Fargo Recap: What’s In a Name?
Dave Foley has quietly delivered one of this season’s most entertaining performances with his understated work as Danish Graves, fixer to the Lyon family. But until this episode it’s never been quite clear how much freedom he has in his scheming. Was he just a catspaw for Lorraine, or was he a mastermind she employed to do what he does best? We get an answer this week. Having been told simply to ready his Porsche to deal with Roy in a previous episode, this week Danish shows us why Lorraine puts so much trust in him. Want to defeat Roy Tillman? Your first step should be getting some dupes to change their name. (Of course, if you were named “John Sasquatch,” it might not take that much persuading.)
The power of names has been something of a running theme this season. Last week we met a community of Lindas, and the final scene of this week’s episode sees the prophecy of Danish’s surname fulfilled. But before we get there, the episode begins with Dot in the clutches of both Roy and the name she left behind when she fled him. While Danish signs the name-change paperwork, Roy checks “Nadine” out of the hospital, where Dot fruitlessly tries to enlist the receptionist by writing “Help Me” in the name field on her release form. This doesn’t work out so well once Roy notices and makes some thinly veiled threats about the receptionist’s brother, but at least Dot is able to pocket the pen without him seeing.
The arrival of Witt doesn’t help matters, either, at least in the short term. Dot’s cowed into staying with Roy even as Witt offers first to drive her home himself, and then to call in backup for help. That glimmer of hope is quickly snuffed out by Roy and the arrival of Gator and a pair of Tillman henchmen. “Time to go, Jay-Z,” Gator says, a line that’s probably intended as racist but just sounds stupid. But Dot is able to fire off a whispered message to tell Wayne she’ll be home soon and, more importantly, Witt’s not one to give up so easily. His next call is to Indira, who’s alarmed to hear that Dot’s with Roy. “I left a message with the FBI,” he tells her, but Indira’s skeptical that this will make any difference since, “They never return calls.”
By now we know Witt well enough to assume he’s not going to just sit there and wait for a call back, but in the meantime, he can’t do anything about Dot being chained up in a shack on Roy’s ranch. In some ways, the whole series has been building to the moment when Dot and Roy reunite, and the wait has made it all the more powerful. We’ve had seven episodes in which Dot’s done everything she can to prevent Roy from finding her, and now that he has, it’s everything she’s feared. Beyond the physical violence, Roy dismisses the life she’s made for herself with Wayne, a tender man she truly loves and happily reminds to take his Lactaid when he eats cheese. Dot doesn’t break, however, vowing to kill Roy, and she obviously means it. But for the moment at least, Roy has every advantage. (That their scenes are shot in a way that emphasizes Jon Hamm’s hugeness next to Juno Temple just drives this home.) Even Karen’s not an ally.
Roy’s violent and domineering, but bad men come in other varieties, too. Where it initially seemed Indira merely married a delusional, freeloading dreamer, Lars has seemed worse with each appearance. Last episode he delivered a lecture on how a wife is supposed to behave, and this week she catches him in bed with another woman. (Or, sort of in bed. She’s topless in the closet.) “He’s useless,” Indira tells the woman. “I don’t want him.” These feel like words that have been a long time coming, but it doesn’t solve Indira’s money problems. She walks out to see her car being repossessed.
While Dot attempts to escape from her chains, Roy shows up for what should be a slam dunk of an election debate before an adoring crowd. But he’s the one who gets dunked on, thanks to the presence of three freshly minted, identically clad Roy Tillmans (“Roys Tillman”) who are also running for sheriff. Also, the smiling cupcake of a moderator decides to ask some tough questions about why he’s been spending the money on military-grade equipment. The crowd turns on him even before he decks the moderator, a moment those in politics would call “bad optics.”
As Danish’s highly satisfying undermining of Roy unfolds, Dot and Gator get a moment together that tells us more about their complicated relationship, made even more complicated when Dot tells Gator she saw his mother, Linda. Fantasy and reality seem to have blurred for Dot, and Dot’s revelation confuses Gator, steeling him against her entreaties, but not her insults: When Dot tells him why he’s not named Roy, it cuts him, whether it’s the truth or just Dot being mean. “I hope you die in here, Nadine, and never see your daughter again,” he replies. Remember last episode when Dot’s puppet-assisted flashback almost made Gator seem more pitiable than bad? This moment shifts that ratio in the other direction, especially after he chases Witt from the front gate. But given that Ole’s found his way into the backseat of Gator’s car, it’s not clear how long this will matter.
Witt tries another tack when he spots Danish at a gas station. But as Witt tells him Dot’s been kidnapped and can be found at Roy’s ranch, he can’t realize he’s sealing poor Danish’s fate. Already mad, Roy’s driven into a rage by Karen’s post-debate analysis and takes it out on Dot. (This happens off screen, but is no less disturbing for it.) When it’s over, Dot does her best to play Princess Leia to Roy’s Jabba, strangling him with the chain used to bind her. This doesn’t work, and it looks like Roy’s on the verge of killing Dot when he’s told Danish has arrived. But Roy has some parting words: “You’ve always been here, Nadine,” he tells her. “It was the rest that was just a dream.” When she retorts that she’ll get away, just like Linda, Roy tells her he’ll bury Dot next to her. Dot’s fantasy starts to fall apart, a process that’s sealed at the end of the episode when she sees what goes into the ground beneath the windmill under which she imagined finding directions to Camp Utopia.
Elsewhere, Indira informs Lorraine of Dot’s location without realizing that Danish is already there. “Today was humiliating to you,” Danish tells him before offering to fix the problem for Roy in exchange for Dot. But Roy doesn’t really hear anything after the word “humiliating.” There’s a price for making Roy look like a fool, and Danish pays it. The last words he hears: “If you’re so smart, then why are you so dead.” Like the debate debacle Lorraine’s fixer so cleverly orchestrated, it would almost be funny if Danish Graves weren’t, indeed, so dead.
This hasn’t been a particularly light season of Fargo. As funny as the show can be, it always goes to some pretty dark places, but this might be its darkest episode yet. We’ve seen Dot be fierce and resourceful and she still ended up in this shack with the man she hates and fears more than any other. As extreme a character as Roy is, this season has offered an unblinking depiction of domestic violence and its lasting trauma. Dot got away but she never really escaped, and her fantasy of Linda and a retreat where all can be safe and recover suggests a deep need for security that even life with Wayne can’t provide. Each season has been substantive in its own way, but few have felt this real.
Okay Then!
• That said, the Debtors of North Dakota image that opens the episode is pretty funny.
• So is the song that accompanies it, “Poor People Store” by Shinyribs.
• R.I.P. Danish. But his departure leaves at least one unanswered question: How’d he lose that eye?
• Everyone in the cast has been quite good, but Temple and Hamm are going above and beyond this season. The terrified look in Dot’s eye as she tells Witt she’s okay? Roy’s long walk to the shed and the shades of rage Hamm projects? Fantastic stuff.