Does Fargo Season 5 Connect to Other Seasons?

Warning: The following article about whether Fargo Season 5 connects to other seasons contains spoilers.

Though Fargo’s an anthology series, each season has featured connections to the show’s former criminal escapades – usually through a character from a previous installment. So, does Fargo Season 5 continue that trend and connect to other seasons?

Does Fargo Season 5 Connect to Other Seasons?

Season 5 of Fargo is the first season of the anthology series where no characters were directly tied to the events of other seasons, and no on-screen cameos or Easter eggs to past characters occurred. On The Prestige TV Podcast, series creator and showrunner Noah Hawley commented it did not feel like an organic opportunity arose in the story to tie in any characters from previous seasons. Though each season of Fargo weaves its own unique tale, this makes Season 5 the first truly standalone narrative in the show.

Despite no characters from previous iterations of Fargo making on-screen appearances in Season 5, Jason Schwartzman did lend his voice as the narrator of “The Tiger.” The Season 4 star joined the ranks of Fargo alum Martin Freeman and Billy Bob Thornton, who both returned to the series as familiar, disembodied voices in previous seasons. This creative inclusion of a former cast member via narration exists strictly as an aesthetic motif throughout Fargo and is unrelated to the direct plot and character connections of prior seasons.

Related: All Seasons of Fargo, Ranked From Worst to Best

Fargo Season 5 Characters Could Still Return in the Future

While Hawley suggested there was no natural way to include previous characters in Season 5, many characters from this season could still crop up sometime in the series’ future. For instance, Jon Hamm’s Roy Tillman and Joe Keery’s Gator Tillman both end Season 5 in jail, much like Russell Harvard’s Mr. Wrench did at the end of Season 1. Wrench went on to briefly appear as a child in Season 2’s prequel and later made a surprise follow-up cameo as an escaped convict alongside Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s Season 3 character, Nikki Swango.

However, for a character like Dorothy Lyon or Ole Munch to return down the line, Fargo would need to receive at least one more subsequent season. The notion of continuing Fargo has not yet been ruled out by Hawley or the network, though the showrunner currently has his hands full with another FX adaptation in Alien.

Fans largely embraced Season 5 of Fargo as a return to form, and, in that sense, its standalone nature furthered this refreshing sense of reset. So, though a few character’s doors remained open after the finale, many fans have expressed contentment with both Season 5’s finale and self-contained story.