Fargo – Season 5 Episode 7 “Linda” Recap & Review

Linda

Episode 7 of Fargo Season 5 begins with Ole Munch, who is still living with Irma. Their “trade,” which he explains as him “guarding Irma’s door like a dog,” isn’t received well by her ungrateful son, Kevin. He asks Ole for rent and gets it promptly. Kevin is an offender and a good-for-nothing. For him, it is money to buy blow or do some other unproductive thing. However, before he can leave the house again, Ole kills him with an axe.

Although we didn’t see Dot in the previous episode, this episode brings us a lot of face time with her. Since leaving Scotty with Indira, Dot has been on a road trip…a long one. In her red Kia, she is heading toward Camp Utopia. She almost falls asleep at the wheel but manages to centre herself. Along the way, she stops at a diner where she has pancakes. We see Dot going to a special spot near a network tower where she finds a postcard from someone named Linda. It turns out that this Linda – who is called Saint Linda at Camp Utopia – was Roy’s first wife. And Gator is her son.

Dot arrives at the camp quite late at night and faints while watching a puppet show. The camp is revealed to be a safe haven for victims of domestic abuse. Linda started it after escaping Roy’s clutches and everyone who stays at the camp for the transitory phase is called by her name. Instead of this being a positive meeting, the confrontation between Dot and Linda starts off with the former punching the latter.

Dot accuses Linda of having baited her to Roy to escape the farm. However, Linda doesn’t accept the accusation. Dot wants her to testify against Roy so that he can be put into jail. But Linda proposes a different trade – Dot makes a puppet and tells her story to the other Lindas. And they will decide what to do next. Dot is given the task of making her own puppet but quickly loses patience. She once again requests Linda to testify at dinner but doesn’t get her way. 

Back at the dealership, Wayne has returned to work. However, he is still having trouble making sense of things around him. For instance, Wayne gives an employee the go-ahead to trade a family’s old car for a brand new one from the dealership – a straight-up loss for the business.

Scotty remains by his side, trying to steer him back on the path. But it is undeniable that Wayne might never be himself again. Gator uses the tracking device to get Ole’s location. He uses a sniper rifle to shoot him through the window of the house from his car. Although Gator thinks he has struck the bull’s eye, he has in fact fallen for Ole’s ploy. Ole knew Gator would be coming after him and used Kevin’s dead body as bait. When Irma finds Gator trying to steal the bag of money from Ole’s car, she attacks him.

Gator pushes her away and Irma falls to her death, hitting her head on the pavement. Dot lays awake at night, thinking about Linda’s prospect. She ultimately decides to go ahead with the task.

Dot works incredibly hard on her puppet and tells her story through a show later that night. It is revealed that Dot grew up in a rural town with no moral compass. As soon as she came of age, the “wolves” of the town hunted her. Dot had to leave everything and run away from that life. She had nowhere to go, nobody to turn to…until she found Linda in the supermarket by chance. Dot was shoplifting but Linda saved her and took her in. But as Dot discovered later, it was only a ploy. Linda wanted Roy to take a liking to Dot, which would allow Linda to escape. This is exactly what happened as Roy raped, abused, and ultimately bonded Dot to himself.

Dot’s show gets a rousing reception. Linda agrees to testify against Roy and takes off with Dot. It is revealed that the stop she made at the diner was after picking up Linda. However, in a freak accident, a huge truck goes offroad and crashes into the cars in the parking. Dot is hit by a car that swerves towards her. When Dot wakes up she asks about Linda, who probably didn’t survive. And then, Dot’s “husband,” Roy, walks up in and up to her bed…ominously holding her hand and saying, “I got you.”  

The Episode Review

Arguably, no one wanted that conclusion. Although we wanted a showdown, it certainly wasn’t Dot lying on her back in a hospital bed and Roy walking up to her. Dot’s inability to tell the truth about the kidnapping has snowballed into this absurd reality. The freak accident is in line with Fargo’s traditions of the unexpected becoming a reality to give shape to things.

The dream sequence puts things into perspective for Dot – why she is in denial about her past. I am not a big fan of such narrative interventions. They end up spoiling the momentum of the storytelling and taking away urgency that will lead us to the next part of the story. As important as it is at this juncture in Fargo’s Season 5 for Dot’s character, I found the sequence to be a little stretched.

Linda is most likely already dead. The one moment that sticks out from the puppet show is the relationship between Gator and Dot. “He wants to be good but he wants to be like his dad” shines a new light on his character in my reckoning. This episode is slightly distracted from the central plot but adds a lot more foundation to the show’s character-building.