Any comments on this episode?
I still can’t believe Anna is falling for all this. I also wonder if Bill has a clue that polygamy is unfair to women (Anna calls out the “double standard”) and also drives them to despair (Wanda, Maggie).
There is just a whole bunch of crazy going on here. This show makes me nauseous but…I can’t stop watching.
I just wonder if they can make Rhonda any MORE unsympathetic.
I will say one thing - never a dull moment. Spoilered for the West Coast:
Did anyone else thing that Margie was going to vacuum up her mother, or was it just me?
I thought this episode was amazing. It had me in tears at several points.
Also: Was Bill’s mom trying to kill herself, or did she just want to see what Frank would be feeling?
I think Lois was seeing if she really could kill Frank with a freezer bag. Answer? Yes. I don’t think he’s dead, though, since she walked away to answer the phone. I’m really curious if she will go through with it. He certainly has egged her on enough. They have a very weird relationship.
Barb’s sister is a horrible bitch. Her mother is passive and weird. I hope Barb is through with them once and for all, since they seem to have no good intentions towards the Henrickson family.
The revelation about Nicki’s previous marriage just makes her a much more complicated character. That picture of her in the Joy Book was so sad-- she looked so young and fresh-faced. She must REALLY love her Daddy if she’s trying to defend him against charges of which she knows for a fact he’s guilty. I hope Kathy does testify against him. And Rhonda too, somehow. Rhonda should have held out for the $100,000. She definitely could have gotten it if she had stuck to her guns.
Frankie hooked up with Heather, eh?
Turns out Sarah is pregnant. What will she do? Give the baby to the sister-wives to raise? Have an abortion and not tell anyone but Ben? I will be watching that plot line with interest.
The song they played at the end of the episode, “Forever Young” by Alphaville, was my prom theme song 20 years ago. Weird.
PS: I also thought Margie was going to vacuum her mom.
Me too!
This was a great episode – probably better than the whole second season (maybe excluding the nuttiness of the Green family stuff.)
Frank just refuses to die. Remember when Wanda poisoned him? He was lying around on the floor for a couple days before Bill dumped him at the hospital. I’d bet that he’s not dead this time around, either. (Though seeing Lois rush off to answer the phone in the middle of committing murder was rather funny.)
I love that we got more backstory on Nikki. Especially that part about Roman un-marrying her. Wasn’t it Roman who sent Nikki to be Barb’s nurse in the first place? He probably orchestrated the whole thing just to get his filthy paws up in Bill’s business, and apparently it worked.
I’m getting tired of Anna, and wondering if we’re ever going to find out what happened with Don’s two fugitive wives.
Women usually seem to get the shaft in most religions. If you haven’t read it before, you might consider reading Harlot by the Side of the Road. It has some pretty awful passages from the Bible in reference to women.
This season, at least for me, has jumped into a faster pace then previous seasons. It just seems like no matter who is in the scene, there is something going on and it’s something to make you shocked.
Out of all of the characters, it seems like the actress who plays Rhonda is the one who has physically changed most. It’s unreal how much older she looks!
I was tapping this episode on my VCR (yes I still use a VCR) and it stopped recording just as Bill was knocking on Anna’s door. I saw her open the door and it stopped.
What did Bill say? Anything earth shattering?
MtM
Of course Bill has no clue that polygyny is unfair to the women. He is, after all, the guy who was just totally floored that Barb was unhappy at the beginning of the second season. She’s lost her family (though they’re apparently a pack of assholes, they’re still her family, and she used to have a halfway decent relationship with her sister) and pretty much all her friends except Don’s family, not to mention being publicly humiliated over this. And in return she gets…to wrangle Nikki and Margene, and 1/3 of the time she used to have with her husband. But it just boggles his mind that she might not be tee-totally thrilled with everything about this life.
He’s just not a perceptive man, and he’s not really given to thinking much about the wider implications of things. He gets to “I want” and pretty much stops there. He’s a schmuck, and I frankly don’t see what Barb or Anna see in him. (Nikki and Margie, I understand. He fulfills what they were looking for, but pretty much anybody else in his situation would have done equally well.)
I don’t think Sarah would ever even dream of turning her baby over to her parents to raise. They’ve really firmly established that she thinks this whole situation is massively fucked-up and dysfunctional, and I just don’t see her having a child and then putting it into a situation she considers fucked-up and dysfunctional. Would she have an abortion? I dunno. But I think if she were going to do that, she would have just gone on and done it instead of getting that book about options. My gut says she’ll have it, maybe without telling her parents that she’s even pregnant, and then either raise it, or put it up for adoption in Arizona.
The thing that took me by surprise was the switch between Barb’s sister and mom. It used to be that Cindy was the one who kept in contact with Barb, while Mom refused to respond to any overtures. Mom even tried to throw Barb out of her wedding, fercrissakes. But now they’re talking on the phone, enough that she knows about Weber Gaming, and Cindy’s the one who is in town for two months and can’t be bothered to let Barb know. What’s up with all that, I wonder?
