Episode Report Card Djb: A | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Oh, Crap!
By Djb | Season 4 | Episode 2 | Aired on 06.19.2004
Fisher kitchen. The camera quite purposefully pans up past a wooden table of some finely-detailed exotic repute, where we find Nate "The Dark Sports Night Of The Soul" Fisher sitting with a full-on toddler on his lap. She's too old to be Maya and she actually seems to be expressing emotion, so she obviously can't be the same placid spawn of Nate Fisher and Madame Tussaud that has stared at us with glassy, emotionless, third-row-at- a-Phish-concert- and-midway-through- watching-a-thirty- minute-Tweezer eyes. ["In fact, it's the same kid who played Maya in the last season; maybe her parents put her in some kind of intense Stella Adler course over the hiatus." -- Wing Chun] Nate bounces Maya on his lap and feeds her, and he would probably make that "airplane flying onto the runway" motion with his hand, but Nate is far too cognizant of fact that the airplane would crash into a fiery heap of strained peas and all they would ever find is the black box and your jawbone, and what the hell message is that to send to a little girl, anyway?
Ruth "On An Extended Honeymoon To Viagra Falls" Fisher enters the kitchen and notes that Nate is up early, and it's the child in the room and the fact that we're about to discover a really jarring time elapse since the last episode that keeps Nate from sticks-and-stoning his mother with, "Well, from what I can hear, it seems that George is pretty much up all the time, so I'd expect you'd be used to it." Instead, he opts for the slightly more "Magic Garden"-y, "I'm always up early. Every day is a new adventure." Ruth waits patiently for her son to explain how he got stuck in The Fly chamber and switched personalities with a fortune cookie, but when she discovers that he isn't even going to tell her her lucky lotto numbers or that "cat" in Chinese is "Mao," she exposits freely, phrasing it in the form of a question, "What do you think of our new table?" Nate doesn't even HAVE an opinion, shrugging, "Dunno. What is it, Indian?" Ruth tells him that she thinks it's Persian, and, when he asks after the difference, she fills us all in: "Persia is Iran and India is...well, India." Not even relenting on his non-opinion of the furniture when he finds out that it's mercifully un-Axis-of-Evil- of-the-past-related, Nate keeps on point, "Is it George's?" At which point Frances Conroy holds her breath and takes the plunge and knows there are going to be a lot of confused "Wait, pause the Tivo" moments in premium cable living rooms all around America following this line, but the woman sleeps on a bed of Emmys, so she's qualified to at least make a go of it: "Well, we've been married for over three months, so..." Ruth Fisher, stop! Collaborate. And listen. We gave you a chance to take some time to reset yourselves, to have Lisa's death settle and have everyone realize that's it's fine, just fine. To take a summer off and be all, "In my spare time of thinking about the fragility of our every living moment on earth, it totally just dawned on me that we live on the water in the middle of an irrigated desert, so me? I'm going to the beach." We gave you that option, Six Feet Under. And what did you do with it? You left the entire cast sitting in an uncomfortable, awkward, last-shot-of- Police-Files- when-they-try- to-freeze- but-things- keep-falling tableau. For the entire off-season. And you left them there with stale cakes and stale jokes about cakes to follow. Did someone really think that Nate screaming over Lisa's freshly dug grave like he was in the final scene of Our Town as rewritten by Edgar Allen Poe wouldn't have made a good last shot of Season 3? Because I think it would have been just fine. And then we could have come back and discovered that everyone's a little better, except for the part where everyone still hates George.