Zack Handlen of The A.V. Club considered "The Law of Non-Contradiction" one of the best episodes in the entire show, including previous seasons, as well as his possible personal favourite. He gave it an A rating, stating "It lacks the emotional power of events from previous seasons, but in its place achieves a sustained, knife's edge sort of curiosity, a high-wire act that keeps threatening to tip over into utter meaninglessness without quite doing so". "What holds all this together, for me, is Gloria finding out where Ennis got his name. It's like a shaggy dog story [...] Ennis's past isn't why he got killed, but there is a chain of events that brought him to that house in the midwest, a series of decisions that both put him into Gloria's life and also made him the inadvertent target of someone looking for someone else. [...] It wanders, and eventually finds its way back home, but it's maybe the closest the series has yet come to actually capturing more than just quirk and crime: that all tragedies are just farce if you step back far enough, but that doesn't make them any less tragic. Or less funny. Noting the many references to the works of the Coen brothers as usual, he however expressed concern that Fargo "runs the risk of becoming a series of paper dolls being slotted into new outfits without much variation at the source".