He apologized to Anna and told her that he reacted badly because he was jealous. He suggested that they go ahead with the relationship despite Anna’s misgivings.
It’s interesting that Barb is still following the advice of Roman’s senior wife, who told her that she would be foolish not to take a hand in guiding the inevitable. That if she didn’t stay in charge she’d find the marriage being run by a younger and more cooperative and assertive wife.
Will someone please remind me who Maggie is? Who apparently killed herself?
I’m taking it she’s Bill and Joey’s sister, but damned if I remember her ever being mentioned before.
She was. Bill’s mother was explaining to Sarah why she cut her hair (she has a short haircut unlike any other women in the compound) and she said it was when her daughter died, but she, of course, didn’t mention why.
With the turkey-roasting-bag, I think she was trying to get a sense of how long it would take to kill him with it. Even tied up, he’s way stronger than she is. I’m just surprised she didn’t take the Wanda-Drano route - she’s going to bury him in the garage anyway…
I’m sure you’re right, but it’s still not ringing a bell. Of course, given how long we go between seasons, it’s easy to forget some stuff.
I wasn’t expecting Frank to still be there when Lois got back. I think she will actually go through with it, but if not it would be cool if Frank suffered brain damage.
Poor Nikki. I think she’s finally starting to see the compound and her father for what they really are.
Bill is an utter moron. :eek: Why the fuck is he willing to be alone with Rhonda? It shouldn’t have taken that incident at the bus station for him to realize. All she had to do was start screaming and someone would call the cops. Rhonda & Roman was funny. She’d have better luck trying to get money of out Adaleen.
I thought the revelation was eventually going to be that Nicki was molested by her father. Remember that episode back in season one where Bill walks in on Roman and Nicki lounging together on the bed? I got the sense that Barb and Bill kind of knew something was funny about Roman in that way from that episode (Barb seems weirded out when she realizes Nicki and Roman are both gone, and Bill seemed disgusted but not surprised).
About Rhonda…Bill was talking about how he and his family would impugn her character, etc. if called to the stand. She is creepy, but do we know that she wasn’t raped by Roman? They never come out and say if she was…although what we saw was creepy enough. ::shudder:: The interesting thing about Rhonda was that she could be right about one thing and yet also a manipulative human being all the same.
Interesting also that both Bill and Nicki are interfering with witnesses for the prosecution.
You think?
It looks like they are finally bring the evil side of polygamy up to the surface. Up until now no character really brought it up.
The show has previously treated the compound situation as a comedy. Now we see how tragic things really are for some of the characters. Nikki and Lois were really repressing their feelings for the past two seasons. They usually do something funny to show their frustration, but in this episode they just break down and cry.
I think what’s bothered me most about this show is that no character mentions the truth. *Everyone *is delusional. Most shows have that one character who is sane, but Big Love has no one.
I always thought they secretly loved each other underneath all that. The hate, the rage, it’s all screwed up, suppressed, twisted, shat upon love. The way she was feeding him the chicken because she knows he likes chicken… I don’t know. They will probably never have a relationship that isn’t murderous, so maybe it’s better if she just offs the miserable bastard and gets it over with.
Alby is also quite repressed. He’s picking up men in rest stop bathrooms. No wonder he’s wound so tight. The only thing worse being a woman in that society is being a gay man.
I think Sarah is sane. Unfortunately, she’s also a teenager who hasn’t made the best choices in reaction to her family’s insanity. However, she is the only person who seems to see it for its insanity while still loving all the people involved in it. Poor kid.
I thought they made it pretty clear polygamy was creepy and evil from the start. All those scenes of Roman and Rhonda in the beginning, with no one intervening. And the hints that Roman had molested Nicki…seriously creepy.
Also in the beginning, the compound always looked super depressing…so dirty and dusty and everyone looked so plain. It was like going to a mini third world country.
I do think the one character who’s non-delusional is probably Sarah. She’s the only one who calls them on all this crap. I can see why she wants to get out of here, though.
Yes it was creepy, but they downplayed it with comedy. They never gave it the feel of a tragedy until now.
Bill asks Lois if Maggie committed suicide and Lois didn’t brush it off like she normally does. She would often go into denial (and the way she does that is usually funny), but in this episode she just went into tears.
She is the closest by far, but she has no clue what she should do. So the only sane character on the show can’t really do anything to help anyone.
I thought the last scene was best: Nikki sitting there, after tearing her page out of the Joy Book and feeling the anger/pain/shame—whatever it was (perhaps really for the first time), and being a total captive audience for the prosecutor’s opening arguments against her father, the prophet.
Brilliant.
How does this show do in Utah? Is it reviled or do people watch every second?