AVE ATQUE VALE

NOTES ON SFU FINALE

Analogous to SEINFELD's closer, where creator Larry David reached for sentimental self-hatred and found barely pity. (CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM often pulls this off.) Alan Ball's feast of death became a weeper, true sign of a writer who's fallen too much in love with his characters and needs to churn out a few more drafts. The most obvious sign was the opening preemie childbirth of Rachel and Nate's daughter, dangled as the opening corpse with that ominous hyphen AS THOUGH THEY MIGHT ACTUALLY KILL HER OFF BY THE END OF THE SHOW. Within ten minutes this became preposterous. Killing a preemie might have fulfilled Rachel's worst fears and self-loathing, but this was a finale tailored to the M*A*S*H* crowd: if the opening stiff was a cheat, the closing visitation by Nate and his father Nathaniel was out and out clumsy. Rachel had never met Nate's father, she would never have been visited by HIS ghost. All the ghosts in this episode tormented their subjects until they turned into hollow Freudian hallucinations. David sees his red-hooded stalker until he boldly confronts him in the mortuary's basement workroom, the vivid deathspace, only to discover that his tormentor is HIMSELF. This panders to all this show's better ideas: David remains genuinely traumatized by a psychopath who poured gasoline on him and made him, one of TV's best-written homosexuals (played by a breeder) suck on a gun. Even after confronting the poor sod in prison, he's inexplicably haunted... even the best shrink would work a couple years work on this alone, not to mention David's childhood in a funeral parlor. Confronting this ghost as "himself" trivializes the whole thing... which could have been followed up on with Keith, ex-LAPDer who probably knows from PTS.

Ruth's arc was the most cliche in a pile of doozies: she camps out at her sister's, lets her hair down, and opens a dog babysitting service with Kathy Bates. On the Memorial show Ball was quoted as saying "Ruth is surprising because she's always surprising herself...," which is gobbledy-gook for not thinking her character through. So he turns her into an Earth Mother who suddenly vaults into the voice of compassionate experience for Claire. Oh please.

You could get with the idea of showing how all the major characters die if only Hollywood weren't in one of its WORST OLD-AGE makeup phases these days. HUGE clunker having Keith killed by thieves as a security guard, one of the show's most noble characters reduced to a racist cliche.

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HALE AND FAREWELL

Dr. Conrad Milton Riley 1913-2005