With one episode left for the season, Big Love is heating up, and very well.  There were many excellent, some weird moments in this week’s episode, but what interests me the most is the rather ingenious way that the impact of the parents’ polygamous lifestyle is being played out in the older children’s lives – the children of the first, original, marriage between Bill and Barb. Both are looking at The Principle as it is lived out in their family and concluding that it is a cover, intentionally or not, for the male to do his thing. Most heartbreaking is the daughter, whose older boyfriend has told her that since she wants to be abstinent in their relationship, he needs to get some sexual satisfaction elsewhere. After first rejecting this, she comes back and edges into agreeing, saying, “It can work…” clearly thinking of her own family situation in which a man is shared.
Oh, and if we had a show called Iron Creepy Bad Guy, it would have to feature a face-off between Alby and Ben from Lost. Great actors, superb casting.
I was thinking last night about how both Big Love and The Sopranos play heavily, at their core, on the impact of a parents’ actions on their children, and the determination that the children would both follow in their parents’ footsteps – but not. Tony Soprano didn’t want his children involved in mob life, saw part of what he was doing as making it possible for them to live outside of it, but in the end, undermined every attempt they made to do so, as we see AJ getting involved in the er, “entertainment” business and Meadow about to marry another mob-scion-attorney. We see that despite all our words and desires, our actions are powerful and (in the Sopranos thematic world) fate is impossible to overcome.  In Big Love, Bill and Barb are conflicted, but it is clear that Barb, the reluctant polygamist, is increasingly horrified by the impact of all of this on her children. Our decisions work themselves into our children’s lives, challenging us to ask ourselves hard questions. If it’s okay for me and not okay for my children…is it really okay for me? For anyone?
To me, what I hear loud and clear in both shows, as an undercurrent, is a lot of anxiety about the impact of contemporary cultural and social moray on children. And questions – which also form both shows – about what previous generations did to get us here in the first place.