Holy crap what a trainwreck.
There’s almost too much suckitude to harp on any one point, but I found Frank’s “confession” cut the teeth out of the show’s backstory. So now everything bad is Roman’s fault? Total cop-out.
That was just…bizarre. Badly bizarre. Lois cutting off Hollis’s arm was serious B-movie horror material, if not C-movie. It reminded me of something I’d see on some SYFY network movie. The fake blood spatter, the ease the arm came off, the sudden change…wow.
And the timeline was really irritating me. Adilene is pregnant?? Um…didn’t she and JJ have sex, like, yesterday? All the other storylines have moved forward only a day or two; how is she jumped forward at least two weeks? Must be a helluva sensitive pregnancy test.
Chefguy, your description is dead-on. All these episodes into it, I feel invested, although I’m realizing I’m invested in crap.
It’ll be worth it, though, if they make Bill into a villain.
Hollis- one of the most evil but intriguing characters on television- came across too much like a community theater with no budget’s interpretation of a James Bond villain in this one. “Because I’m sooooo evil, I’m going to kill you all… but first I’m going to put you in an ostrich pen for hours while I attend a big fiesta, unguarded in spite of all the gun toting fanatics here so you’re on the honor system- don’t try to mingle with anybody who easily breaks into the compound”. And I didn’t understand the “You can save him or you can deal with us…”. Um, OR if you’re an insane cultmember who doesn’t mind killing in the least you can do both. It doesn’t take that long to open a barrage of bullets and then get to the hospital.
The meta timeline is irritating too. Ben was 16 when the show began, but since then there have been children conceived and born and at least 2 or 3 years have passed yet he’s only 17.
How do you figure? Was it ever implied that Frank had abandoned Bill solely on his own initiative? Letting your cult leader bully you into abandoning your son is still plenty reprehensible…
Is there any reason to believe that Frank was sincere or honest in this apology?
Is there any reason to think he wasn’t? I think it’s entirely possible for him to regret what he did, but still be a generally selfish enough bastard for that regret to not really manifest itself in any “useful” way.
The “deathbed confession” factor. I really had no problem believing that he had some regrets though; of course it was similar to the way I felt when watching that father who’s on all the Jonestown documentaries (can’t recall his name but you can google- he’s a gay former policeman in Hawaii) when he laments “More than thirty years later I’m still tortured every day with guilt for leaving my young son at Jonestown”, which was “WELL YOU SHOULD YOU DUMB BASTARD! HE WAS A CULT LEADER WHO TALKED ALL THE TIME ABOUT MASS SUICIDE, GEE WHAT COULD GO WRONG!”
Speaking of, one of my favorite exchanges from the other night (words paraphrased):
ANA (to Goran, in Serbian): She still wants me to come and drink the Kool Aid with the other weirdos.
GORAN: Kool-Aid?
BARB: No thank you.
So here’s how I’d carry on the current wacky topsy turvy plotlines to make for a memorable season finale:
Hollis Green dies of his injuries and his funeral is shown on television. Selma’s crying and howling are so pathetic that when Bill sees it he gets a revelation- “Ease his- or her- hard to tell- pain” and he takes it to mean “You must marry Selma”. So Selma becomes Number 4 (or Number 5 if you count Ana).
The kids find their new Grandpa Selma to be a little bossy. (“Eat your got-dang kaysa-dillers or I’ll shoot you like I did that photographer who was snooping around here last night! I’m gonna go watch Judge Joe Brown. And by the time he gets to the second defendants you better have buried that photographer I shot last night!”) But gradually they warm to her.
It begins when Teensy and Ben both have dates to their school dance, but both dates cancel at the last minute when they learn the Henricksons are plygies, and both are left stag and alone and sad at the dance, until this new mystery date enters- it’s Grandpa Selma, who spends half the date dressed as a Goth boy dancing with Teensy then comes back dressed in a prom gown and dances with Ben, and Selma is elected both Prom King and Prom Queen. It’s a bonding moment for all.
Nicky is upset though because doing handy man type jobs and bringing the batshit crazy compound quotient to the suburbs is her role in the family. They bond however when Selma tells the story of her first period, how she didn’t know what was happening and when a mean girl said “Plug it!” she thought she meant “shoot the gym teacher” and did. They have a good laugh, then make some Schmors and build a rumpus room annex onto her house. Margene comes around because Selma is like both grandparents she never had, and turns out she’s one helluva hand when it comes to making silver turquoise jewelry. Barb comes around when Selma slaps her senseless and locks her in a toolbox overnight, and when ‘Grandpa Selma’s Lemonade’ becomes the number one bestselling beverage at the casino (where she also handles that pesky little protester problem).
She then wraps up all of the loose ends with the compound by taking an Uzi to Alby, his wives, Joey, Wanda, and JJ.
