Six Feet Under “I’ll Take You” (May 19, 2002)

In the penultimate episode of its second season, Six Feet Under did something that few serialized dramas can ever afford to do: it paid off all the emotional threads it had cultivated with a sometimes infuriating deliberateness over the whole of its existence, very much as if that had been the master plan all along.  Relationship doormat Ruth dumped her indifferent boyfriend (in the middle of a bad movie), Claire found kindred spirits awaiting her in art school, Keith tanked his career in an outburst of pent-up violence, and even the noxious Chenoweths found a kind of backwards redemption in a new-agey renewal of their vows.  But the boldest move was Nate and Brenda’s abrupt breakup.  Nate realizes that her erotic fiction is real and they confront each other in a white-hot fury, commitment-phobe versus sex addict.  Every betrayal of the previous twenty-four episodes is laid bare, every rationalization dismantled, in Jill Soloway’s incisive, punishing dialogue, until finally Brenda’s reminder of how their dysfunctional beginning (anonymous sex in an airport closet) brings them (and us) back full circle to the pilot.  Suddenly, a series that communicated mostly in symbolism, dream imagery, and snark shifted into absolute literalism as swiftly as a sock to the solar plexus.  Peter Krause and Rachel Griffiths are superb in this scene, Griffiths playing half turned away and drowning her lines in a snivel, Krause crude and callous (and yet I never despised Nate in the way that many people who have written about this show do).  Some would say that Six Feet Under was about a family, but for me it was always the story of a relationship – Nate and Brenda’s.  Once that ended, the show had three more years to run, and nowhere to go.