‘Fargo’ Boss Noah Hawley Breaks Down That Finale Final Scene: “Right or Wrong, It’s a Beautiful Idea”

[This story contains major spoilers from the season five finale of Fargo.]

Antecedently on Fargo season five, Juno Temple’s Dorothy Lyon battled against a centuries-old sin eater named Ole Munch (Sam Spruell), reckoned with her violent ex-husband and current lawman Roy Tillman (Jon Hamm), all while negotiating family politics with her mother-in-law Lorraine (Jennifer Jason Leigh), and receiving assistance from good souls like deputy Indira Olmstead (Richa Moorjani) and state trooper Witt Farr (Lamorne Morris).

Now, all of those characters are done struggling, at least on screen, and one of them is done struggling forever, thanks to a blade in the dark. As always, Fargo concludes with Coenesque violence, but also, with Coenesque questions — this time, the question being: What do we do with debt? Do we owe, or do we forgive?

The question comes to a head in the final sequence of the finale, in which Dot comes home with daughter Scotty (Sienna King), only to find the sin-eating Munch in their living room with Dot’s harmless husband Wayne (David Rysdahl). He’s here to collect on a debt he believes he’s owed, having lost an ear and a partner to Dot earlier in the season. But Dot refuses to engage his violent instincts. Instead, she invites him over for supper. Munch joins the family in the kitchen, helps make the titular “Bisquik” biscuits, and manages to release the enmity that he’s consumed for literal centuries. The season ends with Munch smiling, his teeth covered in biscuit detritus. If an ancient force of sin like Munch can get past his grudges, isn’t there hope for the rest of us?

That’s certainly the feeling series creator and episode writer Noah Hawley hopes to evoke here at the end of his fifth iteration of Fargo. Describing himself as having “a multitasker’s brain,” Hawley’s work has always spanned a variety of genres and tones and even shows, with his upcoming Alien adaptation presently in the works for FX. Even just within Fargo, though, the range of humanity is at the forefront, with each season serving the master of a bigger topic. This season, it was debt. Next season — if there is a next season — could it be about the very nature of our reality? 

Below, Hawley speaks with The Hollywood Reporter not just about the final episode of Fargo season five — and where it leaves folks like Dot and Roy — but also his view of the modern American experience, and how that could be channeled in future iterations of Fargo. But first, about those biscuits…

The season ends with Dot and Ole Munch settling their differences over Bisquik biscuits. Was this scene baked into the premise of the season?

No. I had the unfinished business denouement idea, which was that everything would resolve itself except for Munch, and he would show up at her house. In a way, in my free association game called Fargo, I was thinking a bit about that scene in No Country For Old Men, where Kelly MacDonald comes home and Anton Chigurh is in the house. They have this conversation where she says, “I knew this wasn’t over,” and he flips the coin, she refuses to call it, and that it has nothing to do with the coin, it’s all about him. And then of course, he kills her off-camera. 

I thought about that, and about Dot, and this idea of debt… she took something from [Munch] and now he wants something in return. But when the time came to write the scene, I thought there was certainly a thriller version of the scene, one last fight or chase or whatever you want to call it. Then I just thought, “Well, what if she refuses to be in that scene? What if that’s his scene, and she’s like, ‘Well, I’m not going to be in your scene. I’m going to make you be in my scene, and my scene is a school night where we’re halfway to dinner, so either do what you were going to do or wash your hands and help.’”

The scene plays out over three distinct parts: The living room, the kitchen and the meal.

Yeah. I really am struggling, the way so many of us are struggling, with how we move past what feels like this entrenched enmity between Americans for other Americans, where everyone feels aggrieved, everyone thinks the other one has injured them, and you have this sort of Hatfield and McCoy thing that’s going on. How can we ever move forward if constant retribution is the only solution? Or, is there something else? In this case, it’s an acknowledgment that both people in this have been hurt, and a big part of trauma is blaming yourself for what was done to you. There’s a process you go through, and the only way to really forgive yourself is to be forgiven. That act of someone else forgiving you, it’s liberating.

