Claire's Prius continues through the desert.
Photographs, all over the wall! There's George in profile with someone else, Ruth and Bettina, Brenda's family at David and Keith's wedding, some glowing futuristic hologram I can't make out, and a few others. And that's just in the hallway outside the bedroom. Inside the bedroom are even more. Black and white art shots, Nate wearing a collage mask in one of those ones that started all the trouble with Russell late last season, aging David and Keith, Nate and Brenda at their wedding (pre-seagull), Maya and a sippy-cup, Ted and Claire kissing at their own wedding. An old, white-haired woman who can only be Claire lies in bed while a nurse reads. And there's a look at one last photo, a head-and-hands shot of Ted that she took at the opening of the episode. In one last ironic twist, we get a tight close-up on her milky, blind eyes, and that's the end for Claire Simone Fisher (1983-2085).
Now that is a fucking montage, people.
Close-up on Claire's still-youthful, still-sighted eyes as she watches the road, her hair blowing gently in the wind. She glances at her sideview mirror. I'd say if Nate kept up for this long and this fast, it could only mean that he's really mad. Claire drives her Prius on toward the horizon as the perfect, ideal song for this sequence ends. I wait for a slow pan to a road sign that reads "Now Entering Death Valley," but it is not to be. There's just one last fade to white. And in the final bit of symmetry, the credits roll, black-on-white, for another five years.
So that's it. Show's over. Go home. Thanks to Wing and Sars, all the SFU recappers who covered this show before me, the cast and crew of Six Feet Under (especially Jill Soloway, for reasons that will become apparent some time in the couple of weeks), and, of course, all y'all. You're who I do this for. Well, you and the money. I leave you with one last thought, courtesy of this final episode: no matter how much happiness, peace, love, fulfillment, or self-actualization you find in this life, you still end up just as dead.
week: Rome. I'll be there. Will you?