six feet under S5 - or damn, did I really finish it?
Well, took me... what, four years, but I -did- manage to finish this show, did I? Or well, I started it in my second year at uni so maybe three but whatever. I'm just being like 'I CAN'T BELIEVE I FINISHED.' Tbh I didn't want it to finish. But. Okay, cut. Also, missy_useless, don't read this if you don't want to be spoiled to eternity, but I totally thought of you during episode eleven. When you get around to it prepare yourself. ;)
DEAR FLYING SPAGHETTI MONSTER THAT FINALE WAS THE MOST PERFECT FINALE I EVER WATCHED.
Also, I bawled. Not as hard as Lost even if this finale was way better than the Lost one on the tying up loose ends/sense of closure/plot-managing, but my emotional attachment to Lost is higher than my emotional attachment to anything, so that doesn't count. I lost it at Ruth telling Claire to go to New York and by the end I had finished a packet of tissues. Alright, I have a cold, but that's just half a justification. Also while this season had stuff that I didn't like (not because they didn't work, just personal issues XD) it just worked so well as a farewell season. I especially liked that there was a lot less focus on the deceased people apart from a few cases and more on the characters themselves, but since they where tying things up I can get the reason. Anyway, I'll just go with some kind of lists plus some gushing about the last episode because that deserves gushing.
What I liked/loved
- DAVID AND KEITH. GOD. THOSE TWO. I love that the only stable/not totally dysfunctional/consistent couple is the gay couple. It makes me happy beyond belief. But that said I just loved to pieces that they kept on having their totally not-perfect life in which they made a bunch of mistakes and also amazing things and that they still loved each other all the same. ;_____; also I legit had aw-ing fits every time there was bonding with their two kids or when they managed to connect and pretty much everything about that storyline. I was half-sure I wouldn't have been impressed because of my mostly 'ugh why kids everywhere' attitude but this round they did it perfectly and it worked and thankfully it was real kids with real shit to deal with.
- DAVID ON HIS OWN. God but Michael C. Hall is good. He knocked it out of the park this round. The aftermath of Nate's death and his nightmare/dream when he comes clean with trauma in the finale would have been Emmy-worthy on their own but he just gave such a good performance. Also I loved it that when I went to check the obituaries at the HBO site they said that David actually embraced musical and became an opera singer. Add it to the reasons he's awesome.
- Brenda: jesus I spent the whole season wanting to hug her. :(( Also I spent the entire middle of the season being like 'I so get that you don't give a damn about going to church'. Also I felt so freaking bad for her in that episode when Nate had to dump her just before he died and just before having an ictus. NATE. X__X (more on that later). But she really did a 180° considering how things were in like S1/2. Also I loved the wedding. Ugh I was sad when they practically decided to state it hadn't worked, but whatever. My OTP was David/Keith so I won't be too heartbroken but dammit I loved Nate/Brenda.
- Billy and his 'who would Jesus bomb' t-shirt. Okay, he was scary when off-meds, but.
- RUUTH. ;___; okay half of the time I wanted to smack sense into her and the other half to hug her, but wow if Frances Conroy isn't GOOD. Everyone is good but she just, completely owned her arc this season. Also I loved that in the end she got to be as happy as it could get and that she stayed with George after all. Btw, George got so awesome this season. ♥ [also Bettina/Ruth is the female bromance of this show. End of story.]
- Best funeral: the army guy who committed suicide. Or well, not in -that- sense of best funeral since I was about to cry for half of the time but they addressed the issue in a way that I really liked. And they handled it with as much care as it gets.
- Claire/Ted. Idek they were cute.
- If there were two Fishers in the same scene and ghost!Nate was the real one instead of a projection, then I pretty much loved any moment between Ruth/Nate/David/Claire paired or in three or as a whole group. IE Ruth telling David they really were alike, or Claire and Ruth in the last episode.
- Kudos to Maya for being the only under five-year-old kid on a tv screen that hasn't made me want to commit infanticide at some point. Actually I went like CUTE half of the time.