That was my hope with the scene. It was really rewarding in the writing of it, and then of course the filming and the editing of it, that we get the story from Munch about his origins and where he comes from, and the fact that he was starving and a rich man paid him to consume his sons, and now all that’s left is his sin. And she says to him, “Well, it doesn’t have to be.” I just think right or wrong, that’s a beautiful idea.

We don’t have to eat what they feed us, basically.

Right. The solution is to eat something made with love and be forgiven. People have asked me: Do I think Dot is going to visit Gator (Joe Keery) in prison the way she said that she would? I said, oh yeah. Once a month, she and Scotty are baking cookies and driving them over and Dot will tell Scotty, “I know he scared you and he’s sorry, but mommy grew up in this house and this was my step brother and then my stepson, which is weird, but he’s a person, these are all people, we’re all people, and we just have to see each other as people in order to not be afraid of each other.”

Speaking of characters in prison, Roy (Jon Hamm) ends up behind bars, in a final showdown with Lorraine (Jennifer Jason Leigh). First, though, he ends up in a final showdown with Witt Farr (Lamorne Morris), which does not go Witt’s way. What went into the decision to kill Witt?

These choices that we writers make are not easy. And sometimes you are doing things you really don’t want to do. But we’ve established the rules of the game, which is that this show says it’s a true story. It says it’s reality, and in reality all the good guys don’t live and all the bad guys don’t die. And it’s complicated and it’s often tragic, et cetera. And part of what this season was wrestling with was the system of justice, the collaboration between Indira and Witt and the FBI and the judges we don’t see, and the prosecutors we don’t see, against the “I am the law” man on a horse, whose every whim is, “If I do it, it’s legal, and if you do it, it’s illegal.” 

So what we ended up with in that tunnel was a guy who believed in the rules and a guy who fought dirty. It would be lovely to think that the rules always win out, but the reality is the guy fights dirty and Whitt turns around, he catches him, he catches a man with a knife behind him. He could have shot him in that moment and would’ve been totally within his rights. But the moment that he doesn’t shoot, and now Roy is standing there with a knife and he clearly has the drop on him, the rule following man says, “well, I can’t murder this man. I can only arrest this man.” And in that moment, he exposes himself to the treachery. And so unfortunately, that treachery occurs.

I tried to set it up emotionally in the moment where Dot is about to finish John off and the FBI stops her, and the moment she turns around, we know something bad is going to happen. And so I didn’t hide that. I didn’t pretend that we were in this suspense-filled chase that was all going to end. We start to vignette to black, this sort of very plaintiff violin comes in, we’re playing the tragedy, we’re playing in this moment how they had him and now he’s getting away and only bad things can follow from this. And ultimately, he is arrested and he is sentenced to prison for life and justice is done, but the tragedy is there’s one more crime before they get him.

I’m glad for the Bisquik scene for a lot of reasons, but especially on the other side of Witt’s death, which feels in itself like a statement on what decency can buy you. But with Dot, an act of decency can save you, too. You get different results depending on the person and the day, maybe.

Yeah. I’m sure there are people who think it’s naive or unrealistic to champion goodness with a small G, but I think the danger of pitching a battle between Big G good versus evil is that everything is at such a fever pitch. There’s nowhere to go. And it really is, I mean, you hear so often that the reality of life is you just got to get out and talk to people who aren’t you, and it goes a long way. And there’s a reason that I live in the middle of the country versus on the coasts. I’m a New York City boy. I’ve lived in San Francisco and Los Angeles, now I’m in Austin. The more exposure you have to the diversity of the human experience, my hope is that that has a currency with the people around you. And I always said that storytelling is a way to get audiences to care about people who aren’t like them, and in that way to build empathy for others. I think that’s optimistic. But I certainly feel like getting out to meet people is maybe a better way of humanizing everybody, both to them and to ourselves.

