In last week’s episode of Big Love, an odd device of fantasy fake-outs were used, where certain scenes played out in polygamist patriarch Bill’s head before we cut back to reality–a device which got much more appropriate play on the deep and psychological series Six Feet Under. Its appearance here, however, did reveal a key difference between the two HBO shows, further confirmed by last night’s finale. It is now clear that, as the characters continuously go through huge crises of faith and make life-altering decisions, only for their family ties to be further strengthened in the end…Big Love is actually ten times more fucked up than Six Feet Under ever hoped to be.
This bleak outlook has been especially present in head wife Barb, who once was the audience’s skeptical stand-in, and has tellingly become little more than a self-righteous alien. This season, Barb has wavered back and forth and settled for a family she doesn’t want again and again to the point where it’s questionable whether she recognizes bad choices even exist anymore. When her teenage daughter Sarah admitted to making some “crummy” life decisions, Barb could barely listen to the word. And last night, when Barb’s non-mothering culminated into Sarah impulsively proposing marriage to her boyfriend–upon hearing him sing “I Wanna Be Sedated,” thinking it, “subversive for a lullaby”–she ultimately ignored disciplining once again, and instead focused on sending Bill’s sperm to India to make yet another child of their own. Just what this family needed.
This kind of eclipsing is a constant on Big Love, where even a funeral for radiant, would-be sister-in-law can become little more than background noise for heated calls to business partners and district attorneys. When Six Feet Under had funeral scenes, they at least had the comfort of being about the dead, as their ghosts habitually teased, cursed, and on one memorable occasion involving Beth Grant, even humped our intrepid undertaker protagonists, but–to borrow one of Nicki’s delightfully antiquated compound sayings– everyone on Big Love has depressingly bigger fish to fry.
With this in mind, it comes as no surprise that this expertly plotted season ended frying the biggest fish of all–Roman Grant. Compound prophet and all around creeper, who has been one step ahead of everyone else since the very beginning, faced a literal smothering at the end, just as his opponent Bill smothers his own ever-growing brood with a sacrament. Which, of course, included separated wife Nicki, her newly-discovered daughter, and Sarah’s fiance, glossing over the lies, hypocrisy, and pain perpetrated throughout the whole season. Was this closing montage a real juxtaposition between the old and the new regimes? Or are we watching a more subversive lullaby?
This season has focused a lot more on religion than the others, but as the group Skull and Bones their way into “celestial rooms” and talk more and more of spending eternity together, the more temporary it all seems. And ever since the Texas compound raid during the writer’s strike, creators Mark V. Olsen and Will Scheffer reportedly came back with a desire to have a more responsible bent in their storytelling. They even added a new character, Jodean (sympathetically played by actual LDS member Mereille Enos), to represent the inbred compound women who mewed their way into America’s hearts during the coverage. So will next season have more cutting commentary? How many times can the Henrickson family be torn apart and pulled back together without becoming their own compound, or worse, becoming parodies of themselves?
One hope lies with Nicki’s surprise teenage daughter, Cara Lynn. We learned she dissects toads just like her mama, but what else could the two have in common? She can be the remedy for what Bill considers “broken” in his estranged wife like she’s being presented as, or she can turn out to be just as pathological. After all she is a Grant, and there is a vacancy at the top.
Either way, next season the clan will have to finally face some permanent damage, or this show will just be way too scary for me to watch.
