When season 5 of Big Love started, I was planning to write a thoughts post on each individual episode, but I got busy with school, work and other things, so I never got around to doing that. Instead, I’m just going to do a thought’s post on my thoughts about what’s happened so far with each character. For the last two episodes of season 5, I’ll either do an individual post on each episode, or one post on the last two episodes of Big Love. Anyway, here are my thoughts on each of the first eight episodes of the final season of Big Love.
Bill: I’ve always loved the character Bill and how conflicted he’s felt at times about everything that’s happened to him and his family, but he’s still really frustrated me at times. My feelings toward Bill and his actions have been all over the place this season, because I think that for the most part Bill honestly has very good intentions for everything he does. He’s doing what he thinks is best for his family and their religious beliefs, but sometimes I don’t he thinks through as well as he could or should. After all, his decision to run for the Utah senate seat and come out to the public as a polygamous family has had some very bad consequences for his family, friends and coworkers. For example, Margene lost her TV jewelry business, she was forced to divorce Goran, meaning that Goran and Ana would have to leave the United States, which was all very devastating for Margene since Ana, Goran and her jewelry business were all very important to her.
Bill’s relationship with Barb has also been strongly tested due to the lack of rights that women has in the Mormon church, and in order to make sure that Cara Lynn would be protected in the event that anything should happen to him, he decided to adopt Cara Lynn. In order to do to that though, he had to divorce Barb and marry Nicki since unmarried couples aren’t allowed to adopt children in Utah. This devastated Barb, but it also gave Nicki what she’s pretty much always wanted, which is to be first wife.
Business at Home Plus was affected very negatively, especially his friendship and business partnership with Don. Don was attacked by one of Alby’s henchmen while he was on a camping trip with his kids. Alby also bought the land that Home Plus is built on, and he offered Don a large amount of money for his shares in Home Plus, which Don was strongly considering. He’s also encountered a lot of conflict with the other U.S. senators as well who are now trying to have him impeached, but in the last episode, “The Noose Tightens”, he wanted to resign if it meant that all of the legal problems he’s facing would be dismissed.
Throughout the season, there have been a lot of things that have happened or that Bill has said that is making me thinking that Bill might be killed when the series ends. The writers have put a lot of emphasis this season about wanting to make sure that his family will be protected in the event that anything should happen to him. Plus, Bill has constantly mentioned that he believes everything he’s done is working toward the afterlife in all of the previous seasons. The dream he had when he was in the hospital after Margene accidentally hit him with her car only reinforced that belief. I have to say that I did think Margene’s facial expression when she accidentally hit Bill with her car was kind of funny. I’m thinking that the series will end with Bill being assassinated.
Barb: This season the writers have definitely put a lot of emphasis on Barb questioning her life and everything she gave up by entering into a polygamous marriage. She visited her old college when they had a trivia game and chatted with a student while she was there. She also started exploring her religious beliefs and started expressing the fact that she thinks that women should have more of an influence and more rights in the Mormon church. In one episode, she decided to give Margene a blessing, which Nicki walked in on and freaked out about since women don’t have the right to perform blessings in the Mormon Church.
Barb also started drinking wine secretively until the whole family found her drunk in the kitchen at the end of the Christmas episode. After that, she began to drink wine openly. She also stopped going to services at Bill’s church. Honestly, I was surprised that there wasn’t really any follow-up to the family finding her drunk in the kitchen. I thought that they would hold an intervention for Barb and try to get her to check into rehab. Barb has continued to feel shut out by Bill, especially when Bill and Nicki got married and then Bill, Nicki and Margene had a re-sealing without her. At this point, I don’t think that Barb will stay with Bill when the series ends. I think she’ll either go start her own church or return to her family (her mom and sister) and leave the Mormon Church.
Nicki: I really love where they’ve taken Nicki as a character this season and throughout the course of the show as a whole, which is saying something since she was my least favorite character at the start of the series. Now she’s my second favorite of Bill’s three wives with Margene being my favorite. It wasn’t until the season one finale when Nicki was freaking out about the fact they had been outted as polygamous family that I started to feel sorry for her like her. The only time I liked Nicki up until that point was when she had scenes with Margene. I like how she’s not as uptight and conservative in the way that she dresses and acts, as she was when the series started. For example, in season three she was forced to dress a little less conservatively than she usually did and dress in a more mainstream society style when she got a temp job at the law firm that was prosecuting her father in order to help pay off her credit card debt. During that time, she fell for the prosecuting attorney, Ray, and led him to believe her name was Margene Heffman, so they wouldn’t know that she was Roman Grant’s daughter. I also liked how she finally cut her hair and took on a more mainstream hairstyle at the end of season four.
