[ Edited at request of OP, to scroll down so spoiler doesn’t show up in mouse-over – CKDH]
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RIP
Nathaniel Fisher Jr.
For real???
Oh, yeah.
Hey, your spoiler is showing; mouse-over preview ignores spoiler tags. Try hovering and see what I mean.
Well, Nate wins my award for biggest scumbag on tv. In effect he uses his dying breaths to break up with his pregnant wife. Nice.
I was sure Ruth was never making it out of the woods alive. I figured either her cock-teasing would get her killed, or she’d be mauled by the cougar. In any event, I will be disappointed if everybody else survives. I want to see every single character die. I’d even settle for a furnace explosion or whatever during Nate’s wake, but obviously there’s too many episodes left for that. (And the previews show them already at the funeral.)
I liked the conversation between Rico and Vanessa. (That’s her name, right?) In particular, I loved that/how he said “Got it.” An effective moment, that.
The whole episode I kept thinking “Maggie, just go home!” Until she tried. Ugh, what an awful situation. Looks like the repug will get to capitalize on that friction to get some from Claire.
The little kid hating hospitals seemed a bit contrived and over-the-top cliche to me. Maybe I’m just too cynical.
Good on Ruth for telling Ed Jr. that “Your needs are not my responsibility!” Good for her.
I just reported it to the mods; hopefully they can fix it for you.
I used to love Nate, but he really deteriorated. Why did he have to break up with Brenda and then croak? I’m not wondering why the character did it, I’m wondering why the writers chose to send him out that way. Is it so they could torture Brenda for the last 3 eps of the season, trying to figure out how to deal with his funeral, Maya, etc.?
As for where the rest of it is going, I have no idea. Three eps left. Hmmm.
I’d just like to see the whiny ones die. Which would leave the gay couple standing. They’re the only ones I don’t want to smack every episode I watch.
When I watch tv, sometimes I’ll talk at the screen-- I hope I’m not the only person who does this. Anyway, tonight after the final scene I realised I’d yelled the exact same words at the beggining with the corpse du jour and then at the end. Holy crap! Since I can’t seem to adjust to the new day and time for the show, I missed last week and that made this week even more of a rollercoaster ride.
I’m not sure I believe Vannessa actually loves Rico, based on how obvious she was about just wanting his help. Maybe the missing episode is at fault, but it seems an awfully big change.
I never thought I’d feel sorry for Brenda. She’s been an ass and gotten slammed for it, but this is just outright cruelty. Him lying there with that smug smile masquerading as inner peace. Ha! Just more of his self-indulgence, skipping from one flower to the next as soon as it becomes too real. Is Maya the only one in his life he stuck with (once he was stuck with her)?
I don’t know what Ruth needs, but she needs it fast. Not happy with or without men, though she might try evaluating her selection process and see if she can’t give it a tweak.
Claire I find some way to dislike more with every episode. That little bit about how now she would stick with him, since he’d done the same for her, was actually sort of mean, not swoony the way she seemed to believe. She might as well have said, ‘I’ve only decided to love you because you did something nice for me’ Ouch.
Unless they’ve got something up their sleeves for the future, they’d have been better off leaving the kids with David and Keith’s friends or something. I agree it seemed a bit contrived.
Wonder what Maggie’s going to do now that-- well, you know.
Me, too. When she was walking down that path, I was expecting the same cougar from the opening to jump on her.
I did love her daydream about blowing away all the men in her life.
Again, me, too. I knew right from the scene in Nate’s room (when Anthony was so uncomfortable) that the older brother was going to tell them about some traumatic event at the hospital involving their drug-addict mom.
I guess there’s not enough time to find out, but I’ve assumed Maggie will end up preggers.
Now that one of the main cast has punched out, I’m expecting a Twin Peaks sort of twist within the next episode or two. I suspect the writers have run through all the “obvious” ways they could close this thing down, and have either rejected them as being too easy to predict, or have decided that they can improve on the unpredictable nature of a few of them and decided to use them anyway, just gussied up a bit.
I thought it was neat not to have Nate show up dead at the start of this episode, which is what many suspected would happen, and to jiggle him around on the line a bit until the audience began to suspect he might actually pull through, and then pull the plug.
I especially liked the “joint fantasy” Nate and David had there at the end. Neat concept.
The only recurring character I want to survive is Keith. How the others wind up being disposed of is okay with me, as long as they all follow Nate’s lead and pass through to the other side in some clever way.
Yes, but Nate thought he was recovering. He didn’t know that he wasn’t leaving the hospital.
To me, the point was that David and Keith were insensitive in not picking up on the boys’s discomfort, and not that it was an obvious plot point.
