HBO
Before you read this post, run back to the car to get the pliers, then watch last night’s Big Love.
“I’m having a hard time reconciling my beliefs with my feelings.” —Ben
You and everybody else, Ben. In “The Special Relationship,” various characters in and around the Henrickson family struggled to deal with the dissonance between what the rules required of them and what their guts told them to do, to distinguish between mere symbolic gestures and matters of principle (or Principle). Rather than run down every storyline in this episode, though, let’s just focus on the one that gave “The Special Relationship” its title, the marriage between Bill and Barb.
The episode described a reversal on both characters’ parts, as Bill began it trying to convince Barb to let him divorce her legally and marry Nicki, in order to be able to adopt Cara Lynn. What Bill feels is a meaningless technicality in the eyes of their religion means far more to Barb—until she realizes that some things mean far more to her even than that. By the end of the episode, Bill and Barb reminisce on the campus of the U, and Bill tells her that he can’t go through with the divorce after all. Whereupon she says that they have to.
There are a few ways of reading her reaction, some or all of which may be true simultaneously. First, there’s the subject of their conversation earlier, Barb’s increasing certainty that she feels spiritually called to be a priesthood holder, which is too great a heresy in Bill’s eyes for him to accept. On one level, it may be that the way Bill presented the decision not to get the divorce—maybe as if it were a sort of consolation prize for the priesthood issue—led Barb to decide that the latter was more important to her than her legal marriage. Maybe it was that Bill’s refusal to support her means she’s simply not as dedicated to the marriage anymore. And maybe—and again, this is not mutually exclusive—she decides that with her feeling of being called comes a higher responsibility, which means that she must sacrifice her legal marriage for the larger good of her family, whether Bill wants it or not.
The upshot is that Bill ends the episode getting what he intended in the first place—and seems crushed by it. Politically too, he gets a “win” in this episode that turns out to be anything but, as his truce with the Senate turns out to be conditional on his agreement to stop referring to himself as a Mormon. His first reaction—which perhaps lowers him further in Barb’s eyes—is to go along out of pragmatism: they’re only words, right?
He comes around to Barb’s way of thinking by the end of the episode, but by then, it seems, the distance between them has already grown. His first wife may have come to plural marriage later in life, but it’s clear here that she has convictions about it as deep as his, even if they are not the same as his own. And as they find in more than one way, making a seemingly symbolic gesture—being ending a legal marriage or making a semantic deal with the LDS—is no small thing. They call it the Principle for a reason.
Quick hail of bullets:
* Loved this mini-exchange: Margene: “I was once married to Barbara Stanwyck.” Nicki [upset]: “I don’t know who that is either. This game is a waste of time!”
* It’s interesting to see that Lois’ desire to move out on her own is only partly out of a desire for autonomy. As she says to Bill, she simply can’t relate to or appreciate his suburban life, even with all its comforts. She’s been treated badly by the compound lifestyle, but at this point, it is too deep in her to renounce entirely: “Better the devil you know.”
* Of all the ways I thought Alby might strike against Bill, I don’t think offing Don was close to the top of the list. But now that Verlan has screwed up that one assignment, can we assume he’ll move on to another target?
* Bill has not always been the most sympathetic guy over five years, and Bill Paxton has been willing to make him as unlikeable as he needs to. But I did like the callback to Bill’s beginnings, as he recalls proposing to Barb with four dollars in his pocket; as many mistakes as he’s made, it’s worth remembering that he was victimized by the compound too.
* So pyramid-scheme product Goji Blast is made from papaya stems? Who knew? Was Big Love trying to appease the powerful goji berry industry with that? (And sidebar: doesn’t falling for what looks to be an obvious pyramid scheme on its face seem a little too dimwitted for Margene—who has shown herself to be business-savvy for all her naivete?)