Warning: This article contains spoilers for Fargo season 5.
One of the most surprising moments in Fargo season 5 is a flashback to Wales in the 1500s – but what does the flashback mean, and how does it connect to Ole Munch? Fargo season 5 stars Juno Temple as seemingly ordinary housewife Dot Lyon and Jon Hamm as the charismatic yet menacing Sheriff Roy Tillman, Dot’s estranged husband who’s determined to capture her. Ole Munch is the kidnapper sent to abduct Dot, who wants revenge against the Tillmans after they tried to kill him for botching the kidnapping.
In Fargo season 5, episode 3, “The Paradox of Intermediate Transactions,” Ole Munch forcibly moves into an elderly woman’s home and lies on the bed, listening to a police scanner, hoping to pick up on a hint at the Tillmans’ whereabouts. At this point, the episode flashes back to Wales in 1522. This flashback might initially seem like a random non-sequitur that has no ties to the main storyline, but it has a subtle connection to Ole Munch’s role in the season.
What Happens In Fargo Season 5’s 1522 Flashback
While Ole Munch is lying in bed, listening to a police scanner for any sign of the Tillmans, the episode abruptly cuts away to the misty countryside and a title card reads, “500 years earlier,” setting up a flashback to 16th-century Wales. The flashback takes place 497 years earlier to be exact. The bulk of Fargo season 5 is set in 2019 and the flashback is set in 1522. In the flashback, a man who looks just like Ole Munch attends a funeral.
This man is hired as a “sin-eater” at the funeral; he’s paid to consume a meal made up of foods that symbolize the dead man’s sins. This ritual is believed to pass the dead man’s sins onto the sin-eater, thus absolving the dead man’s soul ahead of his eternal judgment. In the present, Ole Munch performs his own ritual in Tillman’s shed: he covers himself in goat’s blood and recites a chant in Latin. This ritual could be from the same cultural background as the sin-eating in 1500s Wales.
How Fargo’s Wales Flashback Connects To Ole Munch In Present Day
The fact that the sin-eating man in the Fargo season 5 flashback looks just like Ole Munch suggests that he’s a previous incarnation of Ole Munch. The symbolic act of being paid to eat food representing the dead man’s sins has a thematic parallel with Ole Munch’s role as a kidnapper-for-hire forced to pay for Sheriff Tillman’s sins. The whole point of his revenge plot against the Tillmans is to make them pay for their own sins with their lives.
