Jessie Buckley in Fargo Season 4Image via FX
By
Liam Gaughan
Published 34 minutes ago
Liam Gaughan is a film and TV writer at Collider. He has been writing film reviews and news coverage for ten years. Between relentlessly adding new titles to his watchlist and attending as many screenings as he can, Liam is always watching new movies and television shows.
In addition to reviewing, writing, and commentating on both new and old releases, Liam has interviewed talent such as Mark Wahlberg, Jesse Plemons, Sam Mendes, Billy Eichner, Dylan O'Brien, Luke Wilson, and B.J. Novak. Liam aims to get his spec scripts produced and currently writes short films and stage plays. He lives in Allentown, PA.
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Despite any initial hesitations about rebooting one of the most beloved Coen brothers films of all time, Fargo proved to be a successful experiment that gave Noah Hawley the opportunity to develop his own unique anthology series. Although there isn’t a truly disastrous season in the vein of Game of Thrones Season 8 or Friday Night Lights Season 2, the fourth installment of Fargo is easily the weakest. While Hawley is a brilliant storyteller who admirably refuses to do the same thing twice, the fourth season of Fargo was a bit too uncomfortable and emotionally taxing to merit the same rewatchability of its previous iterations. However, the bright spot of the mixed season is a brilliant standout performance by Jessie Buckley.
Although it now seems more than likely that she will win the Academy Award for Best Actress for her devastating performance in Hamnet, Buckley wasn’t one of the show's more well-known faces when she first appeared in Fargo. Despite memorable roles in smaller dramas like Wild Rose and The Courier, Buckley wouldn’t get more exposure until she appeared in the controversial Netflix thriller I’m Thinking of Ending Things the same year, and then earned her first Oscar nomination the following year for The Lost Daughter. It may have been intimidating for a rising actress to appear in a cast filled with legendary character actors, but Buckley’s terrifying, comical, and utterly unforgettable performance is reason enough to give the fourth season of Fargo another shot.
Jessie Buckley Has the Perfect Comedy Sensibilities for 'Fargo'
One of the reasons that the fourth season of Fargo proved to be so tricky was the scope and intentions of its narrative; while the idea to examine the history of race relations between Black Americans and Italian immigrants was always going to be rife with controversy, the pressure upon a white creator like Hawley was even greater in 2020, in which the Black Lives Matter protests had forced the nation to account for its history of intolerance. However, Buckley’s character exists almost outside of the core narrative as a presence of chaos who shakes the narrative up in all the right ways. She plays Oraetta Mayflower, a nurse who considers herself to be an “angel of mercy” because she often disposes of her clients. Although her actions initially go unpunished and unacknowledged, Mayflower becomes tied into the mafia storyline when she begins an affair with Josto Fadda (Jason Schwartzman), the leader of the Sardinian Fadda crime family.
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Posts By Liam Gaughan Aug 31, 2025Mayflower is a fascinating character because, initially, her story is somewhat aspirational. While the mafia seems to exist beyond the law and rarely faces consequences, Mayflower is able to find the vulnerabilities in anyone who comes under her care, and becomes the rare character who manages to get Josto to keep quiet. Although her initial process of executing patients is darkly whimsical in a manner that’s similar in tone to an actual Coen Brothers movie, her deranged goals soon become a comedy of errors. Despite the fact that several people have begun to follow her trail, Mayflower seems to be unable to curb her own psychopathic tendencies. As demented a character as she is, there’s something somewhat refreshing about the clear-cut villainy that Mayflower has within an otherwise dark and depressing season. It can be hard to enjoy the quirkier aspects of Fargo in a season that is examining racial violence and historical oppression, but Mayflower is so larger-than-life that it's fun to buy into the fantasy.
Jessie Buckley's Oraetta Mayflower Is a Unique ‘Fargo’ Anti-Hero
Although Mayflower could have easily been a character who existed purely as an agent of chaos, Buckley gives a deep performance that honors the thematic relevance of the part. Given that the season examines the history of devastation and massacring that is inherent to American history, the name “Mayflower” can be taken as a metaphor for the actual Mayflower ship, which brought European diseases to the Americas that subsequently wiped out much of the Indigenous population; the fact that Buckley’s character is indiscriminate in who she chooses to take down is similar to the unpredictable and deadly nature of foreign illnesses. Nonetheless, these European dangers ended up being most dangerous to vulnerable communities who didn’t have access to advanced medical resources, which is why Buckley is at her scariest when she’s intimidating the Black teenager Ethelrida Pearl Smutny (E'myri Crutchfield), whose father Herman (Andrew Bird) owns the communal funeral home. Despite the fact that Buckley is a rather diminutive physical presence, she manages to become utterly terrifying whenever she looms over Ethelrida because of the racial power dynamics between them.
Given that the fourth season of Fargo takes place in the 1950s, in which the nation had emerged with its head held high after World War II, the notion of a kindly nurse actually being an administrator of death can be seen as a subversion of the idealized American dream. The fourth season of Fargo examines the price of ambition and the consequences of assimilation, as characters like the Irish-born mob enforcer Patrick Milligan (Ben Whishaw) are forced to become subservient to their oppressors. Although it could be argued that Mayflower is taking advantage of loopholes within the failing infrastructure, her presence does no one any good, as none of the crimes that she commits are done for any reason other than greed. It’s not only a reminder of the shadowy forces of evil that exist behind closed doors (literally, in Mayflower’s case), but an example of how an entire institution can be compromised by the work of a single bad actor. Fargo would eventually recover for a much better-received fifth season, which worked thanks to the more emotionally resonant performances by Juno Temple and Jon Hamm. Nonetheless, Buckley more than satisfied the expectations of her part in the show’s most mixed season and showed a degree of bravery and individuality that suggests she would be well-suited to take on any multitude of roles in actual Coen films.
fargo-season-5-poster-cropped-1.jpg
Fargo
TV-MA
Anthology
Crime
Drama
Comedy
Thriller
Release Date
2014 - 2024-00-00
Genres
Anthology, Crime, Drama, Comedy, Thriller
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