Okay, back to prison. You believe Dot is going to visit Gator. Do you believe Lorraine is really going to do all she said to Roy?

I’ve now told 51 hours of story about the evils of capitalism, and unfortunately, my money’s on capitalism. Desperate people always have a price. So I don’t think that Roy’s going to have an easy time of it, and I don’t think it’s going to be easy for him to know who to trust. That being said, he’s a gladiator in the ring, and I don’t count him out certainly, and I also don’t count out the fact that he can reach out from prison, and there’s a danger to keeping him alive and making him suffer, which is that as long as he is alive, he’s dangerous. But I do enjoy seeing him afraid for at least a moment.

It’s quite the cast across these 51 hours of Fargo, and specifically in the odd seasons, the modern era, I can’t imagine you haven’t thought about some form of Fargo: Endgame, where we see more of these people interact. Are you interested in crossing those streams?

I’ve thought about it, not in terms of a greatest hits or whatever, but when you’re moving around in time the way this show does… as you saw with the Mr. Wrench character who was a child at the end of season two and then recurred in season three, and we see the Bokeem Woodbine origin story in season four. It’s certainly possible. I’ve talked to FX at one point and asked, “Does it always have to be 10 hours?” If I had a Malvo story and Billy Bob Thornton was interested, could we do a two hour? Could we do a four hour?

I think the mindset is it costs the same amount to launch a show no matter how long it is. And so to launch something for four hours, it’s just not sort of financially worth it compared to 10 hours. But it certainly would be, because to build a 10-hour story, the intricacy of it, the number of moving pieces, the volume of thematic elements. I mean, there’s a reason that it takes me a few years to put them together. But if it was a shorter, more concise thing, I could see that. But yeah, I mean, it crosses my mind whenever I’m thinking of like, “well, that guy’s still alive in this year. Is there a way to bring him back?” But I also don’t want to be clever. I don’t just want to be clever. It has to be a meaningful crossover.

How much are you actively thinking about the future of Fargo right now, or is all attention focused on a certain xenomorph at the moment?

I have as many eyes as I can put on [Alien] right now, but when we had some time when the town shut down, my mind certainly wandered to Fargo again. But it’s not where I can put the front of my brain. I entered the fifth season thinking it would be the last one. Even telling FX that it was going to be the last one. But I got it up on its feet and thought: Who am I kidding? This is such a rewarding arena to be constantly reinventing under the auspices of that word, Fargo, to do just about anything as long as it has a couple of elements in it. There are no restrictions, other than there has to be crime, and there has to be decency. Other than that, the sky’s the limit. I don’t have an idea at this moment, but, they seem to come.

Fargo 500 years ago, show more about Munch’s origins?

Done that. (Laughs.) I mean, look, there’s certainly something to the early days of America. I’ve never been terribly attracted to going full period in that way, but you could do Fargo Deadwood or something. But yeah, I don’t know. I mean, I’m just sort of open. It also has to be about, what are we talking about? We’re talking about debt this year in all its complexity, moral complexity, et cetera. You need a big topic. It’s a show about America, which is a country that is evolving much more rapidly than I could have imagined, any of us. So I think in trying to wrestle with that, when the paradigms are shifting. When I started Fargo, we all still had “Turn the Other Cheek Jesus,” and now it’s “Warrior Jesus.” It’s hard to keep up. But to wrestle with those implications is part of why the show exists for me.

In that vein, what’s on your mind about America right now?

I think we have a real challenge in trying to get reality back to being one thing. We have a real challenge with our words, meaning different things to different people. So, how do you have a conversation? When I say freedom, what does it mean, and when you say freedom, what does it mean? There’s an inability to agree on what a fact is. It is so undermining of society that it’s hard to understand how to solve it, and of course, how to teach my children how to prevail in it when we can’t agree on what reality is. And it seems like a very intellectual conceit, but I think it’s a very visceral and real conceit that I think we’re going to be struggling with for some time.

Fargo season five is now streaming on Hulu.