Selma then shows up undercover as an old Asian fireman at the office of Bill’s opponent and tells him "I admire your unique brand of politics’. When the opponent says “I wasn’t aware I had a unique brand” she pulls out a blowtorch and a branding iron and says “Oh, you will”. The scene transitions to him announcing his withdrawal from the race the next day.
All is going well until Ben falls in love and becomes engaged to the adopted daughter of a gay couple played by special guest stars Robin Williams and Nathan Lane who are reprising their roles from BIRDCAGE. The families decide to meet and hilarity ensues as Nathan Lane dresses in drag pretending to be the daughter’s mom and Selma alternately pretends to be Grandpa Buck and Granny Ruth. Nathan Lane (as Albert) senses something is wrong with Grandpa Buck and begins trying to figure a way to trap ‘him’ and swee what’s under those jeans to see if his suspicions are correct; meanwhile Selma senses something suspicious about Nathan Lane’s character and traps him in an upstairs bedroom to get a look at what’s under that skirt to see if her suspicions are correct.
The family hears screaming and comes upstairs, with Robin Williams in tow, to find Selma and Albert in bed together sharing an herbal cigarette. Selma says “All my life I’ve been around Big Love, but now finally I’ve found ‘Deep Love’.”
Bill can put up with mass murder and deception but he will not tolerate adultery and throws her out of the house. A few days later Selma comes back, and the family runs for cover until they realize she’s crying. Bill finally demands “What do you want!” and she says “I need a place to stay for myself… and the baby I’m carrying!”
Bill is stunned, wondering is it his or Albert’s. Nobody notices that Ben is blushing and trying to leave the room. The season ends.
I think the marriage was another Margene airhead idea that maybe isn’t quite so airheaded underneath it all. This green card marriage makes it a lot less likely that Ana’s fiance will attempt to blackmail Bill about his polygamy ( which he threatened to do right before Margene came up with her idea)…
Ana is seriously pissing me off. She knew all about the family before she married in. Then she freaks out about sharing finances, which is pretty normal in most marriages. Yes, she had valid concerns, but what did she think was going to happen? She is the weirdo. I was feeling sorry for her for a while, but she made it impossible.
The whole timeline thing is making me crazy too. I can tolerate a lot of the camp and melodrama and continuity errors, but the timeline might be getting too much for me to over look.
How? The only thing Ana did was fail to do what two of Bill’s other wives did successfully: enter a plural marriage because they were in love with Bill. That doesn’t make her weird. Barb and Margene have managed (somewhat) to deal with it their discomfort with the whole concept but you can see it’s a strain for both of them at times. The point was that Ana couldn’t do it. The money wasn’t really the problem, that was just what pushed her out the door.
It has been implied all series that Frank kicked Bill out as soon as Bill started to become potential competition with the ladies. I seem to recall Bill holding a grudge against Frank for this in the first season. (EDIT: I think they even had a verbal confrontation stating this explicitly, but I’m not positive about that.)
If it wasn’t really Frank’s fault, if Frank just kicked Bill out to save the rest of the family, there is no pathos left about the compound or that way of life. It would’ve all been hunky dory except for mean ol’ Roman, but luckily now he’s gone (thanks, Joey!) and if we could just get Alby out of the way and let Bill become prophet then the compound could finally be the utopia it should have always been.
Blech. Barf. Yuck. Just, no. Such simplistic drek belongs in cartoons. I prefer nuance.
She is totally NOT a weirdo for not liking the lifestyle, but jumping into it, then complaining about it, then calling the others “weirdo” is what makes her one.
Calling them “weirdos” when really, none of them really did anything awful to her and tried to be really nice and inclusive, was just mean of her.
Her name calling them just showed me that she’s not just someone who couldn’t live the life, but has a whole bucket full of her own issues.
You know, if this show is going to jump the shark, I want to see them do it in specTACular fashion. I want Bill to become president and outlaw monogamy, Adilene give birth to a half shark/half octopus (that’s right! Sharktopus!), Margene become a cannibal and eat Barb, Alby become a flamboyant musical star a la Liberace, and Nikki go back in time and marry Joseph Smith. For starters.
True. And if the Henricksons are outed it now looks like Margene was lured into the plural marriage at 18, had a couple kids, but left to establish her own business and has now found happiness in a normal monogamous marriage. Plus her kids are all still too young to talk. Granted she’s still living next door to her “ex-husband” and “ex-sisterwives”.
If Adaleen was just going along with the marriage to JJ as part of some scheme before she’s surely become utterly convinced it was her divinly ordained destiny now (the pregnancy being proof).
I can by Frank’s apology even though he’d never say anything like that under any other circumstances. He truly he was about to die. And he apolgized for “being a weak coward” and not standing up to Roman; shifting all the blame to Roman. That’s as close as he’ll ever get to making amends. And will Lois chopping off Hollis’s arm in one swoop was widely unrealistic and B-movieish compared to everything else happening on this show it’s rather plausible.
