And so farewell to an often entertaining but flawed and very erratic show. I guess people feel the cracks didn’t start showing until later, but I thought Big Love veered off course early. It got worse later and culminated in parrot smuggling. Remember how Nicki’s shopping addiction was a big deal for a few episodes in season one? Nicki thought her dishonesty threatened her marriage. And they were afraid of being outed as polygamists. Compare that to how zany things got the last two seasons.
As far as Bill’s shooting… they wrote themselves into a corner. It’s really that simple. I don’t know how else they were supposed to resolve all this stuff. I don’t know if they could have made a better finale considering what’s happened this season and the season before, but the murder came out of nowhere and it wasn’t a satisfying conclusion. Carl went through a lot of crap, but how much did we see him this season?
It wasn’t bad as far as that goes: I thought it was moving that he had Barb gave him a blessing. There were other scenes in the finale that worked, too. You knew Frank was going to do Lois in eventually (and I don’t think for a moment that he ever considered “joining her” - that’s like asking a rat to go down with a sinking ship). Sampiro’s point about Frank’s cruelty being toned down is well taken, but I could at least see this as an outcome for their relationship. So it made sense dramatically, to me.
I think I liked the scene with all three wives in the new car and I also bought Bill’s response to Barb trading in the car without giving it another thought. That was what the show used to be like, I think. Early on Big Love was a domestic drama about a polygamous family, not Bill vs. The World. That was a more believable show. I think some of the complaints about Bill are overblown in that we’re supposed to see him as a guy trying to hold onto the faith of his fathers. He didn’t always know how to do that and until the end he never had the divine guidance he wanted. (Much as I didn’t like Emma Smith showing up out of nowhere again.) It’s definitely true he never thought about how his decisions were going to affect other people.
I didn’t like Bill introducing the polygamy legislation. I don’t know Robert’s Rules of Order, but I had trouble believing he would have ever gotten that far. I felt the characters were speaking on behalf of the show in defense of polygamy and I thought that was didactic, condescending, and unnecessary. I think Big Love was probably successful in making a case that poylgamy is not necessarily anti-woman, for example. They didn’t need this scene demonstrate that, and by the finale, they’ve either made their point or not and they weren’t going to change anyone’s mind with some yelling on the state senate floor. That was a waste. I think there should be a rule against putting your protagonist on trial in the finale of your TV show.
I thought Bill appearing as a ghost was similarly heavy-handed. It’s not enough that killing your protagonist in the last episode makes people think of the Sopranos; you have to have him show up as a ghost a la Six Feet Under? I’ll grant that having him appear in the background for a second was more subtle than some of the directions they could have taken.
HBO ran a special after the finale - we didn’t watch because we were done with this show at some point in season four - and I saw they pitched it by saying the finale answered every single question left in the series. It kinda goes without saying that killing your main character wraps everything up, but as this thread demonstrates, that was not true at all. And of course the whole scene in the state senate was supposed to show, I thought, that they were kicking off a new debate about polygamy, and we never find out what happens to that debate. They couldn’t ask us to believe that polygamy was legalized or that anything really changed, so they punted. We also don’t know about Ben and Heather, Cara Lynn and Nicki or Greg… I know those points were listed already and there are probably others.
