‘Fargo’ Season 5 Ending Explained: What Does Ole Munch The Sin Eater Chowing Down on A Bisquick Biscuit Mean, Anyway?

Now that was a season of Fargo, huh? After a three-year absence following the show’s divisive (but underrated!) fourth season, Noah Hawley’s extended love letter to the Coen Brothers’ 1996 movie masterpiece — and their entire filmography, for that matter — brought us back to the snows of the Midwest for ten tense episodes of cat-and-mouse thrills.

Our stars this season: Dorothy Lyon (Juno Temple), an unassuming housewife who turns “tiger” when her abusive ex-husband, the fascist cop/warlord Sheriff Roy Tillman (Jon Hamm), tracks her down. Mystery, mayhem, murder, and even magic (more on that later) ensue. 

It all comes to a head in the season finale. Who comes out on top, the sheriff or the tiger? And what about a certain immortal hitman with a horrible haircut who keeps showing up when our hero and villain alike least expect it? What does it all mean? And does it mean there will be a Fargo Season 6?

Here’s everything you need to know about the ending of Fargo Season 5 — warning: major spoilers ahead!

What happens in the ending of Fargo Season 5?

Well, the Roy/Dorothy business gets wrapped up pretty neatly, for starters. Aside from the tragic death of thoroughly decent guy Deputy Whit Farr — stabbed in the heart by Roy because he was the one cop in America who hesitates before he pulls the trigger — the FBI raid on the Sheriff’s compound goes pretty much as planned. Roy is caught with comedic ease during his escape attempt, ratted out by his own son Gator, who ironically has seen the light now that he’s been blinded and repented his wicked ways. Dorothy is rescued and returned to her loving family. 

Finally, a follow-up sequence shows that Dorothy’s billionaire mother-in-law Lorraine has made Roy’s punishment a special project. She visits him in prison to tell him that her connections with the Federalist Society, the very real organization that develops right-wing ideologues into reliably horrific judges and Supreme Court justices, will prevent him from ever getting anywhere in the appeals process. In the meantime, he can look forward to a lifetime of rape and abuse from the prison’s other inmates, literally all of whom owe Lorraine a favor after she paid off their debts for them. It’s the only time all season Roy looks thoroughly scared. All’s well that ends well, right?

Not quite. Returning home one day, Dorothy finds her husband Wayne (David Rysdahl) entertaining a visitor. It’s Ole Munch (Sam Spruell), the mercenary originally hired by Roy’s son Gator (Joe Keery) to capture Dorothy. Even though he helped her escape Roy’s compound, Ole (his full name is pronounced “Oolay Moonk”) feels she still owes him a debt, since she killed his partner and took off a chunk of his ear. “Debt must be paid,” he says.

Dorothy is very aware of the life-and-death threat facing her, though perhaps not aware of just how threatening he is. Ole is, literally, immortal. Cursed with and eternal life without sleep or dreams after becoming a sin-eater — again, a very real Welsh custom in which food representing the sins of the dead was consumed by some poor bastard so that the dead man could get into heaven — this Scandinavian throwback has roamed North America for centuries, sometimes as a soldier, sometimes as a member of indigenous tribes before the European and American colonizers wiped them out, now as gun for hire. 

But just as we saw earlier in the season with his attachment to the elderly woman whom he kind of forced to take him in, Ole longs for connection. Dorothy, who to be fair is a persuasive speaker, talks him into holding off on the whole murder thing long enough for the family to finish cooking and eating supper, preferably with his help. He dutifully pitches in, helping Dorothy make biscuits. Over dinner, after he explains his long and sad story, Dorothy — who knows a thing or two about long, sad stories herself — tells him he doesn’t have to eat a steady diet of sin anymore. He can help himself to something made with love, like one of their biscuits, and accept forgiveness. Hesitantly, he takes a bite…and, finding both the food and the forgiveness delicious, he smiles. The end.

What does the ending of Fargo Season 5 mean? And what’s the deal with “Oola Moonk,” anyway? Fargo Season 5 ending explained:

At this point you may be thinking, “What is an immortal Welsh-Scandinavian sin eater turned mercenary who learned magic from indigenous Americans doing eating biscuits at the end of a quirky Midwestern crime drama?” Glad you asked! 

Fargo has never shied away from the supernatural. Paranormal forces have repeatedly played a major role in the show, from the UFO at the end of Season 2 to the ghost that appears throughout Season 4 to Ray Wise’s mysterious character in Season 3. In all three cases the show has been unambiguous: These are real things that are really happening.