While naturally occurring pregnancies in the 50s aren’t unheard of they are extraordinarily rare and the vast majority of women who get pregnant at that age do so in vitro with donor eggs. Those who don’t use in vitro require hormone shots and fertility drugs to reverse menopause, and that’s not an overnight process. (It’s believed that Elizabeth Edwards, who had a baby at 48 and then another at 50, used donor eggs, but she has not confirmed or denied.)
In vitro, especially among women over 40, often takes many unsuccessful attempts before it works, and the whole process usually takes month- it’s not done at a “Pregnancy in an Hour” drive through window, and a woman sure as hell would know it had been done- it’s not something her husband can just ‘surprise’ her with by slipping something into her soup.
Yet her urine test said she was indeed pregnant. If it’s not a false positive, at this rate she’ll likely give birth next week.
Are there any known things that will cause false positives on pregnancy tests?
I don’t think there is anything weird about this. It’s inconsistent but makes sense for someone who doesn’t know what she wants, or who tries to make a situation work when she’s not excited about it. It failed and she’s bitter about it.
Yes, and? It wasn’t nice, and they did TRY to be inclusive, but the Ana episode reminded us (from an outsider perspective) that these women are a lot to deal with. In trying to make her feel welcome, they were overwhelming and they tried to recruit her into their arguments. Since they ran into her at the restaurant, they’ve tried ganging up on her and pushing her around.
Of course she has her own issues. She has plenty of them.
Only tangentially related to BIG LOVE, but I’ll mention anyway:
Several episodes have dealt with or referenced Bill’s secret use of Viagra. The character is about 50 give or take a couple of years (I’m not sure they’ve stated his exact age but Margene is 25 years his junior she’s at least in her early 20s; the actor is 54, not that this necessarily matters- he’s in fact 14 years to the day younger than the actress who plays his mother), not an age when men necessarily have no sexual stamina but the demands of a harpie senior wife with bad hair, a criminally insane wife who looks like Chloe Sevigny, and a 25 year old harebrain plus the occasional extraextraextramarital fling so it’s understandable he needs some help.
Brigham Young was a 41 year old twice married monogamist with 8 children when he married his first plural wife (Lucy Decker), then he took a couple of more the next year, then 10 more the year after that, then at least 10 more in the next couple of years after that, etc… It’s unclear how many of his wives he had sexual relations with (some were name only marriages) but he had children with 14 (not counting the two women he’d married as a monogamist). Most of his children- about 40 of them- were born in his late 40s and 50s, with a few stragglers born later. Most impressive perhaps is that he had 3 children born just in February 1863 when he was not quite 62; his last child was born when was not quite 69.
Young’s friend and colleague Heber Kimball- same story- a monogamist until his early 40s then boom-shaka-laka- he’s servicing two dozen wives and has children with all but a few of them. Other Mormon polygamists of the era- same story. An interesting non-Mormon case is Rama IV of Siam (of ‘THE KING AND I’ fame) who left a Buddhist monastery where he’d been celibate from the age of 20 until the age of 48 and then literally overnight had dozens of wives and concubines who he serviced well enough to produce 80 children over the next 17 years. (He had 2 more from a brief marriage as a teenager that was annulled when he was forced to become a monk.)
I may be wrong but I think even most 18 year old guys would rather sleep sometimes and I doubt most 18 year old guys could keep up with a dozen full-time wives. How do you suppose a middle aged to moderately elderly men kept up with such a workload in an age before Viagra or other sexual performance drugs? Is it the variety that stimulates them perhaps?
Did her gyno formally diagnose her with secondary infertility, or was he just mentioning it as a possiblity? When she was with JJ’s doctor-son she asked him for hormones and fertility treatments so she could skip all the counseling and tests she’d her regular doctor would make her go through. Maybe the fertility treatments will backfire and Nikki will end up pregnant with quintuplets!
Hmm, JJ implanting one of Wanda eggs into Adaleen? She’d be giving birth to her own aunt. If that’s not creepy enought for you; who’s sperm is JJ using to fertilize the eggs? He could very well be using his own. His sperm, his sister’s egg, being carried by his oblivous wife/ex mother-in-law. :eek:
Yes, Frank kicked Bill out. But has it ever been implied that that was solely on Frank’s initiative?
I guess I see a lot more nuance in “Frank was ordered by Roman to do something evil, and went along with it” than “Frank did something evil entirely on his own initiative”. In fact, there are all sorts of interesting psychological effects that could have. One day he could be convincing himself that he HAD been the instigator of the evil act, because at least that way he was in charge of himself, not just Roman’s puppet. The next day he could be apologizing for it and really meaning it and trying to claim it wasn’t his fault.
But this may just be a case where we have to agree to disagree.