens fire immediately. Why? In my opinion, it is because she is not a man. She doesn't have a head filled with movie heroes, pulp novels and the constant demand to reinforce one's character through the unrealistic and largely fiction-based frameworks of manhood. There's a line in this series that does allude to this (I'm paraphrasing here): "when the end comes, it's not a shootout, it's getting your throat cut at a traffic stop". That IS what every day violence looks like, that IS the nature of the beast. Margaret Gunderson understands this because she is cop AND because she's a woman. She is placed by stereotypes of her gender very high on the vulnerability scale. So, when she sees evil, unlike Jerry who arrogantly believes himself equal to it (it would hurt his ego too much to confront the truth that he is not equal to it, that he is also vulnerable), Marge Gunderson shoots it with no question and with only the amount of hesitation required by the law which she serves. Her feminine "weakness" is the strength that wins the day, granting her clarity of mind when the hour that should have spelled her death came. No such nuance in this series, just girls kicking ass!! Woo!!
There's some great talent in this season, Jennifer Jason Leigh is marvelous and underwritten, Juno Temple is perfect for Fargo but her character is falling into, dare I say it, Mary Sue territory. I don't say that because she's a bad-ass who kicks ass, I actually buy that and it's showcased very well in this episode's heartstopping final scene, but she's not given any flaws to make her a really interesting, really juicy role. She's 2D and it's a waste of Temple's talent. It's a waste of everyone's talent, every single actor is really great in this season. I'm looking forward to more things starring Joe Keery as well, he's proving to be an actor who reliably delivers no matter the role.
All in all Fargo the series has been in decline since Season One but with a 10/10 benchmark like that, it leaves a lot of room for error and a lot of good grace. That good grace has run out now. Going into this as potentially the last Fargo series, I expected to be left wanting more, but ultimately if this season is the level we're at now then I'm really glad for this to be the last. A lukewarm end to one of the greatest, most cleverly written dramas of all time.
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