Monday, August 22, 2005

Six Feet Under Finale


If there is anything that 6 Feet Under taught us is that life is short and the people around us give us the meaning of our life.
Many, if not all, of the clients that came through Fischer and Sons were flat 2 dimensional characters whose deaths were often funny if not ironic. It wasn’t until the Fischer family interacted with the living did we begin to be emotionally tied into their actions.

Since the beginning I found the series to be interesting and well written. These characters were often morbid, socially unacceptable and most of all pretencious. I stuck around to watch the pieces of humanity to come out, often in emotion or moral lessons. On occasion I would be disappointed with cliché antics or worn visual aids for the slow minded viewer, but most of the time the cast and crew was aware of these clichés and redefined them to their own ways. That is what kept me watching and kept me plugging along until the end (a symbol of life in many ways).

The series finale was on HBO last night and as I watched I thought about all the episodes I saw in the past and the night I watched the first episode (kind of ironic).
In the end the tear I shed was the tear of disappointment.

The first hour plus was very good and played out in the same quality that was held up through the entire series run.
However the last montage was a ridiculous portrayal of everything that the series didn’t stand for. The series ends with a Claire starting her new life on her way to New York and we see a future montage of how each main character of SFU dies.

I felt almost no attachment to these people’s deaths, mostly because you were too preoccupied with their bad makeup and giggled at the drawn out deaths.
You wondered, what twist will kill this family member. During the whole montage I kept thinking of the episode only two weeks prior, on the death of Nate, had more emotion and intrigue then any episode too date. On the other hadn the finales ending scene felt more like some cheap rip off written by the same group of writers that did the Very Brady Christmas. It seemed more of the actions of closure then the actual closure itself. Its sad that a show that had such a strong story line to end with something so flat and lifeless.

How about that HBO’s Rome!