Fargo season 5 kicks off by defining "Minnesota nice," which is accurately defined as "aggressively pleasant." That's not exactly on display at the Scandia Middle School PTO meeting, where a chaotic fight breaks out. Dot Lyon (Juno Temple) looks for an opportunity to get out of there with her daughter Scotty (Sienna King).
Hustling Scotty up the aisle, Dot is grabbed by the math teacher, Mr. Abernathy (Dusty Bews). Dot tases him and he falls to the ground. A police officer grabs her arm, but she tases him too. Dot is then arrested by officer Indira Olmstead (Richa Moorjani) and put into the Scandia jail. Dot's husband Wayne Lyon (David Rysdahl) bails her out.
They go to Wayne's parents' house to take the annual family Christmas photo. Wayne's mom, Lorraine Lyon (Jennifer Jason Leigh), is extremely wealthy. When Wayne tells Dot he told his mother about her arrest, she is upset. But Wayne says Lorraine is having her lawyer, Danish Graves (Dave Foley), take care of it. In the massive Lyon mansion Lorraine, her husband (Jan Bos), Dot, Wayne and Scotty gather in front of an enormous Christmas tree as they hold festively colored automatic weapons for the photo.
The kidnapping
That night, Dot has a dream. She's sitting at a long table outside on a farm, with Roy Tillman (Jon Hamm) at the head of the table. The next day Dot starts to make Bisquick pancakes as Wayne takes Scotty to school.
With the house to herself, Dot sits down in front of the TV to knit. As she's knitting, she sees a very tall man wearing a kilt and heavy boots with a burlap bag with eye holes cut into it over his face peering through the windows. The man, Ole Munch (Sam Spruell), enters the house through the sliding glass door holding a hammer.
Another man (Devon Bostick) also wearing a mask, enters through the front door. The two go upstairs. Dot's nowhere to be found. They search the primary bedroom and see the bathroom door is closed.
As the second man slowly slides open the bathroom door Dot emerges. She is spraying a can of hairspray and strikes a lighter, making a homemade blowtorch. The second man falls to the ground with his mask on fire.
Dot points the flames at Ole Munch and backs him out of the room. But as she runs for the stairs, she trips over the laundry basket and falls down the stairs.
Dot plays dead as Ole Munch towers over her. When he kicks her, Dot slashes him in the head with an ice skate. Then she runs again. Ole Munch, holding a roll of paper towels against his bleeding head, closes in on her as the other man comes down the stairs.
That night Wayne arrives home and sees the door open. When he enters the house, he sees blood and immediately calls the police. Officer Olmstead responds to the call and tells Wayne it looks like Dot was kidnapped. Two different blood types were found in the house and neither of them were Dot's, so the police start investigating.
Dot's daring escape
On a remote highway in North Dakota, Ole Munch drives while the other man whimpers in pain from the burns. Dot, with her hands zip tied, pops up from under a blanket in the backseat. She scans the darkness outside the car windows and sees a Gas N Go as they drive past it. A police car pulls out of the gas station behind them and hits the lights and siren.
As soon as Ole Munch stops the car Dot opens the rear door and runs to the police car. But then she keeps running. Ole Munch and the other man open fire on the officers. One is killed, but the other calls for backup and then runs to the gas station. That man, North Dakota police officer Witt Farr (Lamorne Morris), runs into Dot at the gas station. He is shot in the leg by Ole Munch and takes cover inside the convenience store. Dot starts looking for weapons and laying traps.
Farr is not sure what Dot’s deal is. She's barefoot and zip tied, yet very capably sizing up the situation and helping him secure the store. Dot cleverly lays a trap in the bathroom that results in the man with the burned face falling on some ice cubes, hitting his head on the toilet and dying.
Ole Munch and Officer Farr have a gunfight inside the store. Dot manages to knock out Ole Munch and then save Farr by using a windshield scraper and duct tape to create a tourniquet for his leg. Ole Munch escapes. As police backup arrives, Dot runs off.
Aggressively pleasant or delusional?
Back at the Lyon home, Wayne puts Scotty to bed and falls asleep in a chair. He wakes when he hears a sound. It's Dot, with bare, bleeding feet. She's aggressively mixing Bisquick in a bowl to make pancakes for Scotty. Wayne wants to know what happened to her. Dot, strangely, insists she wasn't abducted and just needed to clear her head after a bad day. She keeps aggressively whipping the Bisquick in the bowl and tells Wayne to set the table for breakfast because it's the most important meal of the day.
Fargo season 5 airs new episodes on Tuesdays on FX. They are available to stream on-demand on Hulu in the US the next day. The season streams on Prime Video in the UK, with new episodes each Wednesday.
