Fargo Recap: Into the Woods

Much of “Linda” only makes sense in retrospect, including a song on its soundtrack. Early in the episode we watch Dot, making a return to the show after sitting out the previous episode, sleepily cruising down a snowy road in her Kia and listening to the radio, then hurriedly changing the channel to get away from a song with the line “you can’t escape my love.” Instead, she opts for James and Bobby Purify’s 1967 classic “I’m Your Puppet,” another song about romantic possession, but one seemingly less reflective of her problems with Roy. But it’s not entirely irrelevant to Dot’s situation, and may even inspire the fantasy sequence that takes up much of the episode, a truck stop reverie in which Dot imagines herself visiting a commune of women named Linda seeking escape from abusive relationships.

That this doesn’t actually happen only becomes clear when Dot snaps out of her daydream and back to the real world, jolting the episode back with her, a la “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” In retrospect, however, this should have been obvious. She’s pretty dozy as she pulls into the truck stop and her journey away from the best pancakes from the state plays a bit like a fairy tale. It even includes buried treasure (of sorts) and a car that conveniently breaks down within walking distance of her destination, a place called Camp Utopia. And that destination is perhaps too strange to exist even in Fargo’s reality, which is saying something. Whether the show is playing fair or not by alternating between Dot’s fantasy and the other characters’ lives is another question. But that, too, only becomes an issue after the episode ends.

“Linda” begins far away from Dot, at the North Dakota home of a woman we can now definitively say is not Ole’s mom. But Irma (as the credits refer to her) does have a son, even if he doesn’t last through the episode’s opening credits. That’s long enough to establish him as a real jerk, however. He bosses Irma around, even using antisemitic slurs in his sandwich-making instructions. And though he should probably be concerned that there’s a big, hulking weirdo living in his mom’s house, he’s cool with it so long as Ole pays him. Which Ole does, shortly before taking him out with a shovel in one of this season’s most direct callbacks to Fargo. Irma’s boy even looks a bit like Steve Buscemi, doesn’t he? RIP and good riddance!

That leaves Irma safe from hot-tempered men, at least for a few more commercial breaks. Closer to the end of the episode, however, Gator uses his tracker to find where Ole’s hiding out (insofar as he is hiding) and a sniper rifle to take out Ole as he sits in a window-side rocking chair. Only it seems Ole has strung up a puppet of his own to serve as a decoy; now we know what he did with the body of Irma’s son. Then, while attempting to retrieve Ole’s payoff money from the back of his car, Gator accidentally takes out Irma, which seems to make Ole quite angry. In his own way, he seems to have been fond of the old lady (or maybe just of her pancakes) and she of him. We don’t see Irma mourning her jerk son, but we do see her bringing groceries back to the house she shares with Ole (or did for a few days, anyway).

After Dot’s long journey brings her to Camp Utopia she walks into what appears to be an especially violent Punch and Judy show with all the humor stripped away. This makes it essentially a dramatization of domestic abuse and, we’ll soon discover, that’s the point. Camp Utopia is a gathering place for abused women to heal and recover their identities.

Dot comes in search of a woman named Linda but soon discovers she’s found an abundance of Lindas. At Camp Utopia, everyone is named Linda, until they earn letters that will allow them to change that name incrementally. Her guide to the place, for instance, is “Lindo” (Sorika Wolf), who lays out most of how Camp Utopia runs as she walks Dot through its quite busy grounds. Dot has one particular Linda in mind, the one the others call “Saint Linda” (Kari Matchett), a name that makes Dot chuckle, but not Lindo. At Camp Utopia, they take such names seriously.

Suffice it to say, Dot’s skeptical of Linda’s sainthood, slapping her moments after they’re reunited. “You must think I deserve that,” Linda tells her. And she does think that. Dot knew her first as Linda Tillman, Roy’s wife when they met. (Now we know that the first Mrs. Tillman didn’t end up buried in the woods. Unless she did. We’re in a fantasyland, after all.) Dot’s arrived with an agenda: Linda needs to return with her, report Roy’s crimes, and make sure he ends up in jail. She’s also nursing a grudge, telling Linda, “You fed me to him so you could escape.” Linda seems to understand her feelings but also agrees when another Linda suggests they hold a trial to find the “true truth.” And, of course, this trial will take the form of a puppet show.

