A quick review of tonight’s “Big Love” coming up just as soon as I build bridges in Guatemala…
Between the Super Bowl, the Oscars and a general struggle to maintain my interest in this final season, I got behind on “Big Love” the last few weeks. But I got caught up in time for “The Noose Tightens.” And I’m damn glad to have done so. Because that? That was insane – and the good kind of insane, as opposed to the “Big Love” season 4 brand of insane.
Earlier this year, it felt silly that the show was piling 57 new problems onto the Henricksons in addition to the 2486 they were already dealing with from previous seasons. In some ways, it was like the last season of “Lost,” where nobody cared about the Temple folk and just wanted the show to get around to resolving so many other dangling threads. But while the show has definitely left a lot of material in the past, a lot of these final season problems don’t seem so much new as logical extensions of all that’s come before. Of course Bill would be justifiably tarred with the same brush that’s applied to Roman and Alby and Hollis Greene, because no matter how he tries to dress up The Principle, the show views it as an inherently unhealthy, sexist, destructive concept. As the lead investigator points out, Margene being 16 makes what Bill did illegal, but the morality would have been just as shaky if she’d been 18.
So as the titular noose tightened – with pressure from Alby, and the government, and Margene’s boss at Goji, and even Cara Lynn (who is so very much her mother’s daughter in the way she’s exploiting the family’s current problems to get what she wants) – throughout this episode, it was easy to feel bad for various family members in individual moments while at the same time feeling like this was the marital bed they made, and now they have to lie uncomfortably in it.
Very intense episode, and we’re late enough into the series that I at least contemplated the idea that Alby might kill Nicki, even as I assumed it would be Verlan who wound up catching a bullet.
What did everybody else think? The last time I did a post on the show, the general consensus was that you guys were reluctantly playing out the string, watching out of loyalty but not out of enjoyment. Have these last few episodes rekindled your interest in seeing what happens in the end?