There’s plenty of textual basis for this approach in the Coen Brothers’ work, too. Okay, not in Fargo the movie, which is pretty straightforward. But consider the end of Barton Fink. The beginning (and arguably the end) of A Serious Man. Tex Cobb’s literally nightmarish biker Leonard Smalls in Raising Arizona. The magic clock in The Hudsucker Proxy. Hell, Joel Coen adapted The Tragedy of Macbeth, three witches and all. All those films are varying degrees of realistic, but the supernatural is as real as anything else that happens in them.

In short, don’t let the supernatural stuff trip you up. It’s a way for the show (and the movies) to up the ante — to provide a threat as strange and intense as the emotions of the characters involved, and ideally the emotions of the viewer, too. 

What’s important here isn’t Ole Munch’s — or “Oola Moonk,” as the closed captions spell out — magical origin, but his words and actions, and those of his target turned newfound friend Dorothy. I’ll transcribe their final exchange, which occurs after Ole has described his strange and endless life of abject poverty and isolation, so you can read it in full:

“Then one day a man comes on a wealthy horse, and offers him two coins and a meal,” Ole says, referring to himself. “But the food was not food. It was sin. The sins of the rich. Greed, envy, disgust. They were bitter, the sins. But he ate them all, for he was starving. From then on, a man does not sleep or grow old. He cannot die. He has no dreams. All that is left is…sin.”

“It feels like that, I know,” Dorothy replies with understanding. “What they do to us. Make us swallow. Like it’s our fault.” She brightens. “But you wanna know the cure? You gotta eat something made with love and joy, and be forgiven.”

The biscuit that Dorothy serves Ole then isn’t just a biscuit, it’s a symbol. First of all, it’s something Ole helped make to nourish himself and others, after untold years during which his only contribution to the world was working as a gun for hire. Second, it’s an invitation back into society after centuries of self-imposed exile. 

Third, and most directly, it’s a gift, from someone who wants to be his friend! If he accepts it and eats it and enjoys it, boom, congratulations, you’re now pals with Dot and Wayne and their kid Scotty (Sienna King). You can eat supper, have a beer, maybe watch a game or a movie or something. Maybe tomorrow you can get a decent haircut and a pair of pants, not that there’s anything wrong with kilts. Maybe you can stop hunting human beings for a living and actually, you know, live.

In offering the biscuit to Ole, Dorothy is essentially rewriting the very similar sequence from No Country for Old Men, in which the freakish and seemingly unstoppable hitman Anton Chigurrh (Javier Bardem) pays an identically menacing visit to Carla Jean Moss (Kelly Macdonald), long after his business with her husband Llewelyn (Josh Brolin) seemed to have concluded. Like Dorothy tells Ole, Carla Jean tells Anton that his strange code of honor isn’t some binding thing placed on him from some external authority — it’s a choice he makes, or doesn’t make, to continue hurting people. He could stop if he wanted, stop right then and there.

The Coens’ oeuvre and the Fargo TV show alike are full of characters like this — strange, implacable killers who seem like visitors from another world. (Indeed, they usually are alien to “normal” American culture in some way, in terms of nationality or subculture.) No Country’s Chigurrh, Raising Arizona’s Leonard Smalls, Miller’s Crossing’s the Dane (J.E. Freeman), a character I won’t spoil for you in Barton Fink. On the show, you’ve got Season 1’s Lorne Malvo (Billy Bob Thornton), Season 2’s Hanzee Dent (Zahn McClarnon) and the Kitchen Brothers (Brad and Todd Mann), Season 3’s V.M. Varga (David Thewlis) and his henchmen Yuri (Goran Bogdan) and Meemo (Andy Yu), Season 4’s Constant Calamita (Gaetano Bruno), plus the recurring character of Mr. Wrench (Russell Harvard). Whether they live or die, these men all have one thing in common: Ain’t no one serving them biscuits. No one’s telling them they can refuse to swallow the shit the rich and awful make us eat. No one’s telling them they can be forgiven.

In short, Dorothy is extending grace to Ole, the grace of love and forgiveness and redemption undeserved. None of those other guys get anything close. Writer-creator Noah Hawley is using his show to write a new kind of ending for this very familiar kind of character. Seeing a guy like that smile out of simple happiness, after untold years of watching guys like that kill and die without desire or hope for anything else, is worth a whole season of build-up, if you ask me.

Will there be a Fargo Season 6?

Another good question! Hawley has long been clear that he makes Fargo only if and when he feels he has a Fargo story worth telling: “I don’t want to try and make another one unless I think, ‘Oh, we have to make this one. It’s the best one yet,’” he said after the conclusion of Season 4. So despite the fifth season’s enthusiastic critical reception, it seems unlikely that FX will announce either a renewal or a cancellation until Hawley decides whether he has another Fargo in him or not. So far, that hasn’t happened, so there’s no word either way. But be on the lookout for post-season interviews, in which Hawley may tip his hand one way or the other.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.