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LOS ANGELES, Nov. 9 (UPI) -- Season 5 of Fargo, premiering Nov. 21 on FX, returns to a straightforward crime story with quirky characters. Season 4 got overly complicated with warring gangster families, but Season 5 is classic Fargo. Set in Minnesota in 2019, Season 5 opens with a brawl at a Fall Festival planning committee. PTA member Dot (Juno Temple) gets arrested for tasing a police officer and is taken to the station for fingerprinting.
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After she is back home, two masked men break into Dot's house to kidnap her. Dot improvises resourcefully and manages to escape in their car, but not before they drive to North Dakota, kill an officer and wound his partner, Deputy Witt Farr (Lamorne Morris).
Dot denies the kidnapping to her husband, Wayne (David Rysdahl), and deputy Indira Olmstead (Richa Moorjani). They don't buy it, given the evidence of a struggle in the house.
Dot still acts strange teaching her child, Scotty (Sienna King), how to make booby traps. Wayne's mother, Lorraine (Jennifer Jason Leigh), also believes the kidnapping happened and has always suspected Dot was interested in the Lyon family fortune.
North Dakota Sheriff Roy Tillman (Jon Hamm) has a connection to Dot's past. When Dot's fingerprints showed up in the police database, Roy spearheaded the abduction, and he's not going to stop just because his henchmen couldn't deliver her the first time.
It only takes a single episode to reveal how one secret Dot has been keeping can spiral to put her new family in jeopardy and attract several threatening elements. The mystery develops further in subsequent episodes.
The episodes build the intrigue over how Dot is so brutally capable of handling dangerous thugs. The setup is similar to A History of Violence, but will likely reveal a different backstory. Plus, it plays out in the world of Fargo and with a woman.
The extent of Tillman's connection to her is also parsed out little by little. Tillman is tough and firm, but uses a down-home, friendly tone in asides to keep his opponents off guard.
Violence unfolds in deliberate, effective scenarios. The violence isn't glamorous and it's realistically graphic, but long, steady takes build up the tension of a standoff so the viewer can feel what is at stake, whichever party erupts into violence.
There are some fun callbacks to the 1996 movie's "Trucoat" and vehicle identification numbers, as an auto dealership once again factors into this season.
Once again, every episode begins with the erroneous claim that this season is a true story. It is entirely fictional, but it is just realistic enough that the outrageous confluence of events equals the engrossing nature of true crime stories.
Fargo airs Tuesdays at 10 p.m. EST on FX and streams the next day on Hulu.
Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001, and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Read more of his work in Entertainment.
