Big Love Post Mortem, Reviewing the Series Finale

Now most of you must be sitting there thinking I’m obsessed with this show (having just reviewed the first half of the 5th season a month back) and really I’m not…at all. In fact, I think the show’s best days are long behind it (see the chart below this article for a ranking of their seasons) and the best days were never my favorite show on television. However, we just had the first series finale of 2011 so I figure it’s only appropriate to do a post mortem on the show and review how it stacks up against the all time greats. Is it an emotional success like Lost’s finale, a narrative winner like The Sopranos’s infamous final shot, or an all around home run like The Shield? Or does it suck donkey balls? Well…

[Do not continue reading if you haven’t seen the episode and plan on watching it]

I would have to say the episode was firmly, squarely, stubbornly mediocre. It wasn’t the best series finale of a long running show I watched (that would be The Shield) nor was it the worst (that would be an 84 way tie between all the series finales I’ve seen before 2007 where Hollywood seemed incapable of delivering a satisfactory conclusion to a drama), but it sure didn’t feel too great…or epic…or exciting…hell maybe it did suck.

For those that have given up on this show before now and really just want to know what happened, I’ll recap: The first 45 minutes went on like waaay too much of this season did with the wives arguing about bullshit, Nicky arguing with her daughter (a zero of a character we didn’t need), Bill’s mom arguing with him, Bill arguing with everyone, and Bill and Barb arguing about religion. This summed up the major problem with this season: all talk, no action, with too many subplots about characters we don’t care about. It was almost like they made a concentrated effort to tone down the manic craziness of last season with a deliberately slow season that kept trying (and failing) to make lecturing look exciting.

Then the last twenty or so minutes picked up the pace with most characters making amends with each other, and the three wives taking a much needed drive out in the desert to feel the wind in their hair. Bill tried to get an amendment passed through the state senate to make polygamy legal, it failed but it did inspire a huge following at the new church he had just started, and–in the episode’s most touching scene–he and Barb reconnected at his church as the ancestors of past polygamists visited Bill as he was giving a sermon. It contextualized the abstract discussions of religion that had been slowing down the season and actually had an ounce of the emotion Lost’s finale did.

Then a crazed neighbor shot Bill dead a scene later in his driveway. That’s right, Bill had been facing homicidal Polygamists, a renegade cult leader, fanatical Mormons, furious state senators, and a criminal charge of statutory rape all season and CARL the mild mannered neighbor is what killed him. The twist was very surprising…mostly because it made no sense. Then we saw a flash forward where Bill’s family is living harmoniously into the future with his ghost looking after them. Also, it looks like Bill’s parents finally died of a drug overdose but their death’s are not shown so maybe they lived for the 400th time after trying to off each other like some Road Runner cartoon.

I would say it was an uneven finale to an uneven show that was always mostly about hollow threats from stiff characters broken up sporadically by insane violence from nutty characters. I guess I’m trying to say I’ll miss it…even if I know I was ready to see it go.