I agree. I think it was meant to point out how little David and Keith really know about these obviously troubled boys. But I think they’re going to be all right. A good sign was the way the older boy played with the other patient in Nate’s room. I don’t think that would have happened a few episodes ago.
And I knew from the second we saw the ocean and seagulls on the television set that Nate was going to check out. I don’t see the rest of the characters meeting untimely ends. I see them coming to terms with life as it exists and become the functional family they really haven’t been for the past five years. I don’t really care what happens to Brenda. I have never liked her, never felt sympathy for her. I’m kinda wondering about Billy, though. He just vanished! Now, I do hope he comes to a bad end. Too scarey!
Am I the only one that thinks perhaps that all the conversations Nate had, including the “I"m tired of fighting” conversation with Brenda, were just going on in his mind? All his conversations with David, Brenda, Maggie and Claire just seemed sort of “off” somehow. Plus, he didn’t seem to be hooked to an IV or much equipment other than the monitor and I doubt the hospital would have allowed kids in the room with him. And Claire mentioned twice about watching Nate in his coma (She said that she couldn’t believe that Ruth was missing her own son’s coma).
I don’t think I’d go so far as to think that Nate really isn’t dead because, after all, he did get the white-lettered name on a black screen treatment and a moment of silence, but I do wonder if anything after he yelled “Narm” and fell to the floor actually took place.
Geez, you could be right, but I don’t think so. It seemed to me that the producers were very careful to point out scenes that were in Nate’s mind by using intense color, high contrast, etc.
Maybe the kids in the room were there as a plot device, so we could again learn the gap David and Keith have to cross to truly bond with those boys. I don’t know. This crazy show can go anywhere, can’t it?
Well, Nate did get the white screen treatment during his original AVM surgery, but they reversed it when he pulled through the “complication”. (next episode preview spoiler - just to play it safe):
I think that’s why they made sure to include obvious references to his actual death in the previews for next week. I don’t think they’re screwing with us on anything that happened this episode that wasn’t obviously a dream (coma induced or not).
And I loved stoner/surfer David. I also liked how they kept it ambiguous about if it was Nate’s or David’s dream (or both, as mentioned above). I can’t remember the last time I was moved by a TV show as much as when that final white screen came. I was frozen throughout the silent credits. Great episode, great series. I’m sad it’s almost over.
Pash
I didn’t see this scene that way myself. I was of the same mind about Claire (really starting to dislike the character) for most of last season and the first half of this one, but since the epsiode “The Rainbow of Her Reasons”, where she had the weird little roll-reversal/reconciliation with her mom, and the “maybe you aren’t an artist” slap in the face, I think she’s done a lot of growing up.
She’s getting a taste of what real life is really like, how soul-numbing and pointless jobs define so much of so many peoples’ days. I still think she has strides to make, I think that she’s still seeing Nate’s illness as something that happened to her in a way (I think it’ll be interesting to watch her reaction to his death).
I saw her reaction to the “You would have done the same for me” line as almost apologetic, an acknowledgement that maybe she wouldn’t have, but now realizes that she should.
Damn writers.
All this season, Nate has been a selfish bastard, charming sweet hapless Maggie, and refusing to meet halfway a suddenly sympathetic Brenda, so we hate him, and then he dies! How can we hate someone who dies?
Now that he’s dead, I want to make excuses for his rotten behavior, but I’m all conflicted and ambivalent.
I trust that he’ll reappear over the remaining three episodes, probably explaining himself in some profound way, and that’ll make things even worse.
That’s one of my first thoughts, too. Shall we make it even more twisted and have Brenda lose her baby??
I know it’s TV and I know it’s just make-believe, and I know they take certain liberties and all, but all that happened in one day?? I’ve had major surgery two times. Neither were emergency situations, but once I woke up with a tube in my nose and I was totally out of it. On both occasions, I couldn’t even pretend to have a lucid conversation till at least 48 hours later. C’mon - he’s awake and interacting and all that when the sun comes up?? They couldn’t even pretend to make it a tad more realistic?
Out of curiosity, if one had brain surgery, would one’s entire head, including sideburns, be shaved?
I see Ruth turning this all into a major guilt trip - I wouldn’t be surprised if it killed her.
I expect more deaths of major characters in the final few shows. Given the morbid nature of the series, and the unpleasantness of many of the characters, that seems plausible.
I sure hope they’ll get rid of Billy. But somehow I anticipate that if something violent happens, he will be the perp, not the victim.
Awwww, I am really going to miss this show. These people bug the hell outta me, but I have come to care about them. It’s kind of like the way I feel about my own real-life family.