With a new year come new insights, new horizons and new adventures. And in that light I decided to watch 2009’s first episode of Brothers & Sisters, a show that I actually chewed my own foot off to escape covering last year, because the prospect of bleeding to death or choking on my own hot blood was far preferable to suffering week after week of the self-obsessed Walker militia.
Find out why I’m giving last night’s episode an up-arrow, after the jump…
We catch up with the Walkers following Kevin’s liver donation … which is in itself rather hilarious - how on earth is Lizzie going to live past twelve if she’s handicapped with the boozefilter of a 40-year-old? She won’t make it through a single Walker Sunday dinner!
Anyway, new husband Scotty and mama Nora are vying for the Florence Nightingale award and totally getting in each other’s way, and even the painkillers aren’t enough to get Kevin through it so he escapes the mothership with the help of Justin. Plus, he’s having these weirdo fever dreams about fatherhood, mostly because of the fact that he now knows that he’s Lizzie’s biodad and all that.
The dreams range from the surreal (Kevin with a pregnant belly) to the hilarious (Scotty dressed as a French soldier trying to force-feed him red wine) to the yawn (Kevin offering to buy a teary grown-up Lizzie ice cream) to the downright horrifying (Kevin getting hot and heavy with Julia, which leads to a rather awkward bedside chat when he awakens to find her watching him sleep), but for the most part they provide the episode exactly what the show has always lacked for me: humor that isn’t rooted in how awful these people are to one another.
Of course, the episode had plenty of that as well, with Nora treating Saul’s old friend Roger like a tool even though she was the one who came on to him at a luau 30 years ago (a fact that she only admits while hiding in the pantry drinking wine, natch) and Justin being called a loser by Sarah’s first-grader and the entire family using it as an excuse to stage an “intervention” with the poor guy.
But more than anything I’m really impressed with how far the show has evolved in terms of its gay characters and relationships. Honestly when I last actually watched the show, Kevin was a fairly irredeemable asshole of a character who was dating a closeted actor and Scotty was a needy, pathetic mess. Not exactly must-see TV, in my book.
Now Kevin is a slightly more redeemable asshole, Scotty has his stuff together and isn’t afraid to stand up to his mother-in-law or confront his husband about his lousy behavior (I loved the “what part of ‘in sickness and in health’?” line) and we’ve also got Saul, who seems to be handling his coming out quite well and is a ray of sunshine into the life of his sister. The integration of the gay characters into the various storylines is infinitely more relaxed and satisfying. Even Kevin’s signoff gag about Lizzie possibly growing up to like girls didn’t feel out-of-place.
In all, I didn’t hate the episode and I didn’t hate myself for watching it, which is a big leap in terms of quality of experience from the last time I tuned in.
Of course, our resident recapper Steven Frank will have the full monty for you tomorrow in his mainpage recap. And I gather that die-hard fans of the show might have different feelings about this particular episode.
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