A lot of my favorite moments so far from the final season of Big Love have been with the characters Nicki and Margene. I love the scene in the season premiere where Nicki confronts the kid who was bullying Wayne and the kid accidentally walks into a pole when she was trying to chase after him, only to discover that the kid who had been bullying Wayne also came from a polygamous family. (At least I think it was Wayne, it could have been Raymond. I can’t remember at the moment which one of her kids the boy was bullying.) It’s also been very interesting to see Nicki finally get what she’s always wanted this season, which is to be Bill’s legal wife. At least that’s what her behavior throughout the series has always led me to believe she’s always wanted. This season we’ve seen her sharing moments with Cara Lynn’s teacher, Greg Ivey, where he talks to her about her life on Juniper Creek compound when she was growing up and all of the things she didn’t learn in school, because she was raised on the compound. He gave her a book on complex mathematics to read to help her to expand her education, but she had trouble understanding it due to her limited education. She even accompanied him to a play with Cara Lynn. Sure, he and Cara Lynn invited her to come in order to help cover their romantic relationship with each other, and she seemed to bond with the teacher over the experience.
In this week’s episode “The Noose Tightens”, Margene discovered that Cara Lynn was having an affair with Greg Ivey and told Nicki about it, which of course infuriated and devastated her. I loved how Chloë Sevigny played Nicki’s reaction to confronting Cara Lynn and Greg about their romantic relationship and finding out that they were planning to get married even though Cara Lynn is only fifteen after Margene told her about their relationship, which she had found out about earlier in the episode. Nicki was truly angry and devastated when she confronted them and told Greg that he was to never see Cara Lynn again.
Sometimes I think that despite being raised on Juniper Creek and being raised to believe she needed to practice The Principle and be a part of a plural marriage that deep down she just wants to be married to a man and not have a polygamous marriage, specifically with Bill. After all, earlier in the season she pretty much told Barb and Margene that she didn’t want to have to share Bill with them. I’m starting to think that the show will end with Barb and Margene leaving Bill to go live their own separate lives and explore the world in a way that they would never be able to if they continue to stay married to Bill in a plural marriage while Nicki would be the only one to stay with Bill and finally have him all to herself. Although, I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if the series ended with Nicki leaving Bill to in order to really explore life outside of Juniper Creek and the polygamous lifestyle, leaving Bill all alone.
Margene: The season began with being devastated over losing her jewelry business and the fact that Ana and Goran were forced to leave the country. She began to work for a company called Goji that made juice and did humanitarian work around the world. She quickly began to fall for the Goji guru, which he reciprocated and confessed to Margene during one of his company’s online video messages. (I can’t remember his name right now and the IMDB website simply credits Grant Show’s character as the Goji Guru.) The whole structure of the company sounds like a pyramid scheme given the way their business model works. Bill confronted Margene about this fact and refused to believe that Goji was a pyramid scheme. He also told her that based on some research that he had done, the amount of money Goji uses for the humanitarian work they do is very little. Margene confronted the guru and he showed her some information that appears to discredit Bill’s claims that Goji is a pyramid scheme.
During the Christmas episode Bill kept asking Margene for her driver’s license, because he wanted to buy her, along with Barb and Nicki guns, but she kept avoiding giving it to him. Toward the very end of the episode she broke down and told the family that she had always been lying to her family about her age. When she first met Bill after she was hired to work at Home Plus and later to be the family babysitter, she had told them she was eighteen when she and Bill were married, when in reality she was actually sixteen. Bill asked her why her mother had backed up Margene’s claim that she was eighteen when they got married, and Margene admitted that she had told her mother to lie to them. Because she was sixteen when she married Bill, Bill was technically guilty of statutory rape since the legal age of consent in Utah is eighteen. Nicki told her that she had ruined the family’s Christmas, but just when they thought Margene’s confession was the worst thing that could happen to their family that Christmas, the family found Barb drunk in the kitchen.
In the next episode, Nicki made Margene a fake driver’s license that said she was five years older than she actually is, so people wouldn’t know that Margene was sixteen when she married Bill.