Uhm all the rest is in the part about the last episode. XD
What I didn't like even though it didn't mean that the show was getting bad
Premise: one thing that I love about SFU is that there isn't anyone who's perfect [except Bettina, but she's awesome incarnated] and that all characters fuck up endless times and have deeply-ingrained faults and that you love them anyway because it makes them more human. I like it when it makes me upset. Which doesn't mean that I had at least two occurrences of 'oh dear can I just punch you to sanity'.
- Rico: ugh, man, you disappointed me. Apart that I still was pissed at how he dealt with Vanessa in S4 and I didn't like that he went around telling lies in order for them to get back together, but I did like his story this round overall until he was like 'WE NEED TO TALK BUSINESS'. Might be me wanting to hit anyone treating poor David badly when he feels like shit but I just was like 'DAMMIT HE'S HEARTBROKEN LEAVE HIM ALONE'. I liked that he got his own business and could do his whole thing and that by the end he and Vanessa were reconciled but he still ended up being my least-favorite overall out of the main characters. Pity.
- Nate and Quakerism: UGH CHRIST WHY. Okay no I do get it, but they just had to go and turn Nate into my ex schoolmate who spent half of his time trying to drag me to mass (of his peculiar church, which was waaay worse than Quakers XD) completely disregarding that I was atheist. I have a serious problem with that kind of behavior in RL and so that whole thing completely made me see red, especially if then he was about to leave Brenda because of Maggie. And because he found peace in religion? Seriously? You've been with her for like five months and she's pregnant and you had an ictus and you basically dump her on your deathbed? X___X it did work character-wise but it just rubbed me off in every possible wrong way. Also I didn't appreciate that much his attitude re having a possibly disabled kid (meaning: I get that she hadn't heard his side, but goddammit he didn't even think for one second at the beginning that she might have wanted to have it anyway. And Christ I don't even want kids but if I had been Brenda I'd have been as pissed as her.)
Which doesn't mean I didn't feel horrible when Nate died because I still liked him, dammit. And I loved his ghost conversations with Claire and his ghost self with everyone else when it was -him- and not a projection of Other Character's doubts. (IE when he checks on his daughter with his dad and when he tells Claire to just go to New York.) It also... idk felt somewhat fitting that he was the major character who kicked it in the end. It had started with him in S1 and the first dead had been his father to whom he was indecently similar so idk it just felt like closing a circle. Idk I'm probably not making much sense here but heck I watched all the last half today and I'm still wanting to weep. xD
By the way, best crack scene ever: Nate weeping about Kurt Cobain being dead and wee!Claire comforting him. I just. Idek but the idea of Nate crying because Kurt Cobain died was so absurdly fitting. (And he moved to Seattle! ;) )
But, One Thing I Liked In Spite Of The Fact That The Quakerism Storyline Wasn't My Thing, or, how the atheist in me sort of really liked stuff: this was pretty much the first show that I watched where they deal with religion in a way that isn't thrown in your face and where they put the atheist character on the same level as the not-atheist characters [I'm not counting post-S4 SPN because that's really not the same thing.]. I mean, I watched a bunch of things when atheist character has to reconsider where they stand because they had some kind of proof that not-atheist characters had a point, but this round you had Nate/Maggie actually finding relief in religion and Brenda not believing it and no one had to change their mind. You don't know who's right and who's wrong and all of them stand where they are and there's no real consolation in any of it and to be really honest it's an approach that I really appreciated. It's just not easy to make me like how religious matters are handled, but I thought that they did it brilliantly.
Final episode
Okay. Hands down, this was the best closure I've ever seen for a show. They didn't leave a thread hanging and they brought everything to a point where you didn't even need to know more because they did give you all the information, but they still left enough open to speculation (IE: what did Claire do in NY? What did David & Keith do until 2029? Etc). And while I think that my favorite HBO show stays Deadwood, finale-wise nothing could top this. (Then again Deadwood's finale wasn't a series finale, but ff I'll shut up.) So, list:
- I loved that while it was the last episode (so the show's death) it was the only one beginning with a birth (for a second I thought the kid actually died and was ready to bawl until I realized she wasn't). It was a great touch.
