![]() ![]() The brothers are more dogmatic than either of them cares to admit. She doesn’t match up perfectly with either man’s ethos. ![]() Their value systems are absolute hers is too twisted to understand. The best sequence: Fed up by his mother’s revelation, David fumes, “Can you even begin to fathom the impropriety of this? Your husband is lying in a casket out there!” Nate comes to his mother’s defense: “David, she’s grief-stricken, OK? Fuck propriety.” And Ruth barks, “We don’t say that word!” Both of the sons are stunned. Frances Conroy’s performance is the highlight of an all-around great dialogue, as she deftly flits between pathos and hilarity over the course of a couple minutes. Ball sets up the relationship between Ruth and her sons here with extraordinary craft and humor. The most charged, brilliant scene of the episode takes place in a side room, where a distraught Ruth admits to her sons that she had an ongoing affair with a local hairdresser, who gave her the attentions that Nathaniel neglected. This is not to say that Ruth is entirely swayed by her oldest son’s counterculture stylings. Naturally, she asks Nate to stick around a few extra days. (Can’t hurt that his name’s the same, either.) Maybe the transition doesn’t need to be as dramatic as she feared. Ruth tells Claire that in the days when hearses did double-duty as ambulances, Nathaniel used to joke about it: “Drive around the block a couple more times, and we won’t need to stop at the hospital.” Nate’s self-assured, liberal attitude toward grief is appealingly familiar to her Nate revitalizes a bit of Nathaniel before her eyes. We gather that Nathaniel could take a pretty flip attitude toward death. He may be an unknown quantity, but any port in a storm. At last, she falls into his arms at the grocery store and shares a bench with him at their father’s wake. He tells her to stop driving so damn fast, and she spurns him. She asks him to help her deal with her inconvenient high, and he scolds her. With Claire, the young sister he’s never really known, it’s a clumsy courtship. Lacking any better ideas, he feels his prodigal way along, testing his eldest-son chops on each member of the family, with mixed results. He’s “the prodigal,” as Nathaniel puts it during Nate’s vision in the morgue. While David embraces his familiar role with deeper determination, Nate is struggling to follow a script he’s never read. He’s ready for his close-up as the face of funerary best practices. By reflex, he stands, straightens his tie, and pulls his suit jacket tight. David is sitting slumped on the stairs when he hears his family at the door. ![]() He becomes furious when Nate scoops up dirt with his bare hand, rather than using the “earth dispenser.” David’s coping tactics are summed up in one wonderful physical move by actor Michael C. He tells Fisher & Sons’ loyal employee Federico that there’s no swearing in the embalming room. He handles the rules and regulations, and where there aren’t any, he makes some up. By the end of the episode, she resigns herself to the view that it doesn’t matter.ĭavid, trained in the mores of the afterdeath, latches onto the security blanket of “propriety” and pulls the threads bare. ![]() She can’t discern what parts of her panic are chemical and what parts are emotional. She asks Claire, “Are you having sex? Are you doing drugs?” Not that she’s foolish enough to say so, but Claire is in fact tweaking on meth right then-she has to coast at the very moment she decided to goose the accelerator (literally so, in one scene). Ruth’s next step is a dutiful triage, running through a checklist to make sure that she’s not going to lose any more family today. “Your father is dead, and my pot roast is ruined.” Her autopilot tells her that death is a business transaction, and a ruined hearse is a more pressing business concern than a corpse. Your father is dead,” a catatonic Ruth tells David. Their instinct is not to correct at all-maybe they can just coast. I mean the time after the news breaks but before the death feels final, as the Fishers nervously assess how much of a course correction each of them needs to accommodate this new reality. As Nathaniel’s body is transferred to the morgue, David oversees a viewing in the downstairs “slumber room,” youngest child Claire smokes crystal meth for the first time, eldest son Nate screws a stranger in the airport janitor’s closet, and Ruth tends the roast.īut when I talk about that weird lag, I’m not talking about the time that it takes to disseminate the news of Nathaniel's death. His high-speed demise is sudden only for him for everyone else, there’s a bizarre lag time. The central tension driving this episode is the contrast between Nathaniel’s experience of his death and his family’s experience. ![]()
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