In the episode “The Noose Tightens” the police called Bill, Barb, and Margene about Margene’s age, because Ben’s girlfriend Heather had found out about the situation and told her dad since he’s a cop. Not only was Bill facing charges, Barb was also facing charges of procuring a minor since Margene had stated in a TV interview that she had done in an earlier episode talking about her plural marriage to Bill and said that if it weren’t for Barb, she probably couldn’t have been able to handle staying married to Bill when she joined the family.
Earlier in the episode “The Noose Tightens”, the Goji Guru had told Margene that she was basically a part of cult by being married to Bill, Barb and Nicki since she had basically been forced to live a life of isolation and secrecy by being a polygamous. When Margene had told Bill about the Goji Guru’s claims, he told her that their family wasn’t a cult because they all loved each other. The Goji Guru had also asked Bill to support Goji as a business since he was a U.S. senator, but he refused to do that since he believes Goji is a pyramid scheme.
Margene’s reaction to learning about Cara Lynn’s affair with her teacher made perfect sense to me, and it really demonstrated what she was starting to realize about her own life and her marriage to Bill this season that she was definitely too young to get married when she did and perhaps it was a mistake for her to ever enter into a polygamous marriage in the first place. I took her actions in “The Noose Tightens” to mean that she desperately wanted to try and keep Cara Lynn from making the same mistake she did by marrying her teacher when she’s fifteen. Margene continued to really begin to question her decision to marry Bill when the lawyers also basically told her that her marriage to Bill was basically like being in a cult, which caused her to break down when she realized what a mistake her marriage to Bill was and how narrow her view of the world is. After all, she did say that she believes that Goji has shown her the world. Honestly, I think that Margene is exactly the kind of person that would join a cult. Her breakdown didn’t surprise me at all since she was shown as being extremely overwhelmed taking care of a lot of kids in the pilot when Bill, Barb and Nicki had to go visit Juniper Creek and was practically in tears than too. I have to say that I was absolutely blown away by Ginnifer Goodwin’s performance in the episode “The Noose Tightens”, and she has done an amazing job all season long.
While I had always wanted to watch Big Love, it was basically Ginnifer Goodwin that made me want to finally watch the series after she was cast in the lead role of the movie adaptation of Emily Giffin’s book Something Borrowed. I had never seen any of her work before and since she was the only one in the cast for the movie Something Borrowed that I wasn’t familiar with their work as an actress. That was basically my excuse for finally checking out Big Love. I didn’t go into watching Big Love thinking that Margene needed to be one of my favorite characters since I was finally checking out the show so I could see what Ginnifer Goodwin is like as an actress, but that’s what happened. Margene has been one of my favorite characters from the very first episode and Margene has always been a character that has had some of my favorite storylines throughout the series.
I’m really starting to think that Margene will definitely leave Bill when the series ends in order to explore the world and her spirituality, because Margene has been saying this season that she’s trying to explore her faith. I still don’t know completely what to make of the whole Goji business. It sounds like a pyramid scheme, so maybe Margene will realize that’s what Goji really is and leave the company. I don’t know. A part of me sees her leaving Bill and hooking up with Goji Guru. I’ll have to wait and she what happens with all of that.
Other thoughts: I thought it was really sad when they revealed that Lois has developed dementia after contracting syphilis from Frank and how she’s basically become suicidal since she’s now refusing to eat food.
I was really shocked when Alby held Nicki at gunpoint in “The Noose Tightens” and Nicki was begging Alby not to kill her and trying to remind him of what they were like when they were kids. I knew that Alby wouldn’t kill Nicki, but that scene still had me on the edge of my seat. I was beyond shocked when Alby ended up shooting and killing his secret lover Verlan. I didn’t see that coming at all.
I love that they brought Rhonda Volmer back this season. She always did an excellent job of stirring up trouble for all of the character, and Daveigh Chase has always done an amazing job of playing the role. However, she seems to have really grown up since she’s married with a kid now. Part of me thinks that Ben and Rhonda will end up getting together since he has been showing a great deal of concern for her and her baby given the fact that it’s pretty obvious that Rhonda and her husband don’t have very much money, not even for food, so Ben has been bringing her food and other things.
I have to say that I’m looking forward to the series finale of Big Love even more than I was looking forward to the series finale of Lost. I hope that I’m not disappointed with the series finale of Big Love like I was with Lost. I don’t think that will happen since the first eight episodes of the final season of Big Love have been beyond amazing in my opinion. I was frequently finding myself being frustrated and disappointed with the final season of Lost, and I can’t really think of very many complaints at all that I have about the final season of Big Love at this point. All in all, I give the first eight episodes of the fifth and final season of Big Love an average score of an A-.
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