- I loved how it made me go from ;_______; to :DDDDDDDDDDD to ;__________________; in the span of minutes. (Okay, I was like :DDDDDDDDDD just when Keith told David they should just move into the funeral home and at the dinner, but you get it.)
- I loved that a lot of things that I wanted happened and that a lot of things I didn't want happened and that everyone's life wasn't perfect and that while it did seem that everything ended wrapped neatly in a ribbon (at least objectively) then subjectively it still wasn't true. Like, David and Keith get married and move into the house and are adorable forever but Keith dies prematurely and in that way ;___;, Claire goes off to her dreams but not as she thought, Ruth finds happiness but she went through a hell of a season before getting there (and it's not conventional either, though I loved that Ruth/George was endgame) etc. Like, everyone got good things out of life but they got awful stuff as well and well, damn, I like my realism in tv when I watch it for realism.
- The ending dinner and the concept of family that passed through that.I mean, if you think about that dinner you have a family that includes: a black/white gay couple with adopted kids, a widow raising a kid that isn't even hers and another kid even if the husband just died and she isn't related by blood with anyone at the table, Ruth/George that might be married but if they had that divorce would have been two +55 people that had a relationship without living together and they all still thought of themselves as one unit and even if they're getting through a serious loss, they're all as happy as it gets. Which is reality, but if you showed that in an Italian show on prime time you'd have cardinals saying it's immoral on the day after. But it passed such a great message in the end and idk by that point I was bawling my eyes out.
- The ending montage: or where I bawled harder. I loved that it was all seen through Claire's eyes as she moves forward with her life and that the more she goes on the less cars are on the highway and in the end she's alone (symbolism: I like it when it's done well) and I loved that it showed how everyone ended because it really brought the whole thing full circle while still giving enough room to make you wander what the heck everyone did in their lives between flashes. I awed at a lot of things (David and Keith getting married, Claire getting married, Willa's first birthday <3), I cried through pretty much everything and I loved that you had deaths that felt right and others that didn't (IE: Claire dying at 101 years old or Ruth dying late and seeing both her husband and Nate, while Keith dying that way made me go like NOO ;__; though the best was Brenda dying because Billy brought her to death by proxy boredom. So perfect. XD). Oh, and when David died I bawled harder than the rest. Heck I'm getting my eyes wet just typing it lol.
Last random blatherings
So it took me a heck of a lot of time to get through this (thank my uncle and his awful timing or I'd have been done last year) but fuck if it was worth it. Definitely one of my top five shows for sure. My favorite was consistently David I think xD, I still think that they could have kept Arthur around, I just loved how realistic it was and how it always managed to deliver. I don't even know if I have a favorite season, but right now I'm on a 'OMG THE ENDING WAS PERFECT' high so I might say S5 without meaning it. Also I loved that for once I actually shipped something that was definitely endgame. And it was a canon gay couple. I feel so weird, neither ever happens. And I think that in the end they managed to make me like/dislike every character without full on hating them (though full on loving indeed happened), which is pretty much remarkable.
Though last random thing: is that just the Italian dvds or they spoil you the fact that Nate dies with what they show in the menus? I mean, I knew Nate was going to bite it because it wasn't the kind of spoiler I could avoid, but said menus showed: the characters in a hospital, Nate's face being sort of glow-y and a small funeral where everyone but Nate was attending. And the same picture was on the dvd box's back. I mean, anyone who wasn't spoiled would at least have had suspects if paying attention. O_o maybe they just figured that if you buy the dvd then you've seen it already but.. it seemed kind of weird. Okay this probably was very random and not much called for. XD
Oh jesus I'm done. I'm half-sure that I need to quit catching up with tv for a week at least now. XD sometime later: Justified, Treme and the damned last three seasons of The Wire. Though I'll probably do Justified next if only because it's a) short, b) currently airing, c) I've already seen the pilot (which was good fun) and d) doesn't look particularly heavy. Or not as heavy as those other two.