While Dot considers her options, Scotty quizzes her dad about mammals that lay eggs as they hang out at the Kia dealership. Wayne seems slightly less loopy than before, but he’s also lost his grip on how capitalism works. When a family arrives looking to trade in their Sportage (or, as Wayne’s employee pronounces it, “Sport-age”) even though they don’t qualify for financing, Wayne wants to make it an even trade. He even has a snappy slogan to accompany this new policy: “Give a car. Get a car.”

This may not be great for the Kia dealership, but it makes Wayne all the more endearing. His shock hasn’t so much altered his personality as it’s brought out more of the sweetness that was already there. He’s great with Scotty, and skilled at telling bedtime stories about a brave heroine named “Dorothy,” who leaves her family to go fight against the darkness, “because until you go someplace you can’t come home.” When Dot insists at Camp Utopia that she (now) has a great husband and a happy marriage, she seems to be totally in earnest. Wayne has more to offer than just shelter and a new name, even in his current state.

Meanwhile, back in Dot’s head, she’s struggling to commit to her puppet-making assignment but enjoying a nice candlelit dinner with the Lindas. Brute force having failed, she tries to take a different tack with Linda, noting that she hasn’t asked about her son Gator. “He wants to be good,” Dot tells her. “But more than that he wants to be like his dad.” This doesn’t move Linda, nor does Dot’s insistence she doesn’t need a doll to tell her truth. “I know who I am and what’s important,” Dot says. “This is the process,” Linda retorts. “You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t need to be here.” So a puppet show it’s to be!

Dot starts carving in the middle of the night, her efforts yielding a terrific version of herself in puppet form and setting the stage for the episode’s show-stopping puppet sequence in which Dot recounts her life story, beginning with a bucolic childhood. “And then I got my monthly,” she recalls, “and the wolves came.”

It’s at this point that Dot’s puppet show becomes an elaborate fantasia of her life with Linda, Roy, and Gator as a lonely teenager. Dot’s taken in by Linda after a store manager catches Dot shoplifting chocolate chips and, per Dot’s recollection, Linda then pushes her toward Roy in an attempt to get him to focus his attention elsewhere. It doesn’t work, at least at first. Gator seeks comfort with Dot as the sound of Roy’s abuse of Linda echoes through the house, a glimpse of their tender past relationship that helps explain Gator’s reaction upon running into Dot in previous episodes. But before long Roy’s coming to Dot’s bedroom at night after beating Linda. “And then,” Dot recalls, “she was gone,” having left in the middle of the night, per Roy’s version of the story.

Though Camp Utopia is soon revealed to be a fantasy after Linda, moved by this performance, agrees to travel back with Dot, there’s no reason to believe the events of the puppet show are anything but “the true truth.” And though there’s no real revelation in the puppet show not hinted at before, it’s still a chilling sequence made more palatable by the puppetry but no less unsettling. After completing it, Dot seems relieved, and more at peace with Linda’s departure. “Fight or flight they call it,” Dot says, speaking from experience with both. Then, as the music swells, the dream ends. One terrifying parking lot accident later Dot finds herself in the hospital again. But don’t worry, she’s told, her husband’s there. The only problem: It’s not the husband she wants to see.

After a string of action- and incident-packed episodes, “Linda” slows down the pace while raising the stakes. Dot’s emotionally powerful fantasy makes clear exactly what she’s escaped, and explains her horror at the thought of going back to it. It’s also another flash of the monster beneath Roy’s friendly, folksy demeanor. Not that we didn’t know this already. We’ve seen him abuse Karen and kill others. But the extent of his abuse of Dot had not previously been depicted and seeing it, even (maybe especially) in puppet form, expands the scope of his monstrosity. It also makes the trap Dot finds herself in at episode’s end all the more terrifying. She has three episodes left to escape it and nobody on her side knows where she is. This could go badly!

Okay Then!

• The song Dot switches off is “My Love Is a Hurricane” by David Ramirez. It’s pretty good, too, though it’s understandable why it wouldn’t be what Dot wants to hear it at the moment.

• Later we get, “A Long Way to Go,” by Optic Nerve, a 1993 track that sounds like a lost gem from the mid-’60s.

• It’s undoubtedly a case of parallel thinking, but Dot’s journey to the woods and subsequent immersion in a theatrical performance has a lot in common with a long stretch of Ari Aster’s unclassifiable 2023 film Beau Is Afraid.