According to actress Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Nikki Swango), her character's experience in the bowling alley was surreal: "She was drained and exhausted, and unsure if she's dreaming. She's on some transcendental plane there where she's not really in her body anymore."
The only Fargo episode as of release to not use "The following took place in...", "At the request of the survivors..." and "Out of respect for the dead..." title cards. It does, however, still use "This is a true story", with the words appearing one at a time and cutting to a black background for each word, instead of displaying them in the foreground of the scene.
Nikki (Mary Elizabeth Winstead)'s interaction with Paul (Ray Wise) is reminiscent of the ending scene to Joel Coen and Ethan Coen's 1998 movie The Big Lebowski (1998). Throughout the film, the supposedly supernatural stranger who narrates the film, has a friendly talk with the protagonist, the Dude, at a bowling alley. Both the scene in the film and the scene in the episode are shot similarly.
The way the camera zooms out when she sits at the bar in the bowling alley is very similar to The Big Lebowski (1998) when The Dude meets the Cowboy.