DEAR FLYING SPAGHETTI MONSTER THAT FINALE WAS THE MOST PERFECT FINALE I EVER WATCHED.
Also, I bawled. Not as hard as Lost even if this finale was way better than the Lost one on the tying up loose ends/sense of closure/plot-managing, but my emotional attachment to Lost is higher than my emotional attachment to anything, so that doesn't count. I lost it at Ruth telling Claire to go to New York and by the end I had finished a packet of tissues. Alright, I have a cold, but that's just half a justification. Also while this season had stuff that I didn't like (not because they didn't work, just personal issues XD) it just worked so well as a farewell season. I especially liked that there was a lot less focus on the deceased people apart from a few cases and more on the characters themselves, but since they where tying things up I can get the reason. Anyway, I'll just go with some kind of lists plus some gushing about the last episode because that deserves gushing.
What I liked/loved
- DAVID AND KEITH. GOD. THOSE TWO. I love that the only stable/not totally dysfunctional/consistent couple is the gay couple. It makes me happy beyond belief. But that said I just loved to pieces that they kept on having their totally not-perfect life in which they made a bunch of mistakes and also amazing things and that they still loved each other all the same. ;_____; also I legit had aw-ing fits every time there was bonding with their two kids or when they managed to connect and pretty much everything about that storyline. I was half-sure I wouldn't have been impressed because of my mostly 'ugh why kids everywhere' attitude but this round they did it perfectly and it worked and thankfully it was real kids with real shit to deal with.
- DAVID ON HIS OWN. God but Michael C. Hall is good. He knocked it out of the park this round. The aftermath of Nate's death and his nightmare/dream when he comes clean with trauma in the finale would have been Emmy-worthy on their own but he just gave such a good performance. Also I loved it that when I went to check the obituaries at the HBO site they said that David actually embraced musical and became an opera singer. Add it to the reasons he's awesome.
- Brenda: jesus I spent the whole season wanting to hug her. :(( Also I spent the entire middle of the season being like 'I so get that you don't give a damn about going to church'. Also I felt so freaking bad for her in that episode when Nate had to dump her just before he died and just before having an ictus. NATE. X__X (more on that later). But she really did a 180° considering how things were in like S1/2. Also I loved the wedding. Ugh I was sad when they practically decided to state it hadn't worked, but whatever. My OTP was David/Keith so I won't be too heartbroken but dammit I loved Nate/Brenda.
- Billy and his 'who would Jesus bomb' t-shirt. Okay, he was scary when off-meds, but.
- RUUTH. ;___; okay half of the time I wanted to smack sense into her and the other half to hug her, but wow if Frances Conroy isn't GOOD. Everyone is good but she just, completely owned her arc this season. Also I loved that in the end she got to be as happy as it could get and that she stayed with George after all. Btw, George got so awesome this season. ♥ [also Bettina/Ruth is the female bromance of this show. End of story.]
- Best funeral: the army guy who committed suicide. Or well, not in -that- sense of best funeral since I was about to cry for half of the time but they addressed the issue in a way that I really liked. And they handled it with as much care as it gets.
- Claire/Ted. Idek they were cute.
- If there were two Fishers in the same scene and ghost!Nate was the real one instead of a projection, then I pretty much loved any moment between Ruth/Nate/David/Claire paired or in three or as a whole group. IE Ruth telling David they really were alike, or Claire and Ruth in the last episode.
- Kudos to Maya for being the only under five-year-old kid on a tv screen that hasn't made me want to commit infanticide at some point. Actually I went like CUTE half of the time.
