Is this season of Fargo running in place a little? The show has a history of doing this sometimes—not every season of television can be this show's second and third, much as I wish that could be the case. Fargo is fond of playing the long game with the promise that everything comes together in the end. And it usually does (unless we're talking about season four, and we don't talk about that). But if it forgets about things or leaves them a little undercooked, such is the case of "The Tiger."
It's tempting to complain about the absence of Ole Munch (Sam Spruell), the dead-eyed, five-hundred-year-old (long story) killer that's been stalking horrid "lawman" Roy Tillman (Jon Hamm), but at least it feels like there's a point to keeping him sidelined. Roy has a decently creepy moment in this episode, so the quota for a good villain is full enough. That said, where the hell is Witt (Lamorne Morris)? To have any major player in a Fargo season still alive and yet have nothing to do for two straight episodes (he was at least in the last one, he doesn't even get a mention here) just feels wrong, especially when the state policeman had proven himself both likable and capable.
It also doesn't help that the episode's A-plot mostly retreads what we know. Housewife Dot (Juno Temple) uses her unassuming nature to get the drop on her enemies (as the episode's narration unhelpfully explains), and then we get to watch her do this for half the episode's runtime. (Can we spend half the runtime talking about Jason Schwartzman's terrible accent? It was nice to see him back after his stint in season four, though.)
But with that out of the way, this is still a really good episode. If I had to pick one show to watch do its thing forever, Fargo would be high on the list, and "The Tiger" seems like proof of concept. After her icy mother-in-law Lorraine (Jennifer Jason Leigh) has her committed, Dot gets to show off her cunning yet again. She has two orderlies tied up within a minute and is hurrying out of the hospital in nurse's clothes, and only stops because Roy's men barge in to kidnap her husband Wayne (David Rysdahl), also hospitalized. A neat stylistic moment in "The Tiger" is when Dot imagines several different escapes and concludes the best one is to lie in wait—it's a cool way of showing how her tactical mind works, and we see this when she has to save her husband.
It also shows how much Dot is repressing. On the outside, she's a soft housecat, but when you push her, she shows off the tiger. As she ducks into a patient's room to avoid hospital security, he mistakes her for a nurse and immediately snarls at her for soup—and just for a moment, Dot risks her plan and makes a lot of noise as she knocks the guy out while snapping about "why are you so rude?" She gets an idea and switches the name tags on their doors, tricking Roy's guys into taking the wrong man. She has a run-in with the FBI agents that have been building a case against Roy, but security notices her before the agents can take her into protective custody. (And shouldn't they have jurisdiction considering she's integral to charging Roy? Can't they just take her with them? Am I wrong here?)
But I love the side plots in this episode even more than the main one. Lorraine rules this episode from her first major scene, where she sits down with an asshole banker and quickly puts him in his place. ("I'll tell you when it's your turn to talk," she snaps at his lawyer when he interrupts, who falls silent for the rest of the scene.) When Roy turns up at her house to claim his supposed ownership over Dot, Lorraine ruthlessly skewers his job and politics. "You want freedom with no responsibility? There's only one person on Earth who gets that. A baby. You're fighting for your right to be a baby." (Hamm's acting in here is unsurprisingly phenomenal; watch how his face slackens as he tries to process the brutal truth of her words. Great stuff.)
And even if Witt continues to get the short end, deputy Indira Olmstead (Richa Moorjani) gets some more time to develop. Tired of her prodding in Dot's kidnapping case, Lorraine does a little digging back and finds that Indira, like ninety percent of America (according to Lorraine herself), is in debt. Themes of debt and repayment have run rampant throughout this season, and to see yet another character slipping under the weight of it is interesting and a little sad. "When you die, your debts becomes theirs," Lorraine muses to Indira about her hypothetical children, and who wouldn't want to leave after that?
Indira returns home to find Dot and her daughter Scotty (Sienna King) hanging around at her place, with Dot needing to hide Scotty with someone trustworthy while she takes care of some business. They discuss their feelings on certain topics—the stubborn futility of Indira's layabout husband's golf dreams, how Dot married Roy when she was seventeen and met him at an even younger age. Dot muses about how "they never hit you when it's going their way" and how "they need something small to climb up on to feel big," eerily mirroring how Roy's reaction to getting schooled by Lorraine was to try and scare a passing Scotty. And then Dot drives off into the night, no one else knowing her plan.
So even when it's circling the wagons, Fargo still has it. Fantastic writing coupled with fantastic acting makes for super fun television, who knew? I would love for the intriguing story the earlier episodes have set up to get moving, but if this is what we've got while we wait, I won't complain too much.
This episode of Fargo is now available to stream on Hulu.