Dorothy "Dot" Lyon is at a school board meeting at Scandia Middle School at which a fight breaks out. She tasers one man (who comes at her in a threatening manner) and then another as she tries to escape the meeting with her child, Scotty. The second man she tasers is a police officer but she doesn't realize that until it is too late. Dot gets arrested and taken in by Officer Indira Olmstead of the Scandia Police Department. Dot spends a few hours in jail until Wayne, her husband gets her out. Lorraine Lyon, Wayne's mother, has some pull with local law enforcement.
Dot is abducted the next day by two men wearing ski masks, after her husband and Scotty have left for the day. She puts up a fight before they knock her out. She hits one of the men with a lighter and bottle of hairspray, setting his ski mask on fire. She hits the other one with an ice skate, cutting up part of his face with the blade of the skate.
Wayne comes home and finds the door open and blood on the floor. He calls the police and then goes to his mother for help. Officer Olmstead is the first one to show up.
Dot is transported into North Dakota by the kidnappers when two North Dakota state troopers pull the vehicle over. One of the state troopers is killed in a firefight with the kidnappers. Dot escapes and runs to a nearby gas station convenience store. Deputy Witt Farr, the surviving state trooper, does the same. They arrive at the convenience store at about the same time. The only person there is a cashier. Dot and Deputy Farr hold out against the two kidnappers who come gunning for them.
Backup eventually shows up. The surviving kidnapper disappears. Dot returns home and gets back to work making pancakes as she was just before she was abducted. She acts like nothing happened even though there was clear evidence of a break-in and the fact that her feet are still bloody from the fight at the gas station.
Thoughts
The events in this episode takes place in late October 2019. Dot and her family live in Scandia, Minnesota, which is northeast of the twin cities. It isn't clear how Dot got home but there's no way that she walked it. Someone must have given her a ride but if it was the police then I would think they would have been at her home at the end of the episode. My best guess is that she hitched a ride.
When the episode first began I thought that the fight at the board of education meeting was taking place at a bar. It didn't take long for me to see that wasn't the case but that was my first impression.
This episode was 57 minutes in length. That's about 7 to 10 minutes longer than any of the other episodes in this season.
There are three faces familiar to me in this episode. The first is Jon Hamm who is only seen briefly. The second is Jennifer Jason Leigh, who plays Lorraine Lyon. The third is Dave Foley, who plays Danish, Lorraine's lawyer.
Juno Temple plays Dot. I'm familiar with the name but that's about it. The only thing she has been in that I have seen is The Dark Knight Rises (2012) but I have no recollection of her in that film.
Other characters in this episode include Jerome (Lorraine's security guy), Wink Lyon (Lorraine's husband), and Attorney General Mick Thigpen.
There is an element of crossdressing that shows up in two places in this episode. First, Scotty appears to identify as a boy but, based on what Dot says at one point, has the body of a girl. Second, one of the kidnappers (both of whom looked like men) was wearing what looked like a long skirt.
The impression I get is that Dot ran away from a cult led by Jon Hamm's character or at the very least ran from an abuser which would presumably be Jon Hamm's character. At one point during the fight at the gas station she tells Deputy Farr that this isn't her first getaway. The two men who kidnapped her must have been sent to bring Dot back. I get the impression that Wayne and his parents don't know about her background.
This is an action packed episode. I really liked it. I watched it twice because there were some details, like names, that slipped past me the first time around. I was afraid that if I went to a web site for those details that I would also encounter some spoilers. I wasn't sure how the stand off at the convenience store would end. I'm curious to see where things go from here.
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