Uhm all the rest is in the part about the last episode. XD
What I didn't like even though it didn't mean that the show was getting bad
Premise: one thing that I love about SFU is that there isn't anyone who's perfect [except Bettina, but she's awesome incarnated] and that all characters fuck up endless times and have deeply-ingrained faults and that you love them anyway because it makes them more human. I like it when it makes me upset. Which doesn't mean that I had at least two occurrences of 'oh dear can I just punch you to sanity'.
- Rico: ugh, man, you disappointed me. Apart that I still was pissed at how he dealt with Vanessa in S4 and I didn't like that he went around telling lies in order for them to get back together, but I did like his story this round overall until he was like 'WE NEED TO TALK BUSINESS'. Might be me wanting to hit anyone treating poor David badly when he feels like shit but I just was like 'DAMMIT HE'S HEARTBROKEN LEAVE HIM ALONE'. I liked that he got his own business and could do his whole thing and that by the end he and Vanessa were reconciled but he still ended up being my least-favorite overall out of the main characters. Pity.
- Nate and Quakerism: UGH CHRIST WHY. Okay no I do get it, but they just had to go and turn Nate into my ex schoolmate who spent half of his time trying to drag me to mass (of his peculiar church, which was waaay worse than Quakers XD) completely disregarding that I was atheist. I have a serious problem with that kind of behavior in RL and so that whole thing completely made me see red, especially if then he was about to leave Brenda because of Maggie. And because he found peace in religion? Seriously? You've been with her for like five months and she's pregnant and you had an ictus and you basically dump her on your deathbed? X___X it did work character-wise but it just rubbed me off in every possible wrong way. Also I didn't appreciate that much his attitude re having a possibly disabled kid (meaning: I get that she hadn't heard his side, but goddammit he didn't even think for one second at the beginning that she might have wanted to have it anyway. And Christ I don't even want kids but if I had been Brenda I'd have been as pissed as her.)
Which doesn't mean I didn't feel horrible when Nate died because I still liked him, dammit. And I loved his ghost conversations with Claire and his ghost self with everyone else when it was -him- and not a projection of Other Character's doubts. (IE when he checks on his daughter with his dad and when he tells Claire to just go to New York.) It also... idk felt somewhat fitting that he was the major character who kicked it in the end. It had started with him in S1 and the first dead had been his father to whom he was indecently similar so idk it just felt like closing a circle. Idk I'm probably not making much sense here but heck I watched all the last half today and I'm still wanting to weep. xD
By the way, best crack scene ever: Nate weeping about Kurt Cobain being dead and wee!Claire comforting him. I just. Idek but the idea of Nate crying because Kurt Cobain died was so absurdly fitting. (And he moved to Seattle! ;) )
But, One Thing I Liked In Spite Of The Fact That The Quakerism Storyline Wasn't My Thing, or, how the atheist in me sort of really liked stuff: this was pretty much the first show that I watched where they deal with religion in a way that isn't thrown in your face and where they put the atheist character on the same level as the not-atheist characters [I'm not counting post-S4 SPN because that's really not the same thing.]. I mean, I watched a bunch of things when atheist character has to reconsider where they stand because they had some kind of proof that not-atheist characters had a point, but this round you had Nate/Maggie actually finding relief in religion and Brenda not believing it and no one had to change their mind. You don't know who's right and who's wrong and all of them stand where they are and there's no real consolation in any of it and to be really honest it's an approach that I really appreciated. It's just not easy to make me like how religious matters are handled, but I thought that they did it brilliantly.
Final episode
Okay. Hands down, this was the best closure I've ever seen for a show. They didn't leave a thread hanging and they brought everything to a point where you didn't even need to know more because they did give you all the information, but they still left enough open to speculation (IE: what did Claire do in NY? What did David & Keith do until 2029? Etc). And while I think that my favorite HBO show stays Deadwood, finale-wise nothing could top this. (Then again Deadwood's finale wasn't a series finale, but ff I'll shut up.) So, list:
- I loved that while it was the last episode (so the show's death) it was the only one beginning with a birth (for a second I thought the kid actually died and was ready to bawl until I realized she wasn't). It was a great touch.
- I loved how it made me go from ;_______; to :DDDDDDDDDDD to ;__________________; in the span of minutes. (Okay, I was like :DDDDDDDDDD just when Keith told David they should just move into the funeral home and at the dinner, but you get it.)
- I loved that a lot of things that I wanted happened and that a lot of things I didn't want happened and that everyone's life wasn't perfect and that while it did seem that everything ended wrapped neatly in a ribbon (at least objectively) then subjectively it still wasn't true. Like, David and Keith get married and move into the house and are adorable forever but Keith dies prematurely and in that way ;___;, Claire goes off to her dreams but not as she thought, Ruth finds happiness but she went through a hell of a season before getting there (and it's not conventional either, though I loved that Ruth/George was endgame) etc. Like, everyone got good things out of life but they got awful stuff as well and well, damn, I like my realism in tv when I watch it for realism.
- The ending dinner and the concept of family that passed through that.I mean, if you think about that dinner you have a family that includes: a black/white gay couple with adopted kids, a widow raising a kid that isn't even hers and another kid even if the husband just died and she isn't related by blood with anyone at the table, Ruth/George that might be married but if they had that divorce would have been two +55 people that had a relationship without living together and they all still thought of themselves as one unit and even if they're getting through a serious loss, they're all as happy as it gets. Which is reality, but if you showed that in an Italian show on prime time you'd have cardinals saying it's immoral on the day after. But it passed such a great message in the end and idk by that point I was bawling my eyes out.
- The ending montage: or where I bawled harder. I loved that it was all seen through Claire's eyes as she moves forward with her life and that the more she goes on the less cars are on the highway and in the end she's alone (symbolism: I like it when it's done well) and I loved that it showed how everyone ended because it really brought the whole thing full circle while still giving enough room to make you wander what the heck everyone did in their lives between flashes. I awed at a lot of things (David and Keith getting married, Claire getting married, Willa's first birthday <3), I cried through pretty much everything and I loved that you had deaths that felt right and others that didn't (IE: Claire dying at 101 years old or Ruth dying late and seeing both her husband and Nate, while Keith dying that way made me go like NOO ;__; though the best was Brenda dying because Billy brought her to death by proxy boredom. So perfect. XD). Oh, and when David died I bawled harder than the rest. Heck I'm getting my eyes wet just typing it lol.
Last random blatherings
So it took me a heck of a lot of time to get through this (thank my uncle and his awful timing or I'd have been done last year) but fuck if it was worth it. Definitely one of my top five shows for sure. My favorite was consistently David I think xD, I still think that they could have kept Arthur around, I just loved how realistic it was and how it always managed to deliver. I don't even know if I have a favorite season, but right now I'm on a 'OMG THE ENDING WAS PERFECT' high so I might say S5 without meaning it. Also I loved that for once I actually shipped something that was definitely endgame. And it was a canon gay couple. I feel so weird, neither ever happens. And I think that in the end they managed to make me like/dislike every character without full on hating them (though full on loving indeed happened), which is pretty much remarkable.
Though last random thing: is that just the Italian dvds or they spoil you the fact that Nate dies with what they show in the menus? I mean, I knew Nate was going to bite it because it wasn't the kind of spoiler I could avoid, but said menus showed: the characters in a hospital, Nate's face being sort of glow-y and a small funeral where everyone but Nate was attending. And the same picture was on the dvd box's back. I mean, anyone who wasn't spoiled would at least have had suspects if paying attention. O_o maybe they just figured that if you buy the dvd then you've seen it already but.. it seemed kind of weird. Okay this probably was very random and not much called for. XD
Oh jesus I'm done. I'm half-sure that I need to quit catching up with tv for a week at least now. XD sometime later: Justified, Treme and the damned last three seasons of The Wire. Though I'll probably do Justified next if only because it's a) short, b) currently airing, c) I've already seen the pilot (which was good fun) and d) doesn't look particularly heavy. Or not